Luke Malpass

Sometimes you feel fortunate to live in New Zealand. The lucky country next door has been ravaged by appalling fires in New South Wales and Victoria. Right behind that has been Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s inept handling of the situation.

It should have been a political commander-inchief moment for Morrison: surveying the damage, sending in the army and coughing up $2 billion for the Bushfire Recovery Agency. Instead he somehow stumbled from a poorly judged holiday in Hawaii, to fire victims not wanting to shake his hand and arguments with the states.

In a way, you have to feel sorry for Morrison. Unlike New Zealand, the Australian Federal Government doesn’t have direct control over emergency services.

And he isn’t responsible for the climate change that appears to be underlying the increased severity and frequency of the fires. You could be forgiven for thinking he was to blame for both.

But what much of the anger does hint at is a very Australian impulse: about fair shares. And the fact that the Australian Commonwealth is not seen to be doing its fair share to combat climate change. Or even particularly trying.

In 2019 Morrison ran an election campaign explicitly prioritising Budget surpluses and cost of living over climate, propped up by high iron ore and coal prices. While some of the coverage has been hyperbolic, if the election were held today, many Sydney-siders driving around in ashcovered cars may feel differently.

Such are the febrile politics of climate, the mere fact of Jacinda Ardern being in Queensland for a holiday, saw her get slammed by a Sydney radio shock jock.

Morrison’s problem is that he came to power at the end of a decade of abject and bipartisan policy failure on climate change. Coal generates about three quarters of Australia’s power, making the retail politics of climate hard: any attempt to price carbon emission means a direct hit to household power bills. That makes scare campaigns easier than here.

Australia is also an export coal superpower. Threats to coal production become about blue collar jobs and export dollars – a political nettle that Australian Labor, led by the unpopular Bill Shorten, woefully failed to grasp in the election.

Climate change policy has effectively brought down every Australian prime minister and Opposition leader since John Howard in 2007 and Australia now has both high emissions and high power prices: quite a feat.

New Zealand has a serious political advantage. The Emissions Trading Scheme introduced by former PM Helen Clark (through which the market sets the price of emissions within government-mandated rules) was retained by the Nats and ramped up again by the current Government. The Zero Carbon Bill passed with bipartisan support.

While there are differences in speed and priority, all major political parties more or less agree on the framework to tackle the problem.

So while the next Australian election will undoubtedly again be fought on climate, later this year in New Zealand it will likely not be. There will continue to be legitimate debate over timing, details and costs of climate policy, but the climate culture wars that have consumed Australian politics – where climate and living standards are effectively set up as a zero sum game – will thankfully be avoided.

You could be forgiven for thinking Scott Morrison was to blame for climate change and the fires.