TRUE OPINION: Everything is topsy-turvy on climate change in Australia and that’s exactly the way Prime Minister Scott Morrison – our very own Wizard of Oz – likes it, writes novelist Miles Hunt.
The Wizard of Oz is at it again. Not content with the miracle election win, built around an election promise to do absolutely nothing and not be Bill Shorten – which is not hard if you are not actually him – and then winning and wondering what the hell to do … And praying for a plague to come and save your skin – which then actually happened and killed millions across the world, but somehow also gave the Party something to do for the last three years.
The man, who it turns out is not actually a wizard, but a TV ad man, is now gearing up to pretend that the Liberal Party were always in support of net zero by 2050 and have been so since the beginning of time itself (the Big Bang or whatever it was), and that awful campaign against the carbon tax didn’t actually happen at all. Nor did the National Energy Guarantee, and the Emissions Trading Scheme, and NEG and ETS and all that BS.
It was a figment of our collective imaginations, just like the countless leaders destroyed over the years for even considering any meaningful effort on climate change.
Not sure what caused this change. Maybe they are worried about all those safe Coalitions seats in Liberal party heartland flirting with voting for Fiscally Conservative Greeny Independents because they are worried about their Grandchildren. Or maybe Scotty from Marketing had a chat with Jenny, or the kids, who decided to ask their Dad why the hell he was destroying any chance they had to live on an inhabitable planet in the future?
No one knows the reason. But even the Daily Telegraph recently had a front page spruiking the idea of becoming a green energy superpower. This same newspaper that spent the last 10 years decrying any action on Climate change as the work of some made climate hoax perpetrated by the left intent on destroying roast dinners, V8 Utes and the weekend – and replacing it all with a pronoun-less vegan paradise of wind farms and wheatgrass.
This is a crisis of climate change. Even Cat Stevens got it right about 50 years ago:
Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass, For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas. And you make them long, and you make them tough, but they just go on and on, and it seems that you can’t get off.
Oh, I know we’ve come a long way, We’re changing day to day, But tell me, where do the children play?
Perhaps we have just woken up in Land of Oz. And we, the people, are Dorothy in all of this. Everything fine and dandy until a devastating natural disaster lands us unsuspectingly in Oz. And all we can see is one long yellow brick road…
Barnaby, and the Nationals, must be the Wicked Witch of the West, content with wrecking the joint to make sure there is no action on Climate Change, while Scot Morrison is, of course, The Wizard himself, cloaked and ready to promise anything as long as his true nature is not discovered.
And then beyond that, we have all his Ministers and MPs sprouting the gospel of Oz. in amongst them a whole host of lost and incomplete characters: a heartless Tin Man, a brain dead scarecrow and a lion that has lost its courage.
What more could you want from the Ministry of Magic. The Ministers themselves don’t even speak out now about issues. It is like they have all been given a portfolio for homework, but then forgot to take it home after school and then when they arrive back in class the next day, having not read any of it, and have to fudge some bullshit excuse and the demur to their leader, who they say, speaks for all of us.
And the leader is only a man behind a screen. He’s not some magical wizard that can take Dorothy home, or find the lion its courage, or the Tin Man his heart, but a marketing spin doctor behind a white curtain, telling all of us the sky might fall in … unless we do what he says.
The truth is that we all have to get ourselves out of this mess. The Wizard of Oz can’t help – it was all an illusion. So, like Dorothy and her pals, the only way to get home is to do it yourself, the only way to find the heart and brain and courage to deal with this, is to find it in yourself.
We need to deal with climate change. Time is almost out. The future won’t forgive us if we don’t – the people of the future won’t and the planet itself may not survive. I am no politician nor a Scientist, but it seems obvious that we ought to set a policy or framework to help deal with the transition to renewable energy.
And giving money to fossil fuel companies isn’t the way to deal with this – it seems like the stupidest idea ever concocted. Why not give that money to renewable companies to invest and create for the future, or even better, give it all to the people who work those jobs – in mining and coal power stations etc – and not wealthy dinosaur companies that will be dead in 10 years.
Australia, with its unique environment and weather, could have been a green energy powerhouse: the Saudi Arabia of Solar; the Russia of Renewables. Instead, we still stuck in the past, stuck with a perennially ruling Conservative (Liberal) Party that hates change and refuses to take any of this seriously, and actually obfuscates its responsibilities and makes everything a great deal worse.
Near-sightedness is ruining us. We are like a mole without glasses feeling around outside, unable to see anything beyond the next three-year election term. And a Prime Minister, who is more concerned with getting re-elected than making any lasting legacies for the country, who delays every decision to the last minute so he can always take the most popular route, even if that leads us into a black pit of despair. And there is no way he is letting any of us see behind the curtain, because all that is behind it is hot air.
Let’s just hope we can all get back to Kansas before it is too late.
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