Add warming to list of failures

WHY do we have such a rotten national anthem? It's because the only words that rhyme with Australia are dahlia and failure. Even Les Murray couldn't do much with them. Mind you, a sort of mulga-wood version of the Marsellaise, emphasising Australian failure rather than French triumphalism would fit the local psyche like a shroud. Because were into failure in a big way. Think of all the films weve made about our failures. Even before Gallipoli and Burke & Wills there was Sunday Too Far Away where Jack Thompson failed to be the gun shearer, Petersen where Thompson failed to succeed at Melbourne Uni and Picnic at Hanging Rock where almost the entire cast failed to return from a picnic. Not to mention the two McKenzie films wherein despite his desperate efforts Bazza, that archetypal Australian hero, failed to lose his virginity.

And when asked what we'd prefer as our national anthem Australians vote for Waltzing Matilda, a desolating dirge about a total failure: a swaggie so deep in depression that he drowns himself over a mangy sheep. Gough Whitlam opposed the replacement of God Save the Queen with Matilda in the '70s saying it wouldn't sound right at ceremonial events such as state funerals. Twaddle. It'd be perfect, more depressing than the Funeral March. I mention Australia's litany of woes because we may well be facing the biggest failure in our history: our failure to deal with climate change. It seems we're doomed to die like Burke and Wills, to totally disappear like Miranda and her mates in Picnic.

In a world that can't make Robert Mugabe disappear, that can't persuade dicks in Japan to stop harpooning Mobies, what chance is there of stopping the planet puckering like a prune? Oh, they might be able to slow down the disaster in an authoritarian country, but it is the nature of democracies to dispute and dither. Governments are more concerned by the polls than planetary puckering because that occurs in slow-mo and beyond the election cycle and all those special interest groups and Her Majesty's Opposition are more concerned to make trouble than to have the biggest trouble in history go away.

It's different if we've a short-lived crisis to deal with, such as a hurricane, earthquake or tsunami. Politics takes a back seat and we try to deal with it with appropriate urgency. Should a thumping asteroid head our way we'd bury our differences before it buried us. In war we switch to a command economy and form war cabinets to defeat Hitler or whomever. But with greenhouse-global warming-climate change or whatever we'll next call our curtain call we merely squabble. Or point to oxymoronic solutions such as clean coal. Admittedly we've produced the technology to enable other contradictions in terms -- decaf coffee and safe sex, for example -- but clean coal? That's the mining industry's way of changing the subject.

Meanwhile awesome machines in NSW are marching up the Hunter Valley masticating the entire landscape, defecating mountains of dross while farting billions of tonnes of greenhouse gasses for local and global consumption. Australia is burning while its pollies fiddle. The climate change issue was red-hot urgent 30 years ago. By now any action that is taken, and I speak hypothetically because bugger all is happening, verges on the posthumous.

Before the federal election this column called on the presumptive PM to proffer the Opposition, along with the premiers, full representation in a war cabinet. To at least pretend we were tackling a problem that makes the Cold War look penny ante, let alone that trivial war on terror. Rudd made a few moves in the bipartisan direction, on a number of issues, but having shown reluctant interest (on Sorry Day and 2020 for example), Brendan's switched to giving Kev the finger. He's reduced this vast issue to populist posturing about the price of petrol. Let's fix this week's polls rather than the terminal pollution. And for the Libs and the Nats it's more urgent to get a Gippslandslide against Rudd at the weekend.

The only war cabinet seems to be Kevin's as his comrades quarrel over emission trading, ever responsive to the people they really represent. The various interests of the vested variety.

Rudd knows he must crash through or crash on climate change. The issue is producing a predictable range of reactions. As well as ongoing denial there's already boredom and fatalism. Then there's let's-buy-a-Hummer hedonism. But worst of all will be the Opposition's opportunism. Reduce the scale of the argument to the price of petrol.

Though we can't drown ourselves in the swaggie's billabong -- there's no bloody water -- we can croak out the last verse of our appropriately despondent hymn ...

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong.