Imagine a future even more dystopian than the present – a world where catastrophic climate change meets catastrophic income inequality.
In this near future, floods and fires get more intense and the government’s response remains sluggish. So the wealthy take matters into their own hands.
They leave the poor to use the degraded public emergency services, while the rich are rescued by private means – a fleet of helicopters to get them to safety, private firefighters to protect their homes, the use of satellite phones and access to secure food sources and fresh water.
It’s not such a leap. The rich are already buying their way out of the pointy end of the climate crisis.
In 2018 when wildfires tore through California, Kim Kardashian’s mansion was reportedly saved by private firefighters, operated by her insurance company.
The rich are also buying their way out of the climate emergency with elaborate contingency plans. You see it with the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel buying a very large bolthole in New Zealand, and wealthy Australians buying land in Tasmania to escape the worst ravages of climate change.
And I’m sure we’ll see it in the aftermath of the northern New South Wales and Queensland floods. The rich can either afford to insure, or add protective measures such as extensive drainage and flood proofing, or get out altogether, cut their losses and move to higher ground. Those in south Lismore at the caravan park, who relied on neighbours to rescue them on a jet ski, often can’t afford to insure, let alone move out.
The story of the Kardashian’s home being saved from fire is not a freaky celebrity one-off – it’s the canary in the neoliberal coalmine, it’s the “story of the ramifications of economic disparity in this country”, wrote the Atlantic.
People buy safety in the US – not just safety from climate change, but safety from each other.
They install elaborate security systems, or live in gated communities, and in the case of the University of Chicago, amass one of the largest private police forces in the US to protect students and university property.
So where do we stand in Australia? Right now, at a crossroads. Will the state step up and look after us in the face of climate emergencies (and furthermore will they take action to mitigate the emergencies?) or will they abandon the field, leaving us to rely on volunteers, community action and services that may have coped prior to the acceleration of the Anthropocene age, but certainly not now?
I think we know the answer.
“I don’t hold a hose mate,” is more than a statement of fact that Scott Morrison doesn’t actually, like, hold a hose. It is a mission statement of a government withdrawing from the battlefield. Hawaii is also a metaphor, that’s why it still looms and sticks in the craw years later. The Morrison government nicked off long ago. We’re on our own. Instead, Australians must make do and rely on mateship and community to get them through.
Emergency services elders have begged, as they beg each summer, for the government to do something – but the government simply does not seem to listen.
“The government knew what was coming and it did not adequately prepare our communities or first responders,” Greg Mullins, the former NSW fire and rescue commissioner said this week.
In Australia, this retreat from the commons (the national project) is not a new thing, and it’s not just climate change related. We see it in the sale of and reduction in public housing.
We see it in the lack of funding of public libraries.
We see it in the tax incentives for private health insurance. We see it in middle class people abandoning the public school sector to send their kids to private schools – and we see governments incentivising this in the lavish funding of the private sector. In recent years private school funding has increased at five times the rate of public school funding.
In the years before this summer of floods, we have certainly seen a retreat from the commons at an intense level where the disaster actually hit.
Since the pandemic, there has been an acceleration of the movement of wealth towards the north coast of NSW. Byron Bay property prices are now more expensive than Sydney. The result has been a complete collapse of a variety of social contracts in those communities. The most significant collapse is the one related to housing. The contract goes something like this: you work in this community as a chef, a teacher, an ambulance officer, and you will be housed in that community and build deep roots there. But that social contract has broken down under the pressure of the enormous wealth that has migrated to the region, and lack of government protection and support for those less wealthy. Prior to the devastating floods, the people in northern NSW have already been schooled in seeing the impact of immense wealth disparity in their region.
In Australia’s drift from the public to the private sector, it’s not necessarily the public rejecting the commons but the government nudging citizens away from public utilities designed for public use – via a range of tax incentives and a deliberate neglect or running down of government services.
This drift towards the private sector doesn’t occur in a vacuum. An assessment of other options – of options that exist outside the state – occurs when the state has vacated the field, where the state is not adequately resourced, or where the scale of the problem is too large for the current solutions.
And so we prep.
Perhaps you’re looking around where you live right now, and doing a form of disaster prepping in your head. You might be noticing the summers getting drier or once in 500 year floods occurring every few years, and you might be thinking: how am I going to save and protect my property? And how am I going to save and protect myself and my family?
When you prep, you do so as an individual or family unit. You do not prep your entire region, and as a result many in your community will get left behind.
We have to bring prepping into the commons (the degraded commons, but one that exists nonetheless), so we can all prep together.
Last week, speaking in Lismore before Morrison’s appearance, helicopter pilot Rich Latimer called for government and volunteer groups to unify to prepare for the next disaster.
“The message we really want to pass is: we need unification,” he said. “We need communities to realise that we need to prepare ourselves for this more and more … and really drop the message of us and them, and the polarisation.”
Money might save your house, but do you really want to live in a country where the poor drown and the rich are saved?
