Election Thoughts

Let's start with some facts.

Fact one: The human race is going to die out at some point. That could be from climate change in a century, or an undetected asteroid next week, or - best potential end game - in a million years a single, wise and mysterious old human sits alone in a bar on an alien planet in a distant galaxy, drinking purple rum and listening to amazing tunes, knowing they are the last of their kind, and passing away peacefully in a puddle of rum and alien-kebab vomit.

Fact two: Australia’s contribution to halting climate change and cutting emissions is about as relevant to the fate of the world as Seth Curry’s contribution towards winning an NBA Championship. We’re minor players, our only relevance comes from our relationship with the big names. Sure, with the wrong policies we might emit a few extra thousand tonnes of greenhouse gases, ship out a whole bunch of dirty coal without much in the way of nationalised royalties, and dredge through a bleached UNESCO World Heritage reef to make some offshore bank accounts a little taller. But in the scheme of things, i.e. surviving a million years for the last human to die in an exotic bar, we’re not that important compared to other major countries on the Earth. To truly halt climate change we really need the entire human race to take a long term view, forget about investments and profit margins, and sacrifice.
It’s not going to happen. Humans are animals. There’s 7.5 billion of us. The United States doesn't use the metric system. Australian states can’t even reach a consensus on daylight savings. Millions of people base their lifestyles on varying imaginary friends. Sure, a lot of people might say they’re for global equality, but wait until they find out equality means living on $1000 a month, and everything at KMart is suddenly five times more expensive. So...

Fact three: Climate Change is already here.

Facts established, we can now see that for a lot of people the problem of Climate Change is not “How do we stop it?”, but, “How do we survive it?”
If you believe in capitalism, and you’re rich or think you’re getting rich, you’ll probably believe the market will provide solutions. Heat? Drought? Rising Sea Levels? Technology will save us. There’ll be profits in it. It might be expensive, but it can be bought.
Yes, Climate Change will cause mass extinctions, dehospitablise major parts of the globe, and generate millions of refugees, but that’s easy fixed with a strong border force.
From this we can derive the values of the self-centred, the scared, the ignorant. Jobs are needed to make food and smartphones affordable. Fighter jets and submarines are a crucial part of protecting the Great Australian Moat, the money we can make today we can save for a rainy (that is, really, really sunny) day.

And, I mean, there’s some problematic media issues driving these values as well, but all the most successful news outlets prosper when they tell the majority what they already want to hear.

And that’s why I think people vote for nationalistic, populist parties and outcomes from the privacy of their voting booths. Partly fear, partly ignorance, mostly the delusion of self-preservation.

You might think, Brad, surely you’d want to vote for the Liberal-National Coalition too? I am well paid, in a white-collar job. I own property. I’m more likely at the moment to receive franking credits than welfare. I won’t have children that need child-care payments, or fresh food and clean water for their own children.

Maybe I’m an idiot.

Maybe I want to believe that humans can, with the right amount of social support, in a country and world where education standards are higher, health outcomes are better, and where incomes allow for people to be smarter, less overworked, less exhausted, less hopeless, ascend beyond basic human instincts.

Maybe I'm a tight arse who doesn't want to pay a premium for second-rate Weet Bix and yogurt fifty years from now.

Maybe I’m too invested in the idea of humans eventually cracking faster than light travel, and cellular regeneration, and clean energy, and being able to digest alien rum and process alien rock and roll.

That’s why I voted Green, and why I started drinking last night before the vote count even started.