NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Premium
Home / World

Australia's 'climate election' finally arrived. Will it be enough?

By Damien Cave
New York Times·
23 May, 2022 08:46 PM7 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

    Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Anthony Albanese, Australia's next prime minister, celebrating his victory on Saturday with his partner, Jodie Haydon, and his son, Nathan Albanese. Photo / AP

Anthony Albanese, Australia's next prime minister, celebrating his victory on Saturday with his partner, Jodie Haydon, and his son, Nathan Albanese. Photo / AP

Voters rejected the deny-and-delay approach that has made Australia a global laggard on emission cuts. But how far the new government will go remains to be seen.

A few minutes after taking the stage to declare victory in Australia's election Saturday, Anthony Albanese, the incoming Labor prime minister, promised to transform climate change from a source of political conflict into a generator of economic growth.

"Together we can end the climate wars," he told his supporters, who cheered for several seconds. "Together we can take advantage of the opportunity for Australia to be a renewable energy superpower."

With that comment and his win — along with a surge of votes for candidates outside the two-party system who made combating global warming a priority — the likelihood of a significant shift in Australia's climate policy has suddenly increased.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

How far the country goes will depend on the final tallies, which are still being counted. But for voters, activists and scientists who spent years in despair, lamenting the fossil fuel industry's hold on the conservatives who have run Australia for most of the past three decades, Saturday's results amount to an extraordinary reversal.

A country known as a global climate laggard, with minimal 2030 targets for cuts to carbon emissions, has finally tossed aside a deny-and-delay approach to climate change that most Australians, in polls, have said they no longer want.

"This is the long-overdue climate election Australia has been waiting for," said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University. "It was a defining moment in our nation's history."

Yet it remains to be seen whether the factors that led to that shift can be as powerful and persuasive as the countervailing forces that are so entrenched.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
The Abbot Point coal terminal in Queensland. Australia spends billions each year on subsidies for fossil fuel industries. Photo / David Maurice Smith, The New York Times
The Abbot Point coal terminal in Queensland. Australia spends billions each year on subsidies for fossil fuel industries. Photo / David Maurice Smith, The New York Times

In Australia, as in the United States, ending or altering many decades' worth of traditional energy habits will be difficult.

In the last fiscal year alone, Australian federal, state and territory governments provided about 11.6 billion Australian dollars ($12.7 billion) worth of subsidies to coal and other fossil fuel industries.

An additional 55.3 billion Australian dollars ($60.7 billion) has been committed to subsidising gas and oil extraction, coal-fired power, coal railways, ports and carbon capture and storage (even though most carbon capture projects fail).

As Gergis pointed out in a recent essay, "That is 10 times more than the Emergency Response Fund, and over 50 times the budget of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency."

In other words, Australia still spends far more money to bolster the companies causing the planet to warm than it does helping people deal with the costs tied to the greenhouse gases they emit.

Over the past few years, there has been a buildup in renewable energy investment, too, but nothing on the same scale. And during the campaign, Albanese's Labor party tried to avoid directly tackling that mismatch.

Labor supporters in Sydney on Saturday. Albanese will face pressure to do more to cut emissions. Photo / AP
Labor supporters in Sydney on Saturday. Albanese will face pressure to do more to cut emissions. Photo / AP

On Election Day in Singleton, a bustling town in northwest New South Wales, where more than 20 per cent of residents work in mining, Labor banners reading "Send a miner to Canberra" hung next to signs from the National Party, part of the departing conservative coalition, that read "Protect local mining jobs." And both parties' candidates were upbeat about the region's mining future.

"While people are buying our coal we'll definitely be selling it," said Dan Repacholi, a former miner who won the seat for Labor.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

The coal mining industry is thriving in the area, but so is private investment in renewables, especially hydrogen. "We're going to have a massive boom here through both of those industries going up and up and up," Repacholi said.

During the campaign, Albanese positioned himself as a "both-and" candidate, pledging support for new coal mines as well as renewables — in large part, to hold on to blue-collar areas like Singleton.

But now he will face a lot of pressure to go further on climate, faster.

The great swing against the conservative coalition Saturday included a groundswell for the Australian Greens, who could end up being needed by Labor to form a minority government.

