Left On The Rocks

As the political wind changes direction in response to COVID-19, the left is looking increasingly lost and meaningless. Will it learn from its mistakes, or double down? By Nick Cater.

The anniversary of the first global climate change strike was barely noticed last week by a world that has a more compelling reason to be concerned.

In March last year, GetUp emailed its supporters “Subject: Running out of time to save the world”, reminding them they were 10 weeks from an election that would be curtains for the Morrison government.

“We’ve got an ambitious plan to take out every climate-denier and climate-delayer in our parliament,” the message read. “Pledge to volunteer now.”

With the election lost and the angry bushfire summer behind us, the circus has moved on, leaving burnt-out towns and businesses to fend for themselves.

The business model of climate alarmism has been superseded by the coronavirus, a far more virulent cause of modernity anxiety than a slowly warming planet. “Call that a knife?” Crocodile Dundee might ask. This is a knife.

This is nature in the raw, exposing human complacency, mocking our failure to take precautions and punishing our failure to ­imagine the limits to globalised growth.

No one, not even our tunnel-­visioned friends at the ABC, has managed to bracket COVID-19 with climate change. Like all of us, however, they have spotted the link between the pandemic and probable recession and have a ­sufficient grasp of economics to know it is looking bad.

Some in the ABC may have been a little slow off the mark, as Gerard Henderson noted on these pages on Saturday, but in recent weeks they’ve been talking about little else.

Which was great news for Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who seized the opportunity to abandon the state’s moratorium on conventional gas extraction safe in the knowledge that the ABC would be too distracted to blowtorch his backside.

The significance of his U-turn should not be overlooked. In 2017, he went to a state election in lock-step with the Greens. He argued, fancifully, there was no gas worth drilling. “Experts ­— geologists and others — their position as it stands today is that there is no proven or probable onshore reserves,” he told the ABC’s Insiders, surprising even Barrie Cassidy.

The novel theory that the Gippsland and Otway gas basins stopped some way short of the coast was destroyed this month by the Geological Survey of Victoria, which reported the gas reserves extended under much of Victoria, just as we always thought. Up to 830 petajoules of the stuff could be extracted by conventional drilling, it said, creating jobs and bringing energy prices down.

Andrews, having yet to fully overcome his addiction to lost causes, still opposes fracking, the 73-year-old technology that has revolutionised gas extraction in the US without mishap and is pricing coal out of the market for electricity generation.

“In the radically changed circumstances we now face, there will be little, if any, virtue to seek from advocating reduced economic activity”

Like a reformed alcoholic, however, he should not be discouraged from staring down his habit one day at a time.

The realisation that gas is the enabler of renewable energy, not its enemy, will eventually bring the mainstream left around to fracking, just as it lost the will to fight genetically modified crops.

The corona-crunch will not stop the transition to a lower-emission economy and certainly won’t reverse it. It will, however, restore some sanity to the debate as the centre-left is belted by ­reality, as Andrews was last week, and the climate emergency argument looks more like a ludicrous overreaction.

The green left should be delighted the chances of smashing our 2030 Paris emissions reduction target will be much improved by an economic slowdown. This was never really about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, however, it was about eliminating capitalism.

In the radically changed circumstances we now face, there will be little, if any, virtue to seek from advocating reduced economic activity. The left will campaign, instead, for wealth to be redistributed in favour of those whose livelihoods have been stolen and who have been robbed of the hope that flourishes in an ­expanding economy.

Centre-left politicians who set their principles by the weather vane will shift to the more pragmatic policies on climate and ­energy that their more sensible colleagues have been advocating for some time.

The differences between the mainstream parties will narrow.

The Marxist left, on the other hand, will return to more conventional ways of fighting capitalism, convinced that the economic downturn is evidence that free markets fail.

The mercenary left, including organisations such as GetUp that measure their success by the size of the donations they attract, has already switched track.

After offering some cursory words of sympathy to those suffering from the virus, it has turned to attacking the capitalist landlord class and their top-hatted banker mates.

It has called for the elimination of rental evictions and mortgage foreclosures, the provision of emergency shelter and urgent investments in social housing.

“This moment is really scary,” GetUp wrote. “But it’s also a ­moment for action. The reason so many of us have been fighting all these years is because we knew the system was broken, and we saw the cracks widening.”

Standby for Keynesianism-on-steroids Millennials to fall for the mistaken argument that has delayed the recovery from almost every recession since the 1930s.

Their solution to rising joblessness and increasing hardship will be to cut a shrinking pie into ever smaller pieces and campaign on the inequalities of wealth.

The youthful followers of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain surprised those who thought socialism had done its dash. Both men might be leading their respective nations if the right to vote was limited to those under 35.

The large-scale intervention by the government to support the economy while the virus passes is a necessary, temporary measure. The instinct of the left will be to ­double it and then ensure it becomes permanent.

As GetUp concludes, somewhat ominously: “This is a chance to rewrite the rules, for good.”