As the planet warms and liberal democracy is attacked, does the government care?

Australia Broadcast Center

07-06-2025

This warning was published in 1762:
"As soon as man can disobey with impunity, his disobedience becomes legitimate."
It comes from The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
Rousseau's words inspired the French Revolution, and the American revolutionary war, and influenced the political and moral philosophy we call liberalism, on which modern Australian political society is based.
The message contained in that warning is extremely important.
If we want to live in a world in which individual human and civil rights mean anything, certain groups in society must not be allowed to behave with impunity.
Why? Because if some groups can behave with impunity, and everyone else is forced to stand back and watch, it has a deeply corrosive effect on human culture.
If they can behave with impunity, they'll keep pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with (who's going to stop them?), and their outrageous behaviour will become the new low "standard" for others to follow.
It's obvious what that downward spiral in morality and ethics means for everyone.
Do we believe freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to protest, and the media's right to tell the truth, are essential for a free society?
If we do, then we can't allow privileged groups to dismantle those things in their effort to protect their "prerogative" to behave with impunity.
When we let anyone hack away at those pillars of liberalism — and make it increasingly dangerous for individuals to tell the truth, to speak up, and to protest the abuse of power — what will happen to our "free society"?
It will see illiberalism flourish.
In some ways, the battle to protect important elements of liberal society has already been lost.
In the 21st century, the right to privacy, which is essential to an individual's ability to speak freely in their own home, has been destroyed.
The internet, which held so much promise in the 1990s, has been turned against us.
It's become a tool to crush political dissent and compile lists of suspect individuals and their personal networks. The weaponisation of our data and AI technology is driving a rapid evolution in dystopian predictive policing and warfare.
Some private companies operating at the frontier of this technology, like Palantir, are profiting from these developments.
And we need to understand everything is connected.
Take the environment, the very thing that sustains life on this planet.
In December last year, researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom released a study that showed Australian police are world leaders at arresting climate and environment protesters.
It found more than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involved arrests, more than three times the global average.
It showed Australia's political leaders had joined the "rapid escalation" of global efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest in recent years, while sovereign states globally were failing to meet their emissions targets and international agreements.
It complemented other reports (here and here) that illuminated the links between political donations and lobbying from fossil fuel companies, governments writing harsher laws and penalties for activists, policing agencies being used to enforce the new laws, and legal systems and courts bedding the laws down.
Think about how that phenomenon is connected to the global economic system.
Specifically, consider the role the "price mechanism" is supposed to play in industrialised society.
At the moment, we're watching a nasty global battle over an attempt by scientists and environmentalists to have the true costs of fossil fuels properly reflected in the market prices of the products fossil fuel companies sell to the world.
If the true environmental, climate, and planetary costs of fossil fuels were really reflected in their prices, the price of petrol, gas and coal would be many multitudes higher than today's suppressed "market" prices.
So the global fossil fuel industry is using every lever it can — political influence, legal systems, police forces, private security services, national armies, extra-judicial harassment and intimidation — to stop the true cost of their products being reflected in the market prices of their products.
And climate and environmental activists and scientists are using every lever they can — research, letters to politicians, the legal system, protests, civil disobedience, and blockades — to have the true climate and planetary costs of fossil fuels reflected in their prices.
Do we have a right to an inhabitable planet?
It's not difficult to see how the battle over the price mechanism is deeply connected to the struggle to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples globally (including land rights, the right to cultural preservation, and participation in decision-making processes).
Everything is connected.
Last week, the climate analyst Ketan Joshi wrote a fiery article in Crikey that touched on many of these issues.
It's really worth reading.
Mr Joshi said the Albanese government's recent controversial decision to allow Woodside's North West Shelf gas project to continue operating until 2070 was a major blow to the climate movement and signified something sinister.
He argued Labor was not a climate denier, it was something "far worse".
He said if anyone in 2025 could work to worsen fossil fuel reliance in full acceptance of the consequences, without any willingness to work to prevent them, they were "far scarier" than climate deniers.
"There isn't a great name for this, but we can call it "tactical fatalism": the intentional, weaponised insistence that a worse future is the only future (from those who benefit the most from whatever makes it bad)," he wrote.
"The climate movement is ill-equipped to deal with a threat that looks like this. The easy binary of deniers vs believers died last decade. Any fantasy we had of a global moral pact of good intentions is dead.
"This decade we are realising how much damage and death can be caused openly, without any shame. Genocidal countries know it, and the fossil fuel industry knows it, too.
"A half-decade of wars, invasions, energy crises and a really nasty pandemic haven't been easy on our movement, and the tactical fatalist predators are circling."
How do these sad political developments fit with the principles of "liberalism," where the right to speak freely, to tell the truth, and protest are supposed to be sacrosanct?
In The Social Contract, Rousseau said when privileged groups can act with impunity we exist in a world where might is right.
"And as the strongest is always right, the only problem is how to become the strongest," he wrote.
Is that really the world we want to live in? Is that what younger Australians voted for?