We’ve known of the need for climate adaptation for a decade, but done nothing

For a government that uses climate adaptation as a shield for its inaction on climate change, it sure doesn’t do a lot on adaptation.

Nine years and six months ago, the Productivity Commission wrote a lengthy report on the problems facing effective climate adaptation policies and what could be done to deliver better adaptation for a country that even then was already facing the brunt of a warming climate.

None of the recommendations were ever implemented — though Scott Morrison eventually did the one thing explicitly recommended against by the Productivity Commission: offering home insurance subsidies via the $10 billion reinsurance pool for North Queensland. Insurance premia for commercial and residential properties in North Queensland have risen steadily and strongly in recent years due to the climate change that North Queensland LNP MPs and the Morrison government deny.

Last week Warren Entsch, who campaigned for years for the scheme, suggested the reinsurance pool be expanded to include other parts of Australia — like northern NSW, now a giant, muddy disaster area.

Insurance companies — and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) — opposed the reinsurance pool and suggested that money was better directed at adaptation work: better infrastructure, better planning, better risk-management and better information mapping. In the words of APRA, “public mitigation offers the greatest potential to address the root cause of the risk and improve affordability”.

They were all echoing a 2014 report from the Productivity Commission on disaster aid, which concluded:

governments over-invest in post-disaster reconstruction and under-invest in mitigation that would limit the impact of natural disasters in the first place. As such, natural disaster costs have become a growing, unfunded liability for governments … Australian Government post-disaster support to state and territory governments [states] should be reduced, and support for mitigation increased.

Eight years on, we can see the result of failing to properly invest in mitigation in our regional centres — and in thinking about where we allow new housing. What minimal adaptation efforts have been made by the government have been the wrong ones, and years too late.

And the whole debate about allowing housing in flood zones remains in its infancy, despite being spotlit by every major flood. We’re still stuck at the Shane Stone Stage — named after the Liberal Party hack and National Recovery and Resilience Agency coordinator-general who last week blamed flood victims for their fate.

It’s unsurprising that a government that refuses to take climate change seriously won’t even invest effectively in the fig leaf it uses to cover its inaction. But it symbolises how an inability to treat climate change like any other policy issue in Australia — due to the noxious influence of fossil fuel companies and the Murdoch press on the political class, and the Coalition particularly — corrupts not merely Australia’s inability to adopt any effective climate action policies; it leaches out, like toxic waste, into other policy areas.

The impacts of the northern NSW floods on regional economies will be catastrophic, even if towns are rebuilt. The impact on the NSW state economy will be significant. The impact on insurance premiums in the region will also be dramatic, as the global reinsurance companies factor in the flood claim costs for Australia’s major insurers. Unlike the Coalition, global reinsurers don’t have the option of pretending climate change doesn’t exist, but have been factoring it into their business models for many years.

The failure of the government to take adaptation seriously — let alone meaningful carbon abatement or global leadership on the issue — will also factor into those premium rises. Someone has to pay for the Coalition’s inaction on climate, and in first instance it will be householders who’ve been flooded and had their lives upended, but eventually taxpayers will as well.

In an alternative universe where Australia treats climate change as a normal policy problem, the PC report in 2012 and its disaster assistance report in 2014 could have been the basis for a major infrastructure program over the past eight years to improve flood resilience, harden infrastructure and better protect regional communities, while the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) led the process of better integrating land-use planning and building codes, a dynamic climate model and insurance regulation across federal, state and local government.

But because it’s been heresy to discuss climate change, that never happened, and our economy and budgets will suffer accordingly. Another example of how this government is utterly incapable of actually governing effectively or competently.

Just like we’re only just now discovering that a failure to rapidly transition to electrification and renewable energy has major national security implications given the behaviour of Russia, a major fossil fuel exporter.

The Coalition likes to claim it is the preferred party on economic management and national security. Its inability to acknowledge global heating severely undermines both claims.