Vikki Campion: PM talks climate change as Mid-North Coast deals with devastating floods
As the Mid-North Coast dealt with mountains of mud, piles of debris, looters and carcasses, the Prime Minister was talking about climate change, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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The river gauges failed, the warning never came, and the sirens they wanted to sound were never built.
A flood that bid uninsurable businesses and homes goodbye forever. Farewell to the arcade. To the farm whose whole herd drowned. To the oyster farmers, whose leases washed up on beaches at Tuncurry. To the homes where looters stole what the mud did not hide.
Flooding has been an intergenerational foe for the people of the Mid-North Coast, yet the pumps were never bought and breakwalls never built. Myall Lakes MP Tanya Thompson and MPs before her fought for river dredging to keep the dual mouths open and keep Farquhar Inlet, at the mouth of the Manning River, open, only to have the Labor Government scrap it in early 2023.
Since the last flood in 2021, every measure was met with more multi-layered bureaucracy, requiring more reports and chewing up more funding and, ultimately, last week it ended in five deaths and the end of livelihoods, both on river and land.
Bureaucracy kept failing. Last flood, the ADF were there in two days, so why did they have to wait a week for just 70 ADF members to arrive?
Farmers pleaded for a siren to wail to warn dairies upriver to move cows to higher ground. Oyster farmers rescued their neighbours while authorities told them the river could not be entered.
Yet for the Prime Minister, as residents dealt with mountains of mud and piles of debris bigger than their homes, looters and carcasses, it was about climate change.
“We need to acknowledge that while Australia has always had extreme weather events, science told us that those events would be more frequent and would be more intense, and that is placing pressure on the system,” he said on May 26 in Canberra. Notice, he didn’t dare say it at the press conference in Taree.
On ABC Newcastle before that: “We live in an era where, of course, not every weather event can be brought down to climate change, but we do need to recognise the fact that there are more extreme weather events, they are more intense, they’re more frequent, and it is occurring.”
If you genuinely believe worse floods are coming, wouldn’t you be building dams and breakwalls, dredging rivers, raising levies, or relocating entire suburbs? A week out, and there’s no money announced.
Let’s pretend to agree with him and say this flood peaked 2.2m higher than predicted, and despite cousins in 2021, 1975, and back to 1894, and before, it was climate change’s fault, would you be handing billions to intermittent power investors or building practical infrastructure that made a difference?
Ms Thompson has written for three years to Premier Chris Minns to reinstate the $16m for Farquhar Inlet, the latest stoush in a 100-year-long fight, after she was told in April 2023 it would be “reviewed”. Instead, it was shelved. She fears if Farquhar Inlet had not been opened by chance, they would be looking at another two metres of devastation.
For Mr Albanese to get on the radio while people were ankle deep in mud and say: “But what you can say is that the science told us they’d be more frequent and more intense, and that’s precisely what is happening, which is why my Government are taking it so seriously”, then, as Lyne MP Alison Penfold says, he better get out the chequebook. The scrappy $180 grant didn’t last more than 24 hours. Thompson says families with washing machines ruined, spent that at the laundromat in a day washing mud-soaked sheets and clothes. The cost of insurance starts at $30,000 in some areas. If insurance can be got at all.
If this happened to just one suburb in Sydney, there would be infrastructure money on the table. Warragamba Dam was mitigating floods before “climate change” was a buzzword. But instead of talking about flood mitigation this week, Mr Albanese has been spruiking fuel standards and pointed to imposing even more taxes on farmers, bringing in “energy efficiency, agricultural changes as well, to make sure that we get those emissions down”.
His solution to floods is a methane tax on dairy farmers. Let’s fine those whose cows have just drowned. His announcements were trinkets to the problem. If you can predict the globe’s temperature in 2125, why can’t you warn farmers to move their herds a day out? Why do those who confidently tell us the temperature of the globe in a century’s time, have such a poor track record for telling us when it will rain?
We can build levies and dredge rivers and increase warning and communication capacity. But the only thing the Prime Minister brought to the floods was thoughts, platitudes and a climate change pulpit from which to preach. Everything but what the people needed.
A GOVERNMENT ALLOWED TO BE SMILING, CAREFREE AND UNTOUCHABLE
Napoleon’s old adage about never interrupting an enemy’s self-destruction is playing out again, this time in Canberra.
Two of the Coalition’s new shadow assistant ministers have been appointed without giving a maiden speech or stepping foot in the chamber as an elected official or, as is the case with Giselle Kapterian, no certainty she will be elected.
Meanwhile, Labor Ministers are waltzing through the chaos, untouchable. Cue Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen.
Between eating pasta in front of a priest at mass and preparing to change the 2035 emissions reduction targets in line with whatever the green Matt Kean-led Climate Change Authority tells him, Mr Bowen has been allowed to waltz around the country worry-free of getting in the firing line, while those supposed to be holding him in sight have the lens focused instead on the alternate chaotic political battlefield.
For example, the Department of Climate Change gave one wind factory a 1000 per cent increase in the clearing of endangered woodlands this month. The secret changes for Coppabella Wind at Yass allowed it to bulldoze not just 3.23ha of box gum like in 2018, but 31.5ha.
Farmers would be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for less, but Mr Bowen did not have to worry about preparing for the hard questions.
Instead, at a press conference a few days later announcing $46m of taxpayers’ money to go to private businesses to make solar panels, reporters didn’t grill Mr Bowen on land clearing or skyrocketing power prices. The first and second questions: “What’s your reaction to the Liberals and the Nationals splitting?” Then “And what do you think that means for politics going forward?”
A few days later, the Australian Energy Regulator released the Default Market Offer to allow electricity prices to soar up to 9 .7 per cent for households and small businesses for 2025-26.
Yet no hard questions went his way on how “cheap” renewables are. Instead, Mr Bowen’s fiercest opposition is Turkey, with whom he is stuck in a bidding war to get Adelaide to host the 31st billionaire’s private jetsetting climate summit known as COP, where high-flyers lecture the rest of us on cutting emissions.
LIFTER
LNP Member for Mirani Glen Kelly, who secured a ministerial review of the Moonlight Range Wind Farm, which was dumped by Queensland Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie after inadequate consultation.
LEANER
Australian Energy Regulator boss Clare Savage claiming renewables reduce power bills while being interviewed on the ABC about soaring power bills with the rise of renewables – and the ABC for eating up the spin.
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