Introduction by Croakey: As environmental lawyer Senator Larissa Waters assumes her new role as Leader of the Australian Greens – calling for a progressive Parliament and “politics with heart” – it’s worth taking note of comments by her predecessor Adam Bandt at the end of his recent concession speech.
Bandt urged journalists to do a much better job of reporting on climate change, making an impassioned plea for the media to start taking the climate crisis seriously and to hold governments to account.
Croakey is publishing the relevant extract from his speech below as his comments deserve a wide audience and it’s likely they have not been much covered by the mainstream media. Read his speech in full here.
Comments by Adam Bandt
Before I finish up, want to give a little bit of free advice to the media, if I can – I can see the grimaces here – but we’re in a climate crisis.
We’re in a climate crisis. I really want the media to stop reporting on climate as a political issue and start thinking about it as if our country was being invaded…You should treat the climate crisis as if there is a war on.
And one of the refrains I’ve heard was, “oh well, we don’t hear people talk about climate as much anymore”.
During the course of this Parliament, for a large part of it, pollution, climate pollution, was actually higher under this Government than it was under Scott Morrison.
We were knocking on your doors trying to get you to write stories about it. We were asking questions about it in Parliament. We were holding press conferences about it, and we really struggled to get anyone to take that seriously.
And when we would get up and say, “we’ve got to stop opening coal and gas mines”, it was this kind of shrug of, well, we’d expect the Greens to say that, because that’s your that’s your point of differentiation.
…I would just ask the media now, every time you get a press release talking about a new renewable energy project, or every time you get told that the climate crisis is being taken seriously, please don’t just treat this as a, “well, we’re going to report that, what the political, different political parties say”.
Look behind it and look at the science, because your kids, our kids, everyone’s kids, are in for a hellish future in their lifetimes if we don’t get the climate crisis under control.
You know, we’ve been nudging 20 degrees overnight in Melbourne in May. We’re hitting one and a half degrees now of warming. We are seeing this unfold.
Now the Government’s been lucky to have a climate denialist, Peter Dutton, for many years as their foil, because it made them look good, right? It made them look good.
But in this – as the political debate became about renewables versus nuclear – we tried really hard to get people to pay attention to coal and gas and the over 30 new coal and gas projects that have been adopted, but it was treated as a political point.
Please, please, start taking the climate crisis seriously and holding this government and any future government to account.
Act as if our country is being invaded when you consider what our governments are doing in response to the climate crisis, and don’t let them get away with simply a press release.
And this is going to, only going to become more pressing.
The reason I got into politics was after being at Damian Lawson’s, I think it might have been your sister’s place, reading a paper about the science of climate change and thinking, Oh, well, this is really serious, and surely our governments have got this under control.
Realising that pollution is not coming down in the way that it needs to is why I quit my job and started running in politics in the first place.
The climate crisis is only going to get worse unless we tackle it and this movement of ours that I am so incredibly proud to have been a part of is only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as we make sure that everyone in this beautiful country and this beautiful planet of ours has a safe place to live and everything they need to live a good life.
On other media matters
Please register to join this upcoming discussion about public interest journalism as a public health good.
The panel, moderated by Associate Professor Carmel Williams, includes Professor Bronwyn Fredericks, Dr Norman Swan, Alex Cramb and Dr Melissa Sweet.
The Centre for Health in All Policies Research Translation convenes In Conversation: Boundary, Spanners, Thinkers and Policy Actors Roundtables approximately three times a year. The sessions to date have been a mixture of invitation-only meetings and publicly shared webinars, providing a platform for researchers, policy actors and implementation experts to elevate discussion on emerging issues, present new and upcoming research, and facilitate conversation around impacts and possible solutions.
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