Usually I bristle when shock jocks and others assert that Canberrans are out of touch. Usually they use the metonomy of “Canberra” rather than use the word Canberrans because it is easier to slag off at a city rather than the people in it.
However, I suspect that many Canberrans may be out of touch in not understanding the levels of ignorance and apathy of public policy questions by the mass of the voting public. Nor do they understand the strength of the forces that will keep them that way.
The Government’s climate-change adviser Professor Ross Garnaut says dealing with climate change is a “diabolical” policy problem.
It may be more diabolical than he imagines – not because the framing of a sound policy will be impossibly difficult, but because the getting public acceptance of it will be well nigh impossible and therefore the risk of the Government and the Opposition going to water will be very high.
Australia has been fairly good at a lot of public policy in the past, especially for a federation, or perhaps because it is a federation. Certainly Australia has been better than the US. The Torrens land system, metrification, Medicare, superannuation, the GST, gun control and road safety are good examples.
Indeed, countries like Australia – relatively rich and well-educated – should take a world lead occasionally on policy questions.
But there are several stumbling blocks: media; education; political weakness; and the fact that this policy change will not benefit Australia unless others, particularly the US, join it.
The media problem is major. Canberra with its seven dailies before breakfast and high consumption of the ABC is an exception. Its main daily is a quality broadsheet. Elsewhere they are tabloids and ABC consumption is lower. The tabloids and commercial broadcasters concentrate on the hip-pocket nerve (the price of petrol), celebrity and the unusual.
Media outlets in general produce news, not information. Sometimes they overlap, but so often they do not. With something like climate change and the Garnaut report the disjoin between news and information is disheartening. One day after the report came out, it was no longer news, yet the vast bulk of the population has not absorbed it. So the important details that back the argument for action are lost on the bulk of voters.
The danger in this is made worse by a growing disrespect for experts. Intelligent scepticism is one thing, but baseless dismissal of evidence-based scientific conclusions by many voters will make the political task unnecessarily difficult.
Media outlets are often pressured into running rubbish in the interests of “balance”. So creationists, “intelligent design” proponents, climate “sceptics” and others get far more coverage than they deserve. Worse, a lot of the challengers to the accepted science have high news value, even if they have low information value.
Scientific literacy is not high among voters. But they can understand that a carbon-trading scheme will cost money. And that is newsworthy. Add a few scare tactics and the task gets harder, particularly if the Opposition tries to capitalise on it, as it is doing now.
The most difficult part, though, will be persuading Australians to lead on climate change. We would risk suffering the costs with no benefit, because Australian emissions are such a small part of the world total.
But if everyone says we are not going to move until others do – as the Opposition is now suggesting – the world will warm catastrophically. The cost will be much greater than the costs of taking effective action.
Perhaps one of the best reasons for Australia taking a lead, oddly enough, is that the US is unlikely to. The Australian media is bad enough, the US media is worse. US scientific literacy is poorer than Australia’s. The US has been dumbed down more than Australia. Education, erudition, and geographic and scientific knowledge are no longer required of political candidates in the US. In fact, they are regarded as a disadvantage. Candidates fear being branded elitist far more than they fear being branded ignorant.
How is the US to deal with the complexity of dealing with climate change when its political leaders have to be “ordinary” or “just one of us”? Even Barack Obama had to go bowling and be seen having a beer with the guys.
The US is not the leader of the free world, or indeed any sort of world leader.
US media coverage of the US election – which we can watch quite easily these days – reveals incessant trivialisation. No major policy questions get a good airing. The sound bites are so short as to be meaningless.
Twenty years ago, it would unthinkable for a presidential candidate to trivialise the response to Iran’s nuclear program by parodying the words of a pop song – as John McCain did by singing the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann with the words Bomb Iran. Not even Ronald Reagan would have done that.
The folksy dumbing-down character of recent US politics makes the US incapable of leading the response to something as complicated and serious as climate change.
The weakening of print media and of the reading culture in general augur poorly for a reasoned response to climate change. Understanding what is happening to the climate, its economic consequences and balancing the cost of doing something about it against not doing anything requires reading, numeracy and some basic knowledge of the scientific method. Al Gore did his best to present it visually, but the best parts of his film were in the data.
The economic issues just do not lend themselves to short soundbites.
Australia can and should lead on climate change. We have more than most countries to lose if nothing is done. It may cost us to lead if others do not follow, but if we lead, rather than wait, we will increase the chance that other nations will follow.
Even if it does not guarantee they will follow, but merely increase the chance, it will be worth the cost.
The danger is that people in Canberra will under-estimate the task, paradoxically because we are probably better informed, more scientifically literate and are better served by our media than elsewhere in Australia.