We got some rain in rural Victoria over the weekend, and that’sheadline-worthy news.
There’s been a record-breaking drought that’s been afflicting the states of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and parts of New South Wales for over a year, but depending where you live – and how you get your news – you may not know much about it.
This represents a problem Australia desperately needs to confront.
ABC radio’s Victorian Country Hour has beentouring towns across the state, collecting stories from areas that were previously some of the richest farmland in Australia, recording the ongoing impacts – material, financial, social, psychological – on communities.
The weekend’s rain will help refill some dams, but the winter cold means it won’t replenish pastures where it’s needed for animal feed: an unprecedented “fodder drought” continues.
Australia is predisposed to droughts. Even so, the ABChas quotedthe Colac-based Dairy Farmers Victoria president, Mark Billing, explaining: “This is not a normal year.” He’s right: in parts of southern Australia, rainfall data’s shown totals at near-lowest or lowest levels since record-keeping began.
Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter
Australian farmers have adapted their agricultural methods and listened to science to prepare for unpredictable conditions, but no one was prepared for this. Now, 18 months after farmers began trucking water and hand-feeding their animals, stockpiled feed is running out. Shipping in more pressures the farmer to front the capital for its purchase – a burden that’s pushed many tosell off animalsand sell off land. The bush telegraph in rural communities like mine has been relaying stories of abattoirs so full with the unsustainable stock that some farmers are left with animals that will simply – pointlessly – have to die.
No one needs me to tell them climate change is making droughts worse. But as a nation dependent on local agriculture to feed itself, what we need to work out is how a crisis with such dire implications is barely on the mental register of a city like Melbourne – with 5 million inhabitants and a mere two hours’ drive from Colac – because despite the severity, despitestate government emergency measures– it just isn’t.
Depending on which corners of the internet you hang out in, the drought gets scant mention even in the outrage towards federal environment minister Murray Watt’s provisional approval of a 45-year life extension for Woodside’s North West Shelf gas mega-project in Western Australia. My colleague Adam Morton and some others have madethe obvious connection, and excoriated a project the Australia Institute calculates will generate4.3bn tonnes of emissions“with no proposal for abatement at all”.
But others did not. Which provokes an equal and opposite question: why aren’t climate-hit farmers bullrushing Watt’s office themselves?
A recentPeter Lewis piece remindshow recent rollouts of renewable energy “ran the real risk of being sidelined bya lack of community social licence”. I can vouch “Stop AusNet’s towers” corflutes still hang in our town.
As we try to get our heads around the reality of climate change, the largest obstacle to meaningful action appears to be the siloing of stakeholder communities. If droughts are invisible to city slickers, why should any farming community believe transmission lines are anything but an eyesore?
When it comes to environmental policy, gaining “social licence” is an omnidirectional struggle – not because rural communities are climate deniers or that climate activists are self-appointed moralisers or even that governments steamroll communities into policy decisions. An overwhelming majority of Australiansbelieve in climate change, but evidence suggests communities are no longer holding different opinions so much as they are holding completely different conversations, and I suspect the pick-and-mix,choose-your-news nature of modern mediamay be contributing to a terrifying problem at the worst possible time.
If there’s no common framework, there can be no consensus commitments.
Woodside’s proposed North West Shelf expansion represents an unacceptable climate risk in an Australia where dairy farms are drying out already – and the Albanese government, which has pushed so hard on renewables infrastructure, batteries and EVs from its first term, obviously knows this.
Sign up toClear Air Australia
Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis
after newsletter promotion
The unique “tawny horror” experienced by the red-tinged-with-green Labor-voting environmentalist lies in being disgusted by the environmental consequence of a Labor decision while understanding precisely why it was made.
Absolutely, Australia must reform its environmental protection laws to addclimate considerations, but if we’re to achieve imperative energy and sustainability transitions in the wake of Albanese’s election win “for stability against the chaos of Dutton”, as Lewis writes, that will not come through unilateral, command-and-control antics. At the other end of the political spectrum, that’s what Trump’s doing. Going fast and breaking things results in a lot of broken things – a situation Australians find electorally unpalatable.
The alternative obliged here is a nuanced, national conversation shared by the breadth of the electorate. When it comes to projects like the North West Shelf, there is a pressing need for the government to move on environmental protection reforms, but it can’t do it without all communities contributing to a shared conversation about risks and trade-offs.
At the same time mounting environmental risks are causing increasingly lethal chaos, everyone has to understand where tens of thousands of jobs will be lost, what energy transitions do to investment returns and tax revenue, as well as our energy security relationships with importers like Japan and South Korea.
Complaints are not solutions. Plans are.
Where and howthat honest community conversation takes place is now the challenge. It demands a cultural humility the internet is unlikely to encourage. Overcoming the silos between rural experience, urban attention and the policy bunkers of government is hard, but it has to happen.
We once valued the ABC as the instrument for this kind of national discussion, but as the broadcaster sheds shared forums like The Drum and Q+A, we’re staring down the reality of environmental disaster understood as niche programming.
If a devastating drought only a couple of hours away has become unimaginable, perhaps the faraway place called the future has already become impossible.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist