This was the climate change election — until, suddenly, it wasn't. Every study showed Australians cared keenly, almost desperately, about the environment. Yet, on polling day, the guy who famously capered around Parliament clutching a coal lump to his breast emerged, to the astonishment of almost everyone, triumphant.
The post-election consensus of most commentators insists the ALP went too far and too fast, that it presented the public with an idealistic program they weren't ready to accept.
As evidence, pundits adduce the results from Queensland, where the Coalition won substantial support by defending the Carmichael coal mine. In a typical piece, the ABC's Allyson Horn claims that, with his anti-Adani convoy, Bob Brown 'hammered a nail in Bill Shorten's electoral coffin'. Yet the argument — and the broader claim about Labor's project — misses a key dynamic in environmental politics today, one with which we're all just coming to terms.
A few weeks back, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published an extraordinary document — jointly authored by some 500 scientists from across the world — laying out the extent of the current extinction crisis. The best estimate by the best experts puts something like a million species at imminent risk.
That document followed on the heels of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from late 2018, which argued that, by 2030, global emissions must drop by 45 per cent from their 2010 levels, if we're to avoid exposing hundreds of millions of people to serious climate-related hazards.
Together the reports make entirely clear something that most Australians already intuitively know: namely, that addressing the international environmental catastrophe requires massive social and economic change. As a result, if you want the public to believe you're serious about climate, you have to spell out, in detail, your plan to transform the economy.
Furthermore, because most people now associate 'economic reform' with the neoliberal programs of the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments, you need to demonstrate that the burden won't fall primarily on society's poorest. If you don't do that, you're wide open to a conservative counterattack.
"The prevarication reinforced the longstanding and widespread sense of Shorten as an opportunist, a man who believed in nothing whatsoever."
Now, at first sight, it seems obvious from the final result that a stronger stance on Adani would have doomed Labor to an even more disastrous outcome. But, as Ira Gershwin said, it ain't necessarily so.
Had Labor flatly opposed Adani, it would have been better positioned to sell a different model for the creation of local jobs and security. Instead, the lack of clarity prevented the ALP from articulating a persuasive economic alternative to a mine it wouldn't say definitely was closing.
At the same time, the ambiguity undermined the urgency of Labor rhetoric about a 'climate emergency' to be countered by 'real action'. People aren't stupid. They heard Shorten use this sort of language and then, quite understandably, wondered why, if he thought the situation so dire, he wasn't standing against a mine threatening such dire consequences for the environment.
The prevarication reinforced the longstanding and widespread sense of Shorten as an opportunist, a man who believed in nothing whatsoever.
One of the few sweet moments for progressives on election night came when Tony Abbott, the leader of the Coalition's climate deniers, lost the seat of Warringah. But in his concession speech, he made an important point. 'Where climate change is a moral issue,' he said, 'we Liberals do it tough. Where climate change is an economic issue, as tonight shows, we do very, very well.'
Of course, since the vast bulk of emissions come from industry, climate change can't ever be other than an economic issue. But progressives haven't been very good at addressing that point.
It might be noted that, despite all the memes about the supposed backwardness of the Sunshine State, the Greens outpolled One Nation in the Senate there. In fact, as Jonathan Sri notes, after a five per cent swing to the party, the state now represents one the Greens' strongest constituencies, a fact that undercuts any idea that Queenslanders innately hate the environment.
Yet for a program of climate action to win mass support, it must address ordinary people's legitimate concerns about jobs and wages and conditions. That's the significance of the so-called Green New Deal being discussed in the United States: it links environmentalism to an explicit program of structural change. Without that, a climate program doesn't seem serious — and will struggle for traction.
The takeaway from the 2019 election shouldn't be a retreat to less ambitious goals. The lesson's quite the opposite — on climate, you go hard or you go home.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and honorary fellow at Victoria University.
Main image: Bob Brown speaks as part of the Stop Adani Convoy event on 18 April 2019 in Melbourne. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)