Denial is hard to grasp in the city. In flooded Taree, it’s bewildering

The text came on Wednesday night: “Water up to my shins in the house ... I’m here with two rabbits and a guinea pig. Horses and cows on the mound, water to their chests, so who knows how many will survive.”

This was my brother on the Mid North Coast. Four hundred millimetres of rain had fallen in two days; the forecast was for another 200mm. Some oyster farmers had come around in their boat and taken his partner and their dogs and cats to safety.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

A Thursday morning evacuation was planned for my brother, but you’d need a hard heart not to lie awake thinking about the eight horses and the 60-odd cows on the mound. Imagining an animal with the flood water rising up its legs, to its chest, lifting it off the earth, and then its terror as it gets taken away, the panic, the bruising knocks, finally the exhaustion. For every human life lost in natural disasters, thousands more livestock have gone.

My brother, a vet whose life has been dedicated to animal health, had to put down numerous injured cows after the 2021 flood. He’ll be doing the same once the water drops. It’s beyond words.

It might be out of order to talk politics during these circumstances, but he was knee-deep in water inside his house and he wanted to talk about politics. Or was it science? Science brought down to the level of politics?

“The Nationals are idiots,” he said. “You can quote me on that.”

A truly weird thing about Australia at the moment is that the people who are most affected by natural disasters are represented by the people who are most likely to deny that human activity has changed our climate.

Cattle and horses in floodwater at Stuart Knox’s property in Moto near Taree. They all survived.

Three weeks ago, in the now-underwater electorate of Lyne, voters returned their Nationals MP to Canberra. But the local swing against the party was 7.28 per cent and they attracted just 36.23 per cent of the primary vote. Preferences from One Nation and other splintered opponents helped them to a two-party preferred vote of 59.69 per cent. So the Nationals claim that Lyne is one of the seats that endorsed their climate and energy policy. As it happens, in Canberra days ago, the Nationals left the Coalition, amid divergences on that same policy.

In the federal election, two demographic fault lines overrode all others: city and country, younger and older. Younger metropolitan voters trend progressive while older rural voters trend conservative. Looking at the floods from the city, young progressive voters look at their country cousins and wonder who is representing their interests – their real life-and-death interests.

My brother is rural, white, male, (a little) on the older side and can’t work out why – given the overwhelming evidence that in a warming planet lives and livelihoods in the regions are increasingly and disproportionately imperilled by extreme weather events – his community is still represented by people whose energy policy is to dig and drill their way through another generation of fossil fuels until they arrive at some nuclear pie in the sky.

He texted later: “100-year floods on the Manning in my lifetime: 1978, 2021, 2025. Before that, 1956. Deniers can say oh, two in four years is not statistically significant. But we need to accept more extremes and readjust to 100-year floods!”

It’s true that one flood is not proof of anthropogenic climate change. Andrew Gissing, the chief executive of Natural Hazards Research Australia, said, “It is too early to know the extent that climate change has contributed to the extreme rainfalls. We do know that under a warmer climate that our atmosphere holds more water and that heavy rain events are more likely.” He described this week’s flood as a one-in-500 year event.

It’s hard for people like my brother, who experience this flood as a one-in-five year event, to stretch their imagination wide enough to understand the “deniers” who claim to represent them. Even if, against the current evidence, the “deniers” are right and human action is not affecting the climate, as a simple matter of risk mitigation, wouldn’t they do all they can to lessen the danger, just on the off chance that the scientific consensus is correct?

Denialism is hard enough to grasp in the cities, but in the country it’s just bewildering. Nationals leader David Littleproud and his colleagues, whose official policy is to aim at net zero emissions by 2050, voted eight times against important net zero bills in the last parliament.

Why would you dig in so stubbornly against representing your own people? Is it just helplessness, thinking that until major emitters such as the US address the problem, there’s no point in Australia acting? Is the cost of energy transition deemed not worth it? Is it a rose-tinted reflection of proud country hardiness to take whatever nature throws at them and survive it, and damn the science? Is it the enduring mythology of Said Hanrahan, the 1919 bush poem by the Catholic priest Joseph Patrick Hartigan – “We’ll all be rooned”, one day by drought, the next by flood?

Or is it just that the Nationals don’t actually represent the people on the front line? Is it that the need in Australian politics is for a new rural-based movement to replace a masochistic rearguard action driven by incoherent ideological hatreds? Don’t rural people need representatives who are going to act for their children’s future?

Natural disasters show how quickly individuals move, how they care for each other, how they adapt, how their self-reliance has been moulded by generations of having to do things themselves. We rightly celebrate communities, like those in Lyne, who rally to help one another. Their resilience also gives Canberra ideologues an out. You show your great Australian spirit, and we’ll oppose “green-left conspiracies” and excessive Welcome to Countries, stop trans women from competing in sport. What we won’t do is vote for laws that might help to save your planet. Save yourselves.

By Thursday morning, the water level was dropping to my brother’s ankles. Down on the coast, a herd of cows swept away by the flood had escaped from the river onto the beach. Residents were trying to round them up but the cows, like many of the population of the area, were too cranky.

My brother’s partner wept when she heard that the horses (and the rabbits and the guinea pig) were still alive. She was pleased that he was too. A neighbour had died. Others were missing. The oyster farmers had been by again, offering more help.

In the south of the state, meanwhile, cattle and horses were dying from drought. A different kind of suffering but no less brutal. In Canberra, the regions’ elected officials were still talking about themselves.

Malcolm Knox is an author and columnist.

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