Sydney, Australia—Three months after a “rain bomb” detonated over the city of Brisbane—after the relentless floods had drowned entire suburbs, after 60,000 tons of water-logged trash had been pulled from the wreckage, after a volunteer “mud army” had been deployed to scrape the sludge from the streets, after the actuaries had appraised the total damage at $3.35 billion—a dam finally broke in Australian politics.
Veteran Aussie commentators are calling last weekend’s federal election the biggest political realignment in living memory. The incumbent Liberal-National Coalition—a devil’s bargain between the center and far right that has held power since 2013—tried everything they could to distract voters from the elephant in the room. It tried importing American culture wars by slandering trans athletes to manufacture a backlash. It tried stoking xenophobia by sending texts on election day with vague warnings of an “illegal boat en route to Australia.” All of its tactics fell flat. The public simply had bigger fish to fry: The 2020 bushfires had burned an area the size of Great Britain. A mass bleaching had ravaged over 90 percent of the Great Barrier Reef. Another rain bomb was forecast for Queensland. After a decade of government inaction, voters were ready to respond to their material interests. In district after district and poll after poll, Australians listed climate change as their number-one priority.
Dr. Monique Ryan, a neurologist who pulled an upset victory in a district that had been held by the conservatives since its advent in 1900, captured the mood of the electorate: “We started this campaign because we wanted action on climate change and we felt that it was the most important challenge of our time. It bloody well is. Our government was not listening to us. And so we have changed the government.”
“Bread and butter,” “kitchen table”—whatever metaphor you choose, the takeaway is clear: The climate issue is now deeply entwined with the way Australian voters view their future, their identity, and the quality of their everyday lives. To a certain breed of Washington operative—the sort of cynic whose political imagination has been winnowed down to the length of a TV news cycle—this is perhaps difficult to imagine. Received wisdom among Beltway consultants dictates that climate will always be too abstract to sway political consciousness: the domain of bleeding hearts and do-gooders, not “everyday American voters.”
What has happened in Australia belies that truism and offers a window into what could change in America as the climate crisis comes crashing into a greater portion of the electorate.
In Australia, a governing party that failed to address the crisis—whose prime minister once brought a lump of coal to Parliament, brandishing it like some shamanic talisman—was swept out of office as abruptly and decisively as if it’d been caught in the Brisbane floodwaters (which, in essence, it had been).
