Denial is hard to grasp in the city. In flooded Taree, it's bewildering
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.
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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.
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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.
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It was in the rural Victorian seat of Indi, encompassing Wodonga and Wangaratta, that independent Cathy McGowan was drafted by community group Voices of Indi. In 2013, McGowan delivered the Liberal Party its only loss when she won the formerly safe seat from Sophie Mirabella. The subsequent success of inner city "teals" - community independents like Zali Steggall, Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney - is evidence that Liberal neglect of classical-liberal and metropolitan voters has come back to haunt them. But soul searching is due in the bush as well, particularly among Nationals. So far, they have been criticised for unforced errors (like quitting the Liberal-National Coalition only to rejoin it days later) rather than structural weaknesses, like their preference of mining interests over agricultural ones and their inability to win back seats lost since the 1990s. 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There is a perception that the junior National Party has been the tail wagging the dog, with the Liberals taking up the obsessions of National MPs - in particular nuclear energy. And while Coalition Governments dutifully "pork-barrelled" public money for safe regional seats, they neglected apparently safe urban seats held by Liberals. This helps explain why Liberals now hold mostly regional and rural seats, and barely exists in the inner-city. But big spending programs disguise how country interests have become diluted. Being in Coalition with the Liberal Party has weakened the ability of the National Party to advocate forcefully for the interests of those in regional and rural Australia. Famously, former National leader Michael McCormack could not name one time the Nationals had taken the side of farmers over that of miners. Similarly, in the last Coalition government, Nationals spruiked and voted for Scott Morrison's original stage three tax cuts - even though Nationals electorates had the least to gain. When the Albanese Labor government reformed stage three, the biggest winners were Australians living in Nationals seats. Regional and rural areas would benefit from increased public spending on education, health, public transport and infrastructure; all of which are harder to fund after the tax cuts eagerly pursued by Liberal-National governments. They are most at risk from climate change, and bear the brunt of disasters amplified by a warming earth. Independents like Cathy McGowan, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have recognised this, as have those running in more recent elections like Helen Haines. It is true that the Nationals still hold about as many lower house seats today as they did at the height of the Howard Coalition Government, and many are still nominally safe seats. But in recent elections, both Liberal and Labor Party MPs have learned the hard way that there is no such thing as a safe seat against the right challenger. Australia Institute research shows Australians are unique among Western democracies in their willingness to elect independents. Regional challengers to the major parties will not be cut from the same cloth as community independents in the cities, the so-called "teals". Regional and rural Australians have responded to somewhat different arguments, from somewhat different candidates. We could call these candidates "tans" - from the colour of their pants, and because it is "Nat" in reverse. Of course, none of this is predestined - nor was the Liberal Party doomed to veer to the right and leave behind moderate and classically liberal voters. These are the result of choices made by voters, by party rank-and-file and by elected representatives. A couple of weeks ago, the Nationals made a choice - to quit the Coalition - which suggested a willingness to rethink the old saws. Unfortunately, the reason was not to give the Nationals freedom to consider new ways of representing the country, but to allow them to hold onto failed policies like nuclear power. These policies failed to resonate with voters. And the united front of Liberals and Nationals held back rural candidates. Mia Davies, former leader of the WA Nationals (a more independently minded branch than those in NSW or Victoria) and a candidate in the federal election, thought her job was made harder by the opposition of Liberal shadow ministers to Labor's resources production tax credit scheme. READ MORE: What Angus Taylor called "billions for billionaires", Davies called "good policy". But Davies was a rare Coalition candidate who went against the party line. The effect is a decimated Liberal-National Coalition. And while it is mostly the Liberals who have lost seats, the Nationals have re-attached to the Coalition, which means their future relevance depends on the Liberals recovering 30-odd seats, and the Nationals winning a couple themselves off Labor - something the Nationals haven't managed to do since 2013. Once, National candidates could promise their electorate a voice in the government. With that looking a long way away, it is now independent and minor party candidates who can promise relevance: starting national debates, probing the government in question time and perhaps being at the heart of negotiations in the event of a future power-sharing Parliament. If the Nats are