The New Liberals (who will have to campaign as just TNL in the forthcoming election) have just published its climate change policy:
https://www.thenewliberals.net.au/wp-content/uploads/policies/TNL_CC_policy-Final_Version.pdf
This was the final input I was waiting for before launching the website for my campaign to be elected to Australia’s Senate:
https://www.keenforthesenate.com/
As I was finishing it, the skies opened on my home town of Sydney. Coastal suburbs in this coastal city are now under water: in particular, the beachside suburb of Manly has flooded. Manly is one of Sydney’s two iconic surfing beaches (the other is Bondi Beach, on the other side of the Harbour). The independent Member of Parliament for this seat, Zali Steggall, posted the photo below of a flooded street in Manly.
Zali has wrongly labelled this as on The Corso—it’s actually on Central Avenue, which runs off The Corso on its northern side—but it makes precious little difference. You could imagine these streets being affected by a King Tide or rising seawater, but by rainfall? It’s less than 600 metres from Sydney Harbour to the Pacific Ocean by The Corso (and less than 200 metres to the sand from the photo above). The whole region is definitely less than five metres above sea level—from memory, I’d guess that it’s about 3 metres above high tide. There’s a ludicrous capacity for water to run-off into the ocean on either side of this region. And yet it is inundated by rainwater today (and stormwater runoff), not sea water.
This one-off localized event is not a one-off localized event: rainfall for all of Sydney is quite literally off the charts, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. The rain that has fallen in the first two and a half months of this year is not far short of the annual average.
Nothing like this has happened in the history of the European invasion of Australia, and it’s probable that nothing like it has happened in the history of human inhabitation of Australia either.
I’ll substantiate that claim in a later post: the key point for today is that this was not normal, but this volatility in the weather is the normal we face, if we continue to pump Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere.
It’s time that our political decisions were made by people who understand this, rather than deny it.