◆ CLIMATE EMERGENCY Image: Australian landscape scarred by bushfire. Terri Sharp/pixabay
Unions must declare a climate emergency Finn Bryson, University of Sydney Union Summer intern, NTEU NSW Division
Safe as Houses: Climate change & the Australian Dream cont. ...continued from previous page which to hedge the uncertainties of the future and keep the strange at bay, even the strangeness of a changing world and a changing climate. Unfortunately, the stranger that now takes the form of 'strange weather' is no longer so obedient to the whims of 'our will' or to the boundaries of private ownership, nor does it respect the unambiguous records on the register of Torrens title.
Failure of leadership Yet what is tragically ironic is that over recent decades the Australian Government has been asking more and more from citizens and their privately-owned homes at precisely the time when it should consider other solutions, other alternatives. At all levels of governance, the home has come to be the site where practices of self-reliance and self-sufficiency can be most effectively developed, demonstrated and encouraged. Home ownership, an investment portfolio, and the steady acquisition of housing assets are now overwhelmingly viewed as necessary elements of the individualised risk management that must be developed in the face of employment insecurity,
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precarity and the perceived unreliability (or indeed failure) of government-funded systems and social welfare services.
for the entanglements of the man-made and natural that are at the heart of a changing climate and its consequences.
Citizens are exhorted to recycle, to install solar panels and to make their homes energy and environmentally sustainable. However, a handful of large fossil fuel-based power companies still control the national grid, and even as more and more homes invest in solar panels and battery storage systems to make the energy transformation, the promise of being rewarded for feeding into the grid is being rapidly whittled away by the reduction in tariff payments and eclipsed by the risks of energy supply being increasingly borne by the home.
Losing a home in a bushfire is a traumatic event, a devastating emotional loss that will always exceed the enormity of the material devastation that is left behind, the physical wreckage and rubble that mark the event. Those dwellers who come back to the ruins, to fossick, to salvage and to mourn, return to a place that is unrecognisable as 'home'.
The home, now more than ever, may be called on to absorb risk, to provide a refuge from the vicissitudes of the environment, the turbulence of the climate, and the uncertainties of the future, when what is needed is the very reversal of an interior space closed to the dangers of 'outside'. The clear-cut divisions of modernity fail to make any sense nowadays, and will only continue to do so. Even the idea of a 'natural disaster' remains woefully inadequate as a term of description
ADVOCATE VOL. 27 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2020
Perhaps at a time of climate emergencies such as the recent bushfire crisis it is paramount for us all to develop new concepts of dwelling and to forge new connections between climate, the environment and home. It is a cliché that new life rises from ruins. But as Schlunke argues, 'With the ruin one can see the ruination of a Western (and a very Australian) ideal of conquering space with location'. In its place may emerge a more open, less defensive understanding of home as an extension of the environment rather than its limit. ◆ Dr Fiona Allon, University of Sydney
