Considering life retrospectively

The dynamics of a drought can only be understood retrospectively.

Floods - are they the opening
gambit in the next drought?

What happened throughout the Goulburn Valley in the past few days is hugely different, but it too can only be understood retrospectively.

People throughout the area, particularly those living in Tallygaroopna and Congupna, wrestled with an excess of water, the reverse side of the drought coin.

Accurately pinpointing the beginning of the recent south-eastern Australian decade-long drought never happened, but had we understood that, our communities would have been able to avoid the worst of the difficulties.

Knowing a decade with scarce water supplies was about to unfold, we would have planned and conserved our resource, easing practical difficulties and ensured people were psychologically prepared for the certain changes in their lives.

Drought, however, is remote from the minds of those presently wrestling with the outcome of record rains, filling sandbags and doing what they can to protect their property from rising water.

Considering the reality that we never really know when a drought has started – strangely, considered in retrospect, this could be the start of another – how do we know whether or not the flooding of late should be attributed to changes in our climate brought on by human activities.

The climate change doubters, or skeptics, will rush to the barriers declaring recent record rains were simply cyclical and little more than nature doing what nature does, while the global warming adherents will argue the event fits exactly with scenarios predicted by the climate scientists.

So while knee-deep in water, do we mark this as the beginning of a drought; a predictable and understood cyclical event; or is it evidence of human-induced climate change?

It is the latter argument that is beyond question and, yes, it may well be the beginning of another decade long drought and, no, it is not a predictable and understandable cyclical event.

Had it been predictable and understandable, the events that filled the pages of this newspaper in recent times could have been avoided.

Climate change is subtle and silent and remains that way until we experience events such as those of the past few days, but it is something which we can neither touch nor see.

So while we need to band together and support all those troubled by the floods, what is even more important is that entire communities need to gather and consider their response to a demonstrably changing climate.

Dr Cameron Hepburn

Our behaviour is the root of the trouble and it was only on Thursday that a visiting professor, Dr Cameron Hepburn told nearly 300 people at a Melbourne lecture that about half the complications leading to climate change would be eradicated if we stopped subsidizing technologies dependent on fossil fuels.

The saved money, he suggested, could then be used on a small suite of climate change abatement policies to support Australia’s carbon tax.

Life looked at through the rear view mirror is easily understood, but Dr Hepburn, like us, does not have one and so is eager to understand future workable climate change abatement processes.

Our narrative around which Australia has been built is lost, or distorted

Those who gather in Canberra to govern our country have lost, or grossly distorted, the narrative around which modern Australia is built

Canberra's Parliament 
House seems to be built
 on pointless rhetoric that
appears to have little
to do with the effective
 management of the
Australia.

Pointless rhetoric of our federal politicians is rarely about the effective management of the country rather, it is more about discrediting those who have a different political view.

The 24-hour news cycle has its upside, but the reverse of that is the seemingly silly almost minute-by-minute examination of the lives of politicians, celebrities and their ilk.

Living under the heat of such a fierce spotlight and trapped by public expectations of a faultless performance, our politicians are left without time to reflect, consider and dare not demonstrate any apparent weakness by admitting that they are unsure or simply do not know the answer.

We, the polity, are to blame for that.

Australia, as does the rest of the world, faces pressing problems with the most serious, and the most unyielding, being human induced climate change that will bring unstoppable transformations to our lives demanding that any worthwhile response be bi-partisan.

Rather than simply point-score at the expense of counterparts, our politicians need to work together to prepare Australia to deal with a threat that if left unattended, has the potential to not just seriously disrupt life as we know it, but actually decimate the community.

In recent times the country has almost ground to a halt as we argue endlessly about some insignificant triviality, suggesting we choke on a mosquito, while we swallow, with ease, a camel; the camel being the threat of climate change.

Climate change is just the first order of threats as hard on its heels and invariably implicated in a multitude of ways, is resource depletion, species extinction and an imploding world economy.

You would imagine that with a trio of threats, of which anyone alone has the potential to cause relentless difficulties, those Canberra cronies would put aside their pointless child-like bickering to prepare the country the most all-encompassing challenge it has every experienced, vastly bigger and more consuming than either of the World Wars of the 20^th century.

Courage, commitment and conviction has lifted humanity to where it is at now and should we successfully take the human project any further, those same traits are urgently important and the first to demonstrate that bravery, allegiance and passion must be those who gather in Canberra.

The challenge of steering Australia through the ideological changes of coming decades is so massive that only the most courageous need apply; only those who are genuinely committed to our country’s long term welfare and care little about personal gain, or party leadership; and only those prepared to compromise and so make decisions that will steer us away from present consumptive life styles.