I was at my local football club recently, watching my son’s under-13 side play. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, almost too warm for footy. I stood with a couple of other parents and at half time our chat turned inevitably to the weather.
All long-term football followers, and especially those of us who played school or local footy in our youth, remember bitterly cold days, ankle-deep mud and finding it difficult to tell team mates from opposition through the layers of mud caked on jumpers. My twelve-year-old has already played for more than five years but has not experienced one of those afternoons.
Our discussion turned from the weather, as it inevitably does these days, to the climate, and from there to how we can contribute to the effort to save water and reduce our environmental impact. We talked about water tanks and solar power systems.
Can anyone imagine, even two or three years ago, the discussion between three dads at a suburban football game turning to the sorts of issues once thought only the preserve of 'loony greenies'? Could anyone have predicted that John Howard himself would acknowledge, however grudgingly and superficially, the reality of climate change?
As a reasonably long-standing 'loony greenie', I find this new environmental awareness very pleasing. The fact that the awareness of the issues among the general population is outrunning the policy responses of the major parties doesn’t surprise me. So thorough is the conservatism now built in to our political system, and so profoundly corrosive of the formal political process has been the influence of corporations and neo-liberalism, that it is looking increasingly likely that only a crisis of epic proportions is likely to elicit an appropriate response to the problems that we face. Either that, or people will simply have to demand that governments act in a serious and determined way to deal with climate change.
Let us not, however, exaggerate the level of environmental awareness among the general population either. The understanding of the problems that face the nation and the world remains superficial. John Howard maintains that he will defend jobs and economic prosperity before the environment because he knows a substantial proportion of the population also think that way.
The argument, of course, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Defending jobs in the Australian coal industry is a bit like defending the jobs of night soil collectors when the Board