I’ve learnt a lot about Australia in the last 48 hours.


I‘ve realised our country accommodates two distinct populations. There’s the urban community clustered around the big cities on the eastern seaboard and there’s the rural community scattered far and wide around the country. The second group of people is trying their darndest to look after our land. We are facing less of an offering each decade-arable land for food, a climate that is conducive to growing the crops and sustaining the animals that we like to eat and a population willing and able to be the custodians of the land for the rest of us. When making a living for your family to pay your bills and put food on your table, saving the planet is not your focus.

We ignored opportunities to sustainably address the needs of everyone, especially those who feed the city dwellers. Remember the ‘feed a man fish story’? Governments reactively give money to those who suffer the firestorms, droughts and flooding rains, when what they needed was a proactive partnership to find new action plans and sustainable ways to meet the needs of all in Australia. We have been governed by greed and consumerism and then ignored the consequences.  We found people in other lands willing to work for and produce that, which we would not. We smuggly pay the lowest price for goods. We continue to gouge the earth looking for an export to exchange for money or those cheap goods, while governments allow corporate bodies to avoid paying their share for organising this. Our entitlement to whatever we can acquire has claimed our balance with the land.

What a surprise (should you be unaware what is happening) or not (if you’ve worked it out) we have been dealt with the result of the Federal poll on Saturday. No one wants to have less money to spend. Concurrently, there’s a growing group of people who don’t know where their next dollar will come from. Around the big cities we have chosen to ignore the effects of the climate that’s changed because of our own footprint. We might be hanging on to an eroding coastline but we’ve got money to plaster it up. Join the dots Australians. We do not exist in a consumer void. Someone else suffers but in the longer term we all suffer.

It’s not even a case of the HAVES and the HAVE NOTS. The reality is we’re all losers.

I heard it said this was the climate election. I guess that’s true.

Leave a Reply