By Alex Ashley Chiew
‘You’ll die waiting for a climate election,’ read a placard I saw on my phone in 2021 as I doom-scrolled my way towards the checkout at Braybrook Aldi. This was before Aldi automated their checkouts, like every other major food conglomerate worth their salt or their vinegar.
I didn’t die, of course; we just cut back on living a little. The election came; the teal wave broke. And after years of supply chain disruptions, the economy opened its throttle and the cost of basic necessities shot through the roof.
When I say the roof, I mean the Consumer Price Index peaked at around 8% per annum in December ’22, meaning groceries, housing, insurance and other necessities set us back on average 8% more than they did in December of the previous year, which was already elevated from 2020 when prices began to rise.
This made living harder. You might have noticed it. Or you might have read about it. It probably depends on your level of wealth, your housing situation and your disposable income.
In Australia, some eyes track the ASX. Others flick between their home loan’s interest rate and the balance on their banking apps. And some don’t make it much past the bottom line of the supermarket docket.
‘Choice’ is a slippery concept in life, but one that unites climate and economics in politics. Parties who always-were or have-become-over-time aligned with the interests of the abnormally wealthy tend to frame ‘choice’ as a stopgap between the environment and the economics. An either/or. But this is not a real choice. It is a rhetorical choice, aimed to disenfranchise voters and obscure the fact that choice is everywhere around us, even when ‘cozzie livs’ and ‘enshittification’ are Macquarie Dictionary words of the year. Even in a climate crisis.
Take energy. Economist Richard Denniss has a snappy line about energy: “In Norway, they tax the fossil fuel industry and give university education to their kids for free. In Australia, we subsidise the fossil fuel industry and charge our kids a fortune to go to uni.” The ABC fact-checked Denniss’s claim, and… it checks out. Our Petroleum Resources Rent Tax is considered by many to be broken, barely denting the profits of multinational gas giants who benefit from billions in fuel excise exemptions. Meanwhile ordinary people, who mostly can’t afford EVs, pay it through the nozzle.
And these days, changes to climate affect the hip-pocket in strange new ways. Avian flu – behind our current egg shortage – replicates further and faster nowadays. Chocolate and coffee production in West Africa collapsed with heat waves causing stress and disease. This year, cocoa was four times dearer than in 2023. The bars keep shrinking, but the price remains the same. Or rises.
Most worrying though, is insurance – another bulge in the CPI’s ‘basket of goods’. Lifted by flood waters, fanned by flames, our premiums are not just affected by Aussie cyclones and bushfires. Billions in property damage around the world – from Los Angeles to Pakistan – make for huge payouts, weakening the global re-insurance market, so that premiums rise everywhere. It’s not the butterfly and the hurricane. In the world of buying and packaging risk, the butterfly is the hurricane, and the more damage it wreaks, the faster the rest of us flap our wings to keep up.
And this is climate change: a shrink-flation of all things, including the natural world. Less bang for buck. More time on the clock. Less space between the disturbing wrinkles in life’s rich tapestry to think: where are we? And how did we get here? Why is everything so expensive?
So let’s look decades back, to the 1970s, when boomers were just figuring out how to buy their first homes. Back then, the average house was shy of five times the average yearly wage. Nowadays, it’s twenty. This enormous price increase comes, gallingly, from people’s willingness to pay it – true for rents as well as home ownership.
When we chose twenty years ago to roll back limits on Monopoly-like returns on spending lots of money buying up multiple homes on the board, we chose to become a nation where it is more important to own property than live in it. And now we live in that world.
We could go on, about supermarkets’ profits or how much ‘property’ Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, or Tamboran Resources own, and how important it seems to protect the value of their exclusive assets whilst embracing their risks as our own. Or gripe about poorly insulated, overpriced housing in areas that lack basic infrastructure, where people drive tens of kilometres everyday because they actually don’t have a choice.
But that would be wasting energy.
Instead, I’ll keep making time for local groups and independent voices that help organise people like me to participate in better collective choices building the world we want to live in, not the one we just scrape by to afford.
Alex Ashley Chiew is a member of Climate Action Maribyrnong.
Learn about them here: subscribepage.io/climateactionmaribyrnong
