Continuing the fight for climate action

Climate change will “completely reshape global, national and local politics.”

We must agree with ALP Federal President Wayne Swan’s August 2019 assertion and grapple with the fact that we will be relegated to opposition until the Labor Party can propose meaningful, tangible solutions to the many challenges presented by the climate crisis, from the future of work and communities to health and education.

Despite setbacks in recent elections, climate action must remain central to the Labor mission as our base of lower and working-class people stand to lose the most from catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis.

To our left, we face critics who claim that we can choose the environment over jobs, and from our right, we will hear that we can choose jobs over the environment.

We know that no such choice exists.

While the conservatives will never act on climate change, The Greens will continue to play cheap politics in the face of the most important issue if our time.

We must push back against both narratives and position action on climate change as a tangible plan for jobs, the regions and for workers.

As the party of the workers, we must protect jobs and working conditions for all Australians, and this extends to ensuring future economic prosperity by acting on climate change. It means more than offering vague assurances of a just transition.

As a start, governments could invest in on-shore waste processing centres to provide local manufacturing jobs, as well as reducing the carbon costs of transporting the domestic waste crisis spurred by China’s recent National Sword policy.

Materials processed at these centres could be remanufactured or used in infrastructure projects across the nation, and these centres and these projects could employ displaced workers and local TAFE students.

Staring down a global recession, Labor’s Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers argues we must use this period to “rewrite the social contract [with] meaningful, full employment at the core of it”, with climate positive stimulus packages supporting initiatives that simultaneously protect the environment coming out of the COVID crisis.

While we support its policy objectives we must fundamentally reject the American language of a Green New Deal and excise the term from the Australian political lexicon.

It is a term lazily used by those who fail to realise that the entire reason for the historical allusion to FDR’s nation-building regime is to help U.S. progressives to frame climate action in accessible, tangible ways that Americans can relate to, to counter scare campaigns by conservatives and their media allies.

Until there is evidence that the communities in the Hunter or North Queensland were beneficiaries of FDR’s Rural Electrification Agency, it’s safe to say the term is completely meaningless to those we need to persuade, and just goes to show how far we have go in building a movement that will change minds - and votes - in support of climate action on our shores.

We should not be copying the homework of American activists when we can instead look to our nation’s past and develop a uniquely Australian response to the climate crisis - and those looking to Australian examples of nation-building and environmental action need not look far.

Among all nations, Australia has a unique relationship with the natural environment. The oldest continuing culture, Indigenous Australians have lived with the environment for at. least 65,000 years, caring for country and managing the land.

Australia’s first National Park - The Royal National Park in Sydney’s south was only the second national park in the world when it was proclaimed in 1879, a century after British arrival.

Less than 20 years later, Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson would publish While the Billy Boils and The Man from Snowy River, cementing the bush’s place in the Australian psyche.

Today, we picture Australia not as the seaboard cities that the majority of the population live in, but as the outback with the monolithic Uluru, and we mark the start of summer with the first pilgrimage from suburbia to the beach.

Surely, in our rich history, there is the basis for a popular, grassroots campaign to preserve our environment rooted in the Australian identity.

As members of the Labor Party, we can draw from a deep well of environmental achievements, from Bob Hawke’s creation of Landcare and saving Tasmania’s Franklin River, Bob Carr’s declaring over 100 new National Parks, or the Rudd-Gillard Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

On the nation-building side, we can take inspiration from the Curtin and Chifley Governments’ support of Holden in producing and launching the first local made car in 1948, with the idea of providing jobs to returned service men and women after the war.

But perhaps the most striking historical parallel can be drawn to Curtin’s creation of the Department of Post War reconstruction and Chifley’s pioneering Snowy Hydro project. Employing over 100,000 workers at its peak, the Snowy Hydro was one of the most complex engineering projects in the world, demanding inputs and innovation from all sectors of the Australian economy.

the project played crucial role in transitioning the Australian economy away from its agricultural base towards manufacturing and still produces more than a third of all renewable energy available to the east coast mainland grid. It fostered a generation of engineers and manufacturers who would underpin Australia’s growth for the next 50 years and was pivotal to making Australia the multicultural nation it is today.

Surely there could not be a more apt description of the task that falls at the feet of the next federal Labor government.

In making a case for the project at the opening of work, Chifley hoped the Snowy Hydro would “touch our imagination and hearts and enter into the spirit of the people of Australia”, arguing that it was “a plan for all the nation - and it needs the nation to back it.”

In the vein of Chifley’s nation-building spirit, we must couch action on climate change as a natural extension of Australia’s deep connection to our environment.

If we are to succeed in persuading the Australian people of the urger need to take climate action - to get the nation back to us - this is how we will do it.