Climate ordeals: Australia has eccentric opposition of its own

By David Beeson

In my experience, Australia is just England with better weather. Incidentally, that’s a brilliant thing to say to any passing Australian to whom you might want to endear yourself. Try it some day.

It now seems, however, that Australia doesn’t just have a different kind of weather, it also has a different kind of weather expert. The Conservative Party out there, which they call the Liberal Party just to confuse us poor Poms, has elected a climate change denier as its leader. Tony Abbott’s first priority as the new leader is to kill the Labor government’s Emissions Trading Scheme, intended to be the first step towards reducing Australian greenhouse gas emissions.

Now it’s striking that over the last ten years Australia has suffered from increasingly painful droughts and increasingly violent forest fires. I suppose to a climate change denier that’s just an astonishing coincidence, providing powerful confirmation that anything can happen by pure chance.

To the rest of us, it feels terribly like writing on the wall: Australia is absolutely in the front line of potential victims of global warming, facing ordeal by fire just like the Maldives are facing ordeal by water, as sea levels rise and threaten to drown their islands. The difference is that the Maldives are actively doing something about the prospect, planning to evacuate the entire population, whereas the Australian Liberal Party feels that there’s more mileage in denial.

It sounds terribly as though Abbott’s a conviction politician totally committed to doing exactly the opposite of what his country needs.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to be smug about all this? If only we could say that at least Britain could never end up with a leader of the opposition as completely out of touch with the needs of the nation, as entirely irresponsible about the impact of his policies as Tony Abbott is.

Sadly, we’re way ahead of the Australians when it comes to getting ourselvs saddled with eccentric opposition leaders. And at least in Australia there’s very little prospect of them getting elected.

So it seems that rather than feeling superior, we ought to learn a lesson from the Australians: have a loony opposition by all means, just make sure that it never gets into office.