Page 3376 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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campaign for a right to a healthy environment. This is why we campaign for all of our environmental protection and our climate protection measures.
I want to pause for a moment and talk about art and climate change. I think this probably touches a lot of people in different ways. Most of us have seen it. We are kind of awash in apocalyptic fiction at the moment. We have all seen it on TV and in movies. I was recently at the second National Capital Art Prize, and almost all of the artwork there was about environmental collapse. This is what happens. I think a lot of artists get asked why they choose the topic they choose. I often see people a bit puzzled when they are asked that question. I think most artists have a similar motivation. It is quite easy to make out. You just open up a vein and bleed on the page. You are projecting what is in you and what is all around you. So the reason we are awash in all of this apocalyptic environmental disaster at the moment is that that is what we are thinking about. That is what we are literally breathing in at different points.
I am part of that movement. I wrote rom-zom-com once. I thought I would put a bit of humour in there, because it is quite difficult to deal with otherwise, and it was a lot of fun writing that book. It was girl meets boy, girl loses boy, zombies attack. You have probably seen the same sort of story quite a lot! I remember doing interviews at the time, with media asking me: “Why zombies? Why are there so many zombies around?” It seemed so obvious to me: armies of mindless consumers destroying everything good. This is the world that a lot of us feel like we are living in and feel like we are trapped in.
There is a lot of fear and anxiety there. It is real, it is genuine and it is completely and utterly rational—an absolutely rational response to what is going on around us. But the problem with fear is that it is quite paralysing. I think we all understand now that there are few different human responses to threats—fight/flight/freeze. I sort of feel like Australia has been frozen for a couple of decades and it is really, really, unhelpful.
I take hope from the fact that we are not frozen on other environmental disasters. With the hole in the ozone layer, leaded petrol and lot of things, we did not politicise it; we just leapt in and fixed them. I think we are finally getting there now. I think it is really, really good to think about the action that we are taking and the action that we can take. It is much more helpful, as a response, than fear and anxiety.
Here in the ACT we have done a lot. We have a plan to get off fossil fuel gas. That is amazing. We are the first in Australia to do that. I hope everybody else is going to follow us. I hope the federal government is going to follow us. That is fantastic. We have a plan to electrify our transport. It is so good to see that plan.
We are capable of change really, really fast as a society. I am a new politician. I campaigned in 2020, and both of those policies—getting off fossil fuel gas and getting on to EVs—were labelled as crazy Greens policies. I have heard people in here dissent to them and label them crazy Greens policies. Now they are mainstream. They are simply getting on with it. This is what climate action looks like. It is a whole collection of decisions that you make that are sensible decisions, and you make them every day.
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