A preference for green

A preference for green

So long as it doesn’t cost too much

Relief from the big dry

AUSTRALIANS LIVE CLOSE to nature. Not on the face of things, it’s true: since three-quarters of them inhabit cities of over 100,000 people, they would seem to be well insulated from their natural surroundings. Most have probably never seen a koala or a platypus outside the zoo; many won’t often come across a kangaroo. But for Sydneysiders, say, the chances of meeting a venomous snake or even a deadly spider are not trivial. And above all, literally, is the weather, benign and beautiful much of the time, but often by turns scorching, soaking, dehydrating, burning, blowing, parching, cyclonic, cancer-causing and generally destructive.

Watch our video-guide to Australia's past, present and future, or listen to an interviewwith the author of this Special Report

That may be one reason why Australians seem especially concerned about the environment. Another, if they are informed, is their awareness that one of their finest natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef, is under threat from pollution, overfishing and the warming of the sea; to Australians the reef is a source of pride, not to mention $5 billion a year from tourists. Indeed, many parts of the natural world are under threat in Australia. About 40 animal species, it is said, have disappeared there in the past 500 years, and hundreds more are vulnerable.

That is partly because Australia is an ancient continent with all sorts of ancient creatures. Some of the microbes that built the strange rock-like structures of Shark Bay in Western Australia, for instance, trace their genes back 1.9 billion years, though the structures themselves, called stromatolites, go back only 2,000 or 3,000 years. As an old continent, Australia has fragile soil, which the country’s indigenous animals treat with respect, preferring on the whole to bounce on it rather than to stomp. The sheep, horses, goats and pigs brought by Europeans, however, have hard hooves, which compress the thin soil and cause erosion. Some of the beasts that have been introduced, such as foxes, eat the native species, or their food, and many imported plants prove invasive and overwhelm the locals.

To many Australians, these droughts and storms seem to have become more frequent and violent, and some people are inclined to blame global warming. Insurers are worried, and farmers wonder whether they may need new crops if the climate really is changing. State governments have already built long-term drought into some of their calculations, for instance, by building desalination plants to provide fresh water. Every state capital except Hobart now has at least one, at huge cost.And then there is the climate. No one knows whether it is really changing or, if so, whether man is playing a part. Australia has more than its share of climate-change sceptics, and they can point to the many droughts, cyclones and floods that have afflicted the country for centuries. Indisputably, though, these visitations do much more damage than before, because they affect more people and more man-made creations. The floods that inundated towns, ports, railways and coal mines last December and January may have cost the economy about $13 billion, it was said in January, and that was before Cyclone Yasi swept through, adding another $800m to the bill. The government has said it will spend $5.6 billion to help repair the damage, of which $1.8 billion will come from a levy on higher-earning taxpayers.

Yet another reason for being green is that Australia is not. When it comes to producing greenhouse gases it is almost in a class by itself: only the United Arab Emirates gives off more per person. Three-quarters of the emissions come from producing and using energy, especially electricity, which is largely generated from coal, much of it dirty, brown lignite. Coal is plentiful and therefore cheap, which helps to explain why Australia is prosperous. But many Australians feel vulnerable to climate change and think they need a carbon policy.

A sensible one would raise the price of coal-fired generation enough to make cleaner, plentiful natural gas an economic alternative. Australia will soon require more electricity, but no one wants to invest in new plants, or indeed other forms of energy, without knowing whether or how much carbon will be taxed. Both the main parties have at times accepted the need for cuts in emissions, and the current government has committed Australia to reduce its carbon pollution to 5%, maybe more, below 2000 levels by 2020. Since an increasingly resource-based economy will produce ever more emissions, even 5% would be a bigger cut than it looks, though the Greens want 25%.

The topic is fraught. On becoming prime minister in 2007, Mr Rudd, who had in opposition called climate change “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time”, ratified the Kyoto protocol (disdained by Mr Howard) as his first official act, and put a trading scheme for carbon emissions before parliament. In the face of falling polls and rising opposition, however, he abruptly dropped it. His successor, Ms Gillard, having vowed during the 2010 election campaign that there would be “no carbon tax under the government I lead”, has now said she will introduce one. Her plan is to fix a price for carbon for three to five years, after which a trading scheme will take over. The details remain to be settled, but the idea is that transport, energy and industry will be included, though farming will not.

Whether it will ever come about is uncertain. The Liberal Party, under its previous leader, Malcolm Turnbull, supported a trading scheme, but that support cost him his job. The man who got it, Tony Abbott, had also once been a backer of such a scheme, but then decided it was a “great big tax on everything”. He is now adamantly opposed, knowing that many in his party are climate-change sceptics and sensing votes from those who would be hit by a carbon tax. What he himself believes is unclear: he has declared the science to be “crap”, but even so vowed last year to spend $3.2 billion over four years to secure emissions cuts. The fate of the scheme may lie with the Greens, who help keep Ms Gillard’s minority government in power. In 2009 they voted against Mr Rudd’s scheme, saying it was too feeble. They may find this one no better, yet to reject it would be to invite charges of irresponsibility.

