From culture shock of lockdown to climate shock of revolution

’Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have nothing on our own homegrown billionaire revolutionary Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, whose intervention in the politics of the nation this week has been stunning.’ Picture: Gaye Gerard

Excuse me? What just happened?

For many of us, the last big date in space was July 20, 1969, when men landed on the moon. For half a century we remembered where we were that day and nothing ever came close, not even the 1986 Challenger disaster, in terms of shock and awe.

We knew the moon shots were real (the conspiracy theorists came later) but we figured that was it. Nice try. Good job. But the idea that those of us on Planet Earth would somehow colonise space seemed, frankly, unreal.

Got that one wrong. William Shatner is not the first civilian to travel into space, but the news that the Star Trek legend has just made the trip of his 90 years was a bit like waking up that other morning in November 1989 to find that overnight the Berlin Wall had fallen. Unimaginable. And suddenly the world turns.

Now we find the world’s richest men are competing to conquer this last frontier of space. And they’re using civilians, not scientists or military personnel, to market a product that risks becoming as commonplace as the streaming services that transformed culture or the Zoom calls that revolutionised work.

One minute life is this way, then it’s not. Ideas, beliefs, policies seemingly set in stone, crash in an instant. Just take another brick out of the wall and watch it crumble. Of course, it’s not so simple or simplistic. Even the most apparently dramatic disruptions to the status quo come after decades, centuries even, of accumulated thinking and practice. Specialists and those paying attention see the gradual shifts but it’s still the case that big breakthroughs so often come in a rush, dependent on evangelicals of various stripes and colours.

Those space evangelicals Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have nothing on our own homegrown billionaire revolutionary Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, whose intervention in the politics of the nation this week has been stunning. Forrest is no slouch when it comes to marketing and his performances with Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast on Thursday and later at the National Press Club were masterful. The Fortescue boss’s insouciant invitation to our Prime Minister to join him at Glasgow and get this stuff sorted, capped off another “what just happened?” moment in what has been a remarkable period of change on climate change.

If you’ve been battling to be heard on carbon for more than a decade, it’s doubtless galling to see politicians and business persons pivot to what they now see as the right side of history, dragged by the economic, if not the moral realities. But as Twiggy suggested to Bridget (it’s a wonder he didn’t call her Bridg, such was his mood) via his press club pulpit, don’t look back, baby. Senator McKenzie is doing the heavy lifting for the Nationals but Dr Forrest lost no time in telling her that her rhetoric was at least, well, months out of date. It’s that sort of moment, when a couple of months is proving to be a very long time in politics.

Perspective, caution, a touch of scepticism about all those hydrogen jobs will not go amiss as we come to grips with the exciting prospect of a future built around renewable energy. And it is, of course, important to remember the past missteps and downright chicanery that have dogged climate politics.

Climate campaigner Greta Thunberg speaks at a demonstration in Milan, Italy. Picture: Getty Images

The mantra that we need to know history in order not to repeat the mistakes of history holds even as we hurtle at a zillion miles an hour into space and a post-carbon future.

Dissecting the past has its value: draw breath if you must, call out the hypocrisy of those now positioning themselves as saviours (and no, I don’t mean Twiggy, who has been on this path for a while now and willingly admits to having had a change of mind).

But being on the right side of a revolution is about grabbing the flag and running, not deconstructing the minutes of the last cell meeting.

One gets the sense that the new NSW Premier, while working on a smaller canvas than Messers Bezos, Musk, Forrest and even Scott Morrison, gets the way the world can change in the blink of an eye. NSW residents had their mini “what just happened moment?” on Wednesday when the Premier backed big, fat permanent migration numbers. After months of labour shortages and failure of our leaders truly to acknowledge the damage caused by closed borders, the NSW initiative was welcome but sudden.

Construction workers to protest lockdown and mandatory vaccination at The Shrine of Remembrance last month. Picture: Alex Coppel.

It seems we will have to get used to it. Overwhelmed for the past 18 months by Covid and lockdowns, we’re now being asked to manage an overwhelm of change, adventure, innovation, hope and good sense.

Let’s hope it’s contagious: the pandemic has left us with a stack of wicked problems around health and jobs in particular that could do with some 21st-century revolutionaries.