Yesterday, we put the question to readers: what do they remember as the lowest point of Australian politics of the last few years? Has there been a lower point than what we’ve seen in recent days? As expected, Crikey readers brought the goods. Meanwhile, Guy Rundle’s searing examination of the world’s impending ecological collapse elicited some heartfelt and candid responses. 

On Australian politics’ new lows

Sally Goldner writes: Q: What do you see as the real low of Australian politics over the past few years? A: The last few years.

Christopher Mayor writes: When Trump and Clinton were chosen to contest the election in the US I was staggered to think that the voters in a nation of 340 million people were not given a better choice.  Now I am beginning to feel that few of the best women and men in our country are willing to offer themselves, or are preselected, as candidates. We need more of the talent we see on the cross benches.  

Mary Wood writes: I am so weary or it all. It is now impossible to have anything resembling a civil debate on actual policy. I have decided I do not need to hear or read any of it until after the election.

John Gleeson writes: Picking an outstanding low point amongst all the low points is difficult, until I remembered the utterly disgusting, divisive and disgraceful behaviour of Tony Abbott towards then-PM Julia Gillard. It should be regurgitated in all its misogynistic filth and detail during the election campaign, to remind the voters what the Liberal party stands for, when Murdoch, and Alan Jones and Co. are in lockstep and they can get away with it.

Not only rallies to “ditch the witch” and allusions to “red boxes”,  cheered on by the right towards Australia’s prime minister, but the total contempt for parliament and Abbott’s determination to trash parliamentary process. Possibly the icing on the cake was installing an utter self-obsessed clown like Bronwyn Bishop as speaker — her own barrel-scraping moment shining brightly, when supposedly apolitical as the speaker of parliament, she wanted Professor Gillian Triggs to resign live on television.

On ecological collapse

John Bushell writes: Regrettably I have to agree with Guy Rundle’s summary that we are well on track for extinction of life on earth. Noam Chomsky insisted that you had to get the language right in order to address any issue effectively. On climate, our language has regressed from: “the greenhouse effect”, “anthropogenic global warming”, “global warming” to “climate change”. The term “climate change” robs humans of any agency to act decisively to reduce and eliminate the massive global heating problem that we alone have created. Thus the expression provides politicians and the mainstream media with the perfect excuse in future that “its just climate change there’s nothing we could or should have done about it”.

Bert Morris writes: I am 87 and glad (selfishly) that I am not one of my grandchildren. The future is an awful prospect. It strikes me though that it is getting close to the time when we have to call out our fellow citizens who vote for the deniers. It is their votes that elect the politicians who have done nothing to remedy the situation. Instead of focusing on the politicians we should be telling their supporters that they are responsible for the threat to our civilisation. And the longer it goes on and on, the more we should be telling them that they have brought it about.

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