by Madhumita Mukherjee

2019

TENSIONOverTIME

TW: Murder, racism, sexual assault & police brutality

Written by Ruby Hartley

Greta Thunberg rises to prominence with her weekly strikes for climate action. She spurs the climate crisis movement to transcend the boundaries of the scientific community and become a worldwide cause relevant to everyone, everywhere. Strikes of over 80,000 people fill the streets of Sydney, calling for the Morrison government to deliver change. Our Black Summer follows soon after: a culmination of increasingly severe droughts and winds which decimate entire towns. In 2022, survivors of the climate crisis in Australia still living in caravans after their homes and communities were burnt to the ground.

Two years later, Scott Morrison attends the Glasgow Climate Summit (COP26), arguably the most important summit since the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2015, where the Paris Agreement was signed. He returns with no new targets for net-zero emissions and continues to emphasise finding alternatives to coal and gas as the responsibility of private companies, rather than the government. After three years of calling for change to save the planet, it is clear that the climate crisis simply doesn’t affect him. Climate change primarily affects those who contribute to it the least: those living in small Pacific Islands such as Tuvalu, in low-lying coastal areas of Bangladesh, in drought and war-ravaged Afghanistan, or in central African nations where monocropping has devastated the land - people without the power to relocate to escape the climate crisis. They will feel the brunt of the next century the most, not Australian Parliamentarians, and certainly not Scott Morrison.

2020

George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police after allegedly providing a counterfeit bill to a corner store. People of colour have been screaming out for centuries at the racism and violence perpetrated against them by police, and Floyd’s death is the catalyst for white people to finally listen. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people build upon the Black Lives Matter movement to propel their own experiences into the spotlight, highlighting the hundreds of deaths of First Nations people in police custody. Those in power don’t act on these issues. Why would they? White men and women have always benefited from racism, and ignorance of the pain we have caused indigenous people and people of colour is the easier option, because knowledge signifies guilt, and having to change.1 Australia’s political and legal structures are overwhelmingly white. Consequently, the key recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 have still not been adopted, no treaties have been signed, and we continue to face the Invasion Day/Australia Day debate on a yearly basis.

2021

Grace Tame, founder of the Let Her Speak campaign, is named Australian of the Year for her activism in changing Tasmanian sexual assault laws. Brittany Higgins speaks about her alleged sexual assault in Parliament House at the hands of a male staffer. Chanel Contos begins a petition exposing the toxic rape culture within Australia’s private school system, sparking a national conversation about consent education. These women set the climate for the March 4 Justice, which calls for safer laws, accountability, and harsher punishments for gendered violence. Our Prime Minister’s response to the march? The women of Australia are lucky not to have their protests met with bullets. We hear Scott Morrison say that he has to use his perspective as a father of daughters in order to believe and empathise with victims of rape. Evidently, a toxic rape culture does not affect men in positions of power.

Throughout all of this, we are facing COVID-19. The massive toll on our health system highlights visible gaps in aged care and the unique challenges for immunocompromised individuals. We’ve had to contend with a virus in an era where fake news travels six times faster than real news,2 and algorithms enable echo chambers to thrive. As such, the anti-vax movement has succeeded to the point where 50% of ICU patients in NSW are from the 5% of unvaccinated in our state.3

Now

I hope that the 2022 election ushers in a very different demographic driven towards change. I hope to see more First Nations Peoples, more women of colour, more migrants, and more people with disabilities in political spaces. I hope that our government opens its ears to society’s demands for change.

I am tired of white men taking no one seriously but themselves, but then again, why would they? We are asking men who have never been oppressed to empathise with those who often experience intersectional oppression of race, gender, disability, or income. We need people in leadership who have lived experiences, not just connections and an Arts/Law degree. My biggest hope for this new year is that people will not have to be homeless, dying, sexually assaulted or dead before they are finally listened to.

1 Hamad, R., 2019. White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color. Melbourne University Publishing. 2 The Social Dilemma. 2020. [film] Directed by J. Orlowski. Netflix.

3 NSW Covid-19 update: the 5% of population who are unvaccinated make up 50% of ICU patients