not interested in serving the interests of those in rural and regional Australia, they will find no shortage of "tans" willing to throw their Akubras in the ring. The community independent movement did not begin in Sydney or Melbourne, but in the bush. It was in the rural Victorian seat of Indi, encompassing Wodonga and Wangaratta, that independent Cathy McGowan was drafted by community group Voices of Indi. In 2013, McGowan delivered the Liberal Party its only loss when she won the formerly safe seat from Sophie Mirabella. The subsequent success of inner city "teals" - community independents like Zali Steggall, Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney - is evidence that Liberal neglect of classical-liberal and metropolitan voters has come back to haunt them. But soul searching is due in the bush as well, particularly among Nationals. So far, they have been criticised for unforced errors (like quitting the Liberal-National Coalition only to rejoin it days later) rather than structural weaknesses, like their preference of mining interests over agricultural ones and their inability to win back seats lost since the 1990s. Conditions are ripe for the Nationals to face challenges from independents on the same scale as those already faced by the Liberals. And while Indi's "Voices of" model of community organising and drafting candidates was an innovation, the country has long been friendly to independents. Father of the House of Representatives Bob Katter is a rural independent, as were Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who negotiated minority government with Julia Gillard in 2010. Windsor and Oakeshott sat in the NSW Parliament before the jump to Commonwealth politics, and today the NSW crossbench boasts 10 independent MPs, mostly from regional and rural parts of the state. Many independent-held NSW seats overlap with federal seats held by Nationals (like Riverina and Parkes) or regional Liberals (like Farrer and Hume). And at the last two federal elections, independent candidates have turned National and Liberal-National seats like Cowper and Groom marginal. There is a perception that the junior National Party has been the tail wagging the dog, with the Liberals taking up the obsessions of National MPs - in particular nuclear energy. And while Coalition Governments dutifully "pork-barrelled" public money for safe regional seats, they neglected apparently safe urban seats held by Liberals. This helps explain why Liberals now hold mostly regional and rural seats, and barely exists in the inner-city. But big spending programs disguise how country interests have become diluted. Being in Coalition with the Liberal Party has weakened the ability of the National Party to advocate forcefully for the interests of those in regional and rural Australia. Famously, former National leader Michael McCormack could not name one time the Nationals had taken the side of farmers over that of miners. 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But in recent elections, both Liberal and Labor Party MPs have learned the hard way that there is no such thing as a safe seat against the right challenger. Australia Institute research shows Australians are unique among Western democracies in their willingness to elect independents. Regional challengers to the major parties will not be cut from the same cloth as community independents in the cities, the so-called "teals". Regional and rural Australians have responded to somewhat different arguments, from somewhat different candidates. We could call these candidates "tans" - from the colour of their pants, and because it is "Nat" in reverse. Of course, none of this is predestined - nor was the Liberal Party doomed to veer to the right and leave behind moderate and classically liberal voters. These are the result of choices made by voters, by party rank-and-file and by elected representatives. A couple of weeks ago, the Nationals made a choice - to quit the Coalition - which suggested a willingness to rethink the old saws. Unfortunately, the reason was not to give the Nationals freedom to consider new ways of representing the country, but to allow them to hold onto failed policies like nuclear power. These policies failed to resonate with voters. And the united front of Liberals and Nationals held back rural candidates. Mia Davies, former leader of the WA Nationals (a more independently minded branch than those in NSW or Victoria) and a candidate in the federal election, thought her job was made harder by the opposition of Liberal shadow ministers to Labor's resources production tax credit scheme. READ MORE: What Angus Taylor called "billions for billionaires", Davies called "good policy". But Davies was a rare Coalition candidate who went against the party line. The effect is a decimated Liberal-National Coalition. And while it is mostly the Liberals who have lost seats, the Nationals have re-attached to the Coalition, which means their future relevance depends on the Liberals recovering 30-odd seats, and the Nationals winning a couple themselves off Labor - something the Nationals haven't managed to do since 2013. Once, National candidates could promise their electorate a voice in the government. With that looking a long way away, it is now independent and minor party candidates who can promise relevance: starting national debates, probing the government in question time and perhaps being at the heart of negotiations in the event of a future power-sharing Parliament. If the Nats are not interested in serving the interests of those in rural and regional Australia, they will find no shortage of "tans" willing to throw their Akubras in the ring.
