Politics

Picture this. It has been almost five years since Black Summer. Fires and floods, supercharged by climate pollution, have claimed hundreds of Australian lives and thousands of Australian homes. An election is on the horizon and the leader of the opposition declares that, if he wins, he will dump Australia’s 2030 climate targets, the very targets developed to secure a safer future for our kids and grandkids.

We are apparently to take the Coalition on trust even though there are internal pressures from former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and other Nationals for Australia to quit the Paris Agreement. This is something Donald Trump did soon after becoming United States president in 2017.

The government should be accountable on its commitment to Truth and Treaty and use its power and platform to lead the community along this journey, rather than staying silent or pandering to those who seek to undermine progress.

As speculation gathers around the possibility of an early election, I am growing increasingly sceptical. The prime minister has no substantive justification for considering such a move, except to exploit the vulnerability of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and his team. It would do nothing towards the betterment of Australians.

One of the most concerning elements that has remained unresolved by governments of both persuasions over the past decade has been the taxation of the mining industry, especially given the multibillion-dollar profits companies have made.

The undercurrents of self-doubt in the Liberal Party bubbled to the surface earlier in the week, with a rush to return former treasurer and leadership hopeful Josh Frydenberg to parliament.

At the best of times, Minister for Immigration Andrew Giles can look like the proverbial rabbit caught in the spotlight. Mild-mannered, quietly spoken and very earnest, Giles was in the opposition’s crosshairs all week with increasingly strident demands that he be sacked.

Dutton’s superficial focus on immigration, as part of his call to move ‘back to basics’, can be taken as a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to past debates advocating bans on Asian immigration, and the rhetoric of Pauline Hanson...

It is clear Dutton sees talk of a ‘better Australia’, not a ‘bigger Australia’, as a powerful campaign tool. He is utilising immigration and its history of stirring prejudice and xenophobic sentiment, emulating John Howard’s success in the 2001 election when he tied threats to national security to Middle Eastern asylum seekers.

Australia’s attempts to keep China out of the Pacific region have put my people in the middle of a fight we don’t want and didn’t ask for. The irony of Australia’s efforts to create ‘security’ is that so many of Australia’s actions actively undermine it, in my country and through the region.