{"id":175277,"date":"2025-06-11T09:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T09:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/175277\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T09:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T09:21:08","slug":"parts-of-australia-are-suffering-another-devastating-drought-but-you-wouldnt-know-it-in-the-cities-van-badham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/175277\/","title":{"rendered":"Parts of Australia are suffering another devastating drought, but you wouldn\u2019t know it in the cities | Van Badham"},"content":{"rendered":"

We got some rain in rural Victoria over the weekend, and that\u2019s headline-worthy news<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a record-breaking drought that\u2019s been afflicting the states of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and parts of New South Wales for over a year, but depending where you live \u2013 and how you get your news \u2013 you may not know much about it.<\/p>\n

This represents a problem Australia desperately needs to confront.<\/p>\n

ABC radio\u2019s Victorian Country Hour has been touring towns across the state<\/a>, collecting stories from areas that were previously some of the richest farmland in Australia, recording the ongoing impacts \u2013 material, financial, social, psychological \u2013 on communities.<\/p>\n

The weekend\u2019s rain will help refill some dams, but the winter cold means it won\u2019t replenish pastures where it\u2019s needed for animal feed: an unprecedented \u201cfodder drought<\/a>\u201d continues.<\/p>\n

Australia is predisposed to droughts. Even so, the ABC has quoted<\/a> the Colac-based Dairy Farmers Victoria president, Mark Billing, explaining: \u201cThis is not a normal year.\u201d He\u2019s right: in parts of southern Australia, rainfall data\u2019s shown totals at near-lowest or lowest levels since record-keeping began.<\/p>\n

Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton\u2019s Clear Air column as a free newsletter<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Australian farmers have adapted their agricultural methods and listened to science to prepare for unpredictable conditions, but no one was prepared for this. Now, 18 months after farmers began trucking water and hand-feeding their animals, stockpiled feed is running out. Shipping in more pressures the farmer to front the capital for its purchase \u2013 a burden that\u2019s pushed many to sell off animals<\/a> and sell off land. The bush telegraph in rural communities like mine has been relaying stories of abattoirs so full with the unsustainable stock that some farmers are left with animals that will simply \u2013 pointlessly \u2013 have to die.<\/p>\n

No one needs me to tell them climate change is making droughts worse. But as a nation dependent on local agriculture to feed itself, what we need to work out is how a crisis with such dire implications is barely on the mental register of a city like Melbourne \u2013 with 5 million inhabitants and a mere two hours\u2019 drive from Colac \u2013 because despite the severity, despite state government emergency measures<\/a> \u2013 it just isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Depending on which corners of the internet you hang out in, the drought gets scant mention even in the outrage towards federal environment minister Murray Watt\u2019s provisional approval of a 45-year life extension for Woodside\u2019s North West Shelf gas mega-project in Western Australia. My colleague Adam Morton and some others have made the obvious connection<\/a>, and excoriated a project the Australia Institute calculates will generate 4.3bn tonnes of emissions<\/a> \u201cwith no proposal for abatement at all\u201d.<\/p>\n

But others did not. Which provokes an equal and opposite question: why aren\u2019t climate-hit farmers bullrushing Watt\u2019s office themselves?<\/p>\n

A recent Peter Lewis piece reminds<\/a> how recent rollouts of renewable energy \u201cran the real risk of being sidelined by a lack of community social licence<\/a>\u201d. I can vouch \u201cStop AusNet\u2019s towers\u201d corflutes still hang in our town.<\/p>\n

As we try to get our heads around the reality of climate change, the largest obstacle to meaningful action appears to be the siloing of stakeholder communities. If droughts are invisible to city slickers, why should any farming community believe transmission lines are anything but an eyesore?<\/p>\n

When it comes to environmental policy, gaining \u201csocial licence\u201d is an omnidirectional struggle \u2013 not because rural communities are climate deniers or that climate activists are self-appointed moralisers or even that governments steamroll communities into policy decisions. An overwhelming majority of Australians believe in climate change<\/a>, but evidence suggests communities are no longer holding different opinions so much as they are holding completely different conversations, and I suspect the pick-and-mix, choose-your-news nature of modern media<\/a> may be contributing to a terrifying problem at the worst possible time.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s no common framework, there can be no consensus commitments.<\/p>\n

Woodside\u2019s proposed North West Shelf expansion represents an unacceptable climate risk in an Australia where dairy farms are drying out already \u2013 and the Albanese government, which has pushed so hard on renewables infrastructure, batteries and EVs from its first term, obviously knows this.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to Clear Air Australia<\/p>\n

Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

The unique \u201ctawny horror\u201d experienced by the red-tinged-with-green Labor-voting environmentalist lies in being disgusted by the environmental consequence of a Labor decision while understanding precisely why it was made.<\/p>\n

Absolutely, Australia must reform its environmental protection laws to add climate considerations<\/a>, but if we\u2019re to achieve imperative energy and sustainability transitions in the wake of Albanese\u2019s election win \u201cfor stability against the chaos of Dutton\u201d, as Lewis writes, that will not come through unilateral, command-and-control antics. At the other end of the political spectrum, that\u2019s what Trump\u2019s doing. Going fast and breaking things results in a lot of broken things \u2013 a situation Australians find electorally unpalatable.<\/p>\n

The alternative obliged here is a nuanced, national conversation shared by the breadth of the electorate. When it comes to projects like the North West Shelf, there is a pressing need for the government to move on environmental protection reforms, but it can\u2019t do it without all communities contributing to a shared conversation about risks and trade-offs.<\/p>\n

At the same time mounting environmental risks are causing increasingly lethal chaos, everyone has to understand where tens of thousands of jobs will be lost, what energy transitions do to investment returns and tax revenue, as well as our energy security relationships with importers like Japan and South Korea.<\/p>\n

Complaints are not solutions. Plans are.<\/p>\n

Where and how <\/strong>that honest community conversation takes place is now the challenge. It demands a cultural humility the internet is unlikely to encourage. Overcoming the silos between rural experience, urban attention and the policy bunkers of government is hard, but it has to happen.<\/p>\n

We once valued the ABC as the instrument for this kind of national discussion, but as the broadcaster sheds shared forums like The Drum and Q+A, we\u2019re staring down the reality of environmental disaster understood as niche programming.<\/p>\n

If a devastating drought only a couple of hours away has become unimaginable, perhaps the faraway place called the future has already become impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We got some rain in rural Victoria over the weekend, and that\u2019s headline-worthy news. There\u2019s been a record-breaking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-175277","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114664000543785279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}