Australia feels the brunt of climate change. Now, as elections approach, its politicians are trying to figure out how to manage the anxiety of voters.
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HARDEN, Australia — It’s been a year of extremes for this country. The hottest summer ever. Torrential rains in the north. A crippling drought in its southeastern farm belt.
Now, with national elections scheduled for May 18, a vital question looms: To what degree will climate change sway the way Australians vote? The answer could provide important lessons for other democracies in the age of climate change.
Australia is acutely vulnerable to climate change, just as it is also a culprit. The continent has warmed faster than the global average; its cherished Great Barrier Reef has been devastated by marine heat waves; and heat and drought this year took a bite out of the country’s economy, according to a top official of the country’s central bank. At the same time, central to its prosperity is the extraction of the dirtiest fossil fuel: Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal for power generation.
Against that backdrop, the governing conservative coalition, led by the Liberal Party, is under pressure in key districts as independents assail longstanding members of Parliament like Tony Abbott, a former Liberal leader and prime minister, over their climate positions.
To understand what it all means, I recently drove through southeastern Australia, the country’s most populated area, to speak to voters, both urban and rural, about climate change.
In rural districts, voters who traditionally send conservative lawmakers to Parliament are talking openly about the effects of climate change — in some instances, even coming out to protest. And, in poll after poll, climate change has climbed the ladder of concerns among the electorate.
More than 60 percent of voters identified climate change as the top “critical threat” facing Australia over the next 10 years, while nearly the same share said the government should take steps to address global warming even if that involves “significant costs,” according to a poll by the Lowy Institute, an independent research group.
Another poll by Ipsos, a market research firm, found that half of all Australians gave the government “poor” marks on managing climate change.
My road trip began in Melbourne, continued on to Sydney and then took me west to the land of Angus cattle and Merino sheep in the vast, parched countryside of New South Wales. On these undulating hills and bare fields, generations of farmers have raised livestock, sown wheat and canola, and elected conservative lawmakers to Parliament. Climate change, for the most part, they used to dismiss as city talk, or just “rubbish,” recalled Peter Holding, 64, a third-generation farmer who lives near a hamlet called Harden.
That’s changing.
These days, the soil is so dry that a sparse occasional rain shower barely dampens the dirt.
