dealing with climate’s dark art
The desperate need for frank, honest, timely and evidence based advice.
Remember how things were during the more optimistic days of living in Australia, when climate change was not a dirty word or two?I am referring to the times of the Kevin Rudd and then Julie Gillard governments.
Back then the country was known internationally as taking a whole raft of initiatives to deal with climate change mitigation and adaptation.
I have to admit that I found the public sector involved in these areas to be under all sorts of pressures. The then government’s priorities kept changing as they worked through what they could and couldn’t do, given the nature of the controls other parties had over the government’s policies.
In the end the first Rudd Government failed to deliver on many of their promises in relation to climate change. But in the end, during these interesting times, the then Labor governments did put in place all sorts of energy programs, support for renewables and even implemented a price on carbon. Across the nation, government and private initiatives were delivering changes to the way we lived and a drop in energy usage and therefore a drop in the reliance on carbon. It was small but there was measurable differences being accepted.
But alas, these steps were small beginnings to the challenges that were descending on the planet and life as we know it. But this all went up in smoke. The incoming Rabbott government has attacked all these sensible policy initiatives on ideological grounds and in order to satisfy the needs of their money-making business chiefs. Their gun boat policies have laid waste to so many climate initiatives and innovations.
In those early days the public sector workers were very much a dedicated bunch of people who had moved to particular departments knowing that there were now opportunities to really make a difference. Climate change was indeed the great challenge and these people were hard at work putting great changes in places. In several cases I know that this was happening despite the stupidity of some of their political masters. They offered up advice to government to assist in delivering on some ground breaking policies.
So what happened to these hard-working and dedicated people as the new wrecking crew arrived? One of these people could not longer do his job and could not participate in the climate’s dark art as he would have had to do as a public sector employee of this government.
He departed the public sector. His story was published in the Canberra Times – click here.
It is sad that the community has lost these people from the public sector.
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this posting was cross posted on our other site: Sustainable Settlements Institute
Paul Costigan, 14 February 2014