Droughts and flooding rains

If carbon emissions are the new worry for Australians, water is the old one. For millennia, the country has been shaped by water, or the lack of it. Some 85% of the population live within 50km of the coast, largely because no rivers run reliably in the middle of the continent. No wonder that for the homesick poet, Dorothea Mackellar, her homeland was “a sunburnt country,/A land of sweeping plains,/Of ragged mountain ranges,/Of droughts and flooding rains.” Not long before she wrote those lines, a century ago, drought had been one of the factors bringing the states to federation. Water nearly put a stop to the talks.

The issue then was the allocation of water in the Murray-Darling basin. This is the swathe from Queensland down through New South Wales and Victoria to South Australia where 65% of the country’s irrigated farms produce 40% of its agricultural output, all watered by the Murray and Darling rivers or their tributaries. The rivers satisfy the thirst not just of the 10% of the population who live in this basin, but also of many town-dwellers and farmers outside it; the city of Adelaide, for example, depends on the Murray for about 40% of its water. But the slow-moving Darling is often dry, and sometimes even the perkier Murray does not reach the sea. The ensuing influx of salt water at its mouth has troubled South Australians ever since 1887.

Down under down under

Now the main worry is the health of the river. For the past two years water has flowed in plenty; torrents have surged down riverbeds that had been dry for years, flushing out accumulations of salt and detritus. Birds have returned to nesting places unvisited for years; plants and trees have blossomed and flourished. But the ten years of drought before this efflorescence followed a huge expansion of irrigation in the 1970s and 1980s that reduced the flow of the Murray to a trickle. South Australia, with the least rainfall and at the end of the line, had been hit hardest, and began trading water allocations in the 1980s. The practice caught on elsewhere, helping the farmers of the basin to get through the recent long drought using far less water than before yet with no reduction in output. Their example is held up to would-be water traders all over the world.

The trouble is that, though the farmers got through the drought all right, the environment did not, certainly not in the southern part of the basin where so little rain fell. The flow of the river, made constant by careful management to please consumers, did not suit the handsome river red gum trees along its banks, which thrive on drought and flood. And despite dredging, salinity was becoming a problem. Many feared it would soon become impossible to hold back the sea.

In 2007, however, the Howard government passed an act that allowed it to muscle in on water management in the Murray-Darling basin, constitutionally a state responsibility. A set of proposals is now in the making that would reduce the extraction of water available for consumers by up to a third. As with the carbon scheme, the outcome is in doubt. Water users along the line of the river are protesting furiously. But the fuss is probably overdone. The lesson of Australia’s water management is that there is enough water to go round. No one likes paying for it but, in places of shortest supply, where they pay most, people use it carefully. In Victoria much irrigation is inefficient. Parts of New South Wales could also adopt less wasteful methods. But arid Adelaide recycles over 30% of its water, and to its south, the vineyards of McLaren Vale are irrigated with the city’s waste water. Australia has produced some of its biggest agricultural crops in times of greatest drought. It should be capable of sharing the water so that human beings, animals and plants all have enough.

If water is mainly a problem for people in the country, it does not mean that city-dwellers are unconcerned about their surroundings. People in the main cities now have enough water, thanks to desalination, though they still have to pay for it. And they have other concerns. The poor state of public transport and infrastructure generally played a large part in the ejection of Labor governments in New South Wales in March and in Victoria last November. The price of housing is another political issue, reflecting the pressure of rising numbers of people in the state capitals, where migrants make up about a third of the population. Increasingly, though, Australians want new buildings to be green.

Melbourne has led the way. Its City Council House 2, with windows that open at night to take in air that cools the interior by day, was the first public building in Australia to get a six-star green rating. Like other buildings, it has been designed as part of an effort to create a good street, which it is hoped will make a good city. In Melbourne that also means good lanes, arcades and frontages, many of which were built in the 19th century and had fallen into decrepitude. They have now been restored, helping to lure people back to the centre. The city’s planners believe Melbourne’s population will more than double from its current 4m to 8m by 2050. Rob Adams, the director of city design, thinks this could be accommodated using only 7½% of the land within the existing metropolitan area. But it would mean, if not a city of high-rise living, then buildings of several storeys.

Admiral Arthur Phillip, the man who brought the First Fleet into Sydney Harbour in 1788, ended his days tumbling out of an upstairs window in England. It would never have happened if he had stayed in Australia, for Australia is still the land of the bungalow. That’s the way people like to live, and why they say Sydney, Australia’s most crowded city, is already full up. Yet its population density is lower than that of Los Angeles. If they really mean to be green, Aussies will have to start going upstairs.