Adam Bandt, the Greens' leader, has said that a ban on new coal and gas projects would be the party's top priority in any power-sharing agreement.

Several new independent lawmakers, who campaigned on demands for Australia to increase its 2030 target for carbon emission cuts to 60 per cent below 2005 levels — far beyond Labor's 43 per cent commitment — will also be pressuring Albanese and his opposition.

"Both sides of politics are going to have to reorient themselves," said Saul Griffith, an energy policy expert who advocates policies that would make it easier for people to power their cars and heat their homes with electricity. "This is a very clear message on climate."

More than one in four homes in Australia now have solar panels, more than in any other major economy. Photo / Faye Sakura, The New York Times
More than one in four homes in Australia now have solar panels, more than in any other major economy. Photo / Faye Sakura, The New York Times

Like many other experts, Griffith said he was not particularly interested in bold official promises to end coal mining, which he expects to fade on its own through economic pressure.

New gas projects present a bigger problem. An immense extraction effort being planned for the gas fields of the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory could produce enough carbon emissions to destroy any hope of Australia's meeting reduction targets on par with those of other developed nations.

Climate action advocates are mostly hoping to start with legislation like the bill introduced by Zali Steggall, an independent, which would set up a framework for setting stricter emissions targets and working toward them through rigorous science and research.

Robyn Eckersley, an expert on the politics of climate change at the University of Melbourne, warned that Labor, the Greens and independents needed to "play a long game," keeping in mind that a carbon tax caused a backlash that set Australian climate policy back by nearly a decade.

New South Wales in January 2020. Australia has yet to recover fully from that year's record-breaking bush fires. Photo / Matthew Abbott, The New York Times
New South Wales in January 2020. Australia has yet to recover fully from that year's record-breaking bush fires. Photo / Matthew Abbott, The New York Times

Fixating on a single number or a single idea, she said, would impede progress and momentum.

"It's important to get something in and build a consensus around it," Eckersley said. "Having debates about how to improve it is better than swinging back and forth between something and nothing."

Griffith said Australia had a shot at becoming a global model for the energy transition that climate change requires by leveraging its record-breaking uptake of rooftop solar. More than 1 in 4 homes in Australia now have solar panels, outpacing every other major economy; they provide electricity for about one-fifth of what it costs through the traditional grid.

"The real action on climate has got to be community-led," Griffith said. He argued that the election results were encouraging because they showed the issue resonating with a wider range of the electorate.

"It's a less divisive set of politics; it's coming from the centre," he said. "It's a middle-class uprising, and so the climate action isn't as partisan."

Sadly, it has taken a lot of suffering to get there. Australia has yet to recover fully from the record-breaking bush fires of 2020, which were followed by two years of widespread flooding.

The Great Barrier Reef also just experienced its sixth year of bleaching — disturbingly, the first during a La Niña climate pattern, when cooler temperatures typically prevent overheating.

"People no longer need to use their imaginations to try and understand what climate change looks like in this country," Gergis said. "Australians have been living the consequences of inaction."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.


Written by: Damien Cave
Photographs by: David Maurice Smith, Faye Sakura and Matthew Abbott
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Save

    Share this article

    Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Latest from World

World

'Robbed of all dignity': UK postman jailed for gruesome murder

Premium
World

JFK assassination: Files reveal CIA secrets, but experts say there's more

World

'Truly historic': King Charles to host Donald Trump for second state visit


Sponsored

Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from World

'Robbed of all dignity': UK postman jailed for gruesome murder
World

'Robbed of all dignity': UK postman jailed for gruesome murder

He texted his girlfriend's mother, pretending she was alive, after the murder.

15 Jul 01:04 AM
Premium
Premium
JFK assassination: Files reveal CIA secrets, but experts say there's more
World

JFK assassination: Files reveal CIA secrets, but experts say there's more

15 Jul 12:20 AM
'Truly historic': King Charles to host Donald Trump for second state visit
World

'Truly historic': King Charles to host Donald Trump for second state visit

15 Jul 12:03 AM


Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky
Sponsored

Solar bat monitors uncover secrets of Auckland’s night sky

06 Jul 09:47 PM
NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP