Yesterday's one-vote victory for the Liberal Party's climate sceptics effectively leaves seven million rural Australians disenfranchised.
Who represents their interests now? With northern Australia set to lose the Kakadu wetlands, barramundi fisheries and 50 per cent of tropical rainforests to climate change, it's no wonder Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Henderson gloomily described the change in Liberal leadership as ''a bad day for Australia''.
A leadership squabble in an air-conditioned party room in Canberra is a long way away from the heart-breaking social and economic realities being played out across rural Australia as climate change kicks in.
Described by the National Rural Health Alliance as people living ''on the front line of climate change'', drought-ravaged rural communities are struggling with debt burdens, livestock losses, water shortages, rising food prices and mental health issues. Rural suicides are 20 per cent above the national average and 45per cent of callers to a national depression help-line are rural men. Yesterday, a Salvation Army spokesman said he was shocked by the extent of the rural poverty he saw while touring NSW bush towns last year.
The Murray-Darling Basin, which grows 43 per cent of Australia's food, is heading into its ninth year of drought. The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting an El Nino effect, with above average summer temperatures. The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics estimates 4500 farm jobs were lost last financial year, with drought wiping billions off the value of food exports.
But Nick Minchin thinks climate change is a left-wing plot. Try telling that to a farmer out on the Lachlan, forced to spend $4000 to truck in a load of water. Or to apple growers, whose exports have dropped from $46 million to $7 million.
At a time when rural Australia needs a strong voice in Parliament, the Opposition now has a leader who thinks climate change is little more than a passing scientific fad. ''If you look at Roman times, grapes grew up against Hadrian's Wall,'' Tony Abbott told Lateline barely two weeks ago. He admitted he hadn't read the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that inform global political debate on the issue. ''I'm a politician. I have to rely on briefings. I have to rely on what I pick up through the secondary sources,'' he said.
If Prime Minister Kevin Rudd calls an election as early as March, Abbott's ignorance and intransigence on this critical issue will be a liability during a campaign following a scorching summer. Climate scepticism will not play well against a backdrop of record-breaking temperatures, bushfires, farm failures, heat stress deaths and electricity blackouts.
What's most frustrating about the ascendancy of the Liberal Party climate sceptics is that it lets Labor off the hook. Who will question their lacklustre performance on environmental issues? Or their failure to help Australia's food producers cope with climate change?
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