Australia’s Voters Betray Themselves (updated)

Australia’s Voters
Betray Themselves, Their Homeland And Mother Earth

Op-Ed: Jerome Irwin,


Australian’s Vote For Australia’s Largest Export- COAL

Australia’s voters have defeated a Labour Party that had a clear and comprehensive platform for addressing the climate change crisis and instead re-elected a Liberal Party that virtually had no clear solutions to address the climate crisis other than allow the market to direct whatever changes will happen in the future. How exactly this happened should not be lost on other countries, like Canada, who are facing their own contentious national election and similar rancorous climate crisis issues raised by the catastrophic effects of severe, reoccuring, widespread drought, cyclones, floods or wildfires.

By re-electing their current right-wing Liberal Party government and its Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, Australian’s have, in one fell swoop, simultaneously betrayed humanity’s higher nature that seeks to heal and constantly grow beyond whatever the more limited, baser, self-destructive tendencies among human beings and their societies.

In so doing, Australia’s voters have also denied the long-term protection of their ostensibly-sacred homelands from the continued havoc and desultory effects of: unchecked climate change and the wilful destruction by the world’s corporations and their minions of followers and supporters who continue to advocate for more and more mining and extraction of coal, iron and a multitude of minerals that will only further deplete the world’s precious supply of water and other natural, finite resources.

Australia’s voters have also now ensured the continuation of its Liberal Party’s ideological market philosophy that promotes development and expansionistic policies that favour: the on-going need for further massive influxes of immigrant workers; a consequent population explosion and density of its urban and rural areas requiring ever greater infrastructure development and the on-going degradation of its natural environment; an exodus to Australia’s shores of more and more of the world’s wealthier classes eager to reap the benefits of the kind of investments that will take advantage of the current receptive political climate. A climate that will continue to encourage the consequent negative environmental effects caused by excessive economic and commercial development, all of which, of course, will come at the ultimate loss of time-honoured human, cultural and environmental heritage, to be replaced by the idle promises of so-called unspecified better things yet to come in the future.

Also threatened by Australia’s 2019 election is the future proliferation of ever more clever, yet corrupt, bureaucratic economic schemes, such as its current negative gearing, that unduly affords wealthy investors with financial leverage through depreciation and lower interest rates charged on investment property loans; while expanding tax benefits and discounts on captial gains of investment properties that in the long run creates a virtual Kumbayah Dance that promotes the unseemly bonds of mutual growth and expansion between corporate interests and Australia’s wealthy classes that benefit from each other’s mutual growth and expansion at the expense of the country’s poorer, less-privileged sectors of the population. Such dynamics can but only further exacerbate in the future the existing long-standing gaps and distinctions that exist between Australia’s societal classes while also dull any real positive progress in addressing the earth’s climate crisis.

As the final election results were tallied, the smug smiles on the faces of Liberal Party recumbents had the look of the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. They knew they’d pulled off a major coup.

But the ultimate election success of Australia’s Liberal Party ideology, in spite of all the pre-election polls that predicted a progressive Labour Party victory, raises important questions about how the climate crisis, any kind of worldwide carbon tax or related issues will fare in the contentious debates of other national elections in the future.

The cynical way in which Australia’s Liberal Party employed the time-old strategy of simply throwing a lot of money at every sector of the electorate, and essentially buy their votes, worked exceedingly well: the wealthy were assurred their comfortable “Negative Gearing” scheme would continue as before; dispossessed youth, all but priced out of the current housing market in Australia as they are everywhere else among the world’s wealthy, developed nations, were guaranteed the down payment on their first home would only require from them an extremely-risky 5% down payment, with the government going out on a limb by offering to become the guarantor for the remaining cost; while the ever-burgeoning numbers of struggling immigrants were all but assurred job security in the ever-more secure, burgeoning mining, construction and development industries.

Australia’s national election thus represents not only a victory for the philosophy of uncapped money, wealth and a pittance of unsustainable, non-renewable resource-based jobs but a world ideology that primarily will remain market-driven that, in the long run, not only will fail to sustainably support human civilization but, if copied by other developed and developing nations, will trump the possibility of creating any rational sanity for the human race and its ultimate role in the preservation of Mother Earth herself.

At this point, one can only now hope that all those Australians who voted for the Conservative Liberal Party over its Left-Wing, union-controlled Labor Party are correct and that not only is Climate Change, indeed, a myth if not total bullshit, as some would say, but otherwise is simply a natural re-occurring process in the evolution of the earth.
Or that the Labor Party’s overt policies, if once put into place, would have not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of older Australians, who would have been forced to move from their self-funded pensions onto a public pension system, but would have caused a big rise in costs for renters, small investors and totally wrecked the real estate’s resale market.

Those Australian’s who voted against Labor and the Greens obviously believed that it made no sense to ever think about eventually shutting down all of Australia’s 22 coal-fired power stations when nearby China is one country that is building 1,000 of them. “Tell me”, asked the majority of Australia’s voters, “how that makes any sense at all. And tell me what will happen when the Solar Minimum hits this year and next year, and possibly for the next 40 years?”

Australia’s voters, rather than believe climate scientists, like those who have now created the acclaimed documentary Anthropocene, that documents what is causing the current Epoch 6th Great Extinction of species on Earth, obviously instead have decided to follow those climate scientists who proclaim:”There is No "Greenhouse Effect"; “There is No Extra Warming to Explain”, and, furthermore; “There is No "Greenhouse Effect" on Venus Either!”

In the end, if the voters of the world can take any one lesson at all from Australia’s national election it’s the same old story, but with a frigteningly more dire, larger scope: Poor Humans, Poor Wildlife and Poor Mother Earth!

Words (1100)

Tags: Australia’s 2019 National Election, Australian Liberal Party Victory, PM Scott Morrison, Australian Labour Party defeat, Candidate Bill Shorten, Adani Corporation’s Coal Mine, change, climate crisis, climate disasters,

Bio Note: Jerome Irwin is a freelance writer who, for decades, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, has sought to call attention to problems of sustainability caused by excessive mega-developments, the resulting horrors of traffic gridlock, loss of single family neighbourhoods and a host of related environmental-ecological-spiritual issues and concerns that exist between the conflicting philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.

This is an updated version of an earlier opinion piece published on Scoop

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