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> Another great example of the apathy I'm talking about is the collective shrug

Talking about collective shrugs and apathy, I am still absolutely stunned by the complete apathy to half of the Great Barrier Reef dying. Here is this absurdly massive natural icon of Australia featured in all of its tourism ads while growing up. Half of it dies. And majority Australia basically doesn’t give a fuck. There’s no outrage. Nothing.

It gets regular media coverage in the US but practically nothing in Australia. I don't understand why this is.

It's for the same reason Canadians largely ignore the extraordinarily vast environmental destruction in their resource extraction territories: their economies, wealth and incomes are partially dependent on destroying the environment. Everyone knows what is happening, most ignore it and go about their business.

Out of sight out of mind, for the most part. You see this in nearly all countries.

It's often peculiar what people can have apathy about and what gets rabid attention.

The media and social frenzy about measles cases in the US this year as an example. There will be 1,600 to 2,000 cases in the US in 2019, and a few deaths. It's wall to wall media coverage, the world is ending, social media is on fire. Meanwhile ~25,000 people will die just from fentanyl in the US this year. Half a million Americans - more than died in WW2 - die in total from overdosing across seven or eight years, and well you know, it's just a thing that's going on, I guess we should focus on it a bit maybe sometime, shrug what can you do.

The are some important differences between measles situation and the situation with opioids and other drugs that people get addicted to and OD on, which may lead to the differences in news coverage:

1. People have been getting addicted to things since ancient times, and those addictions often led to the deaths. In all the time since then, we've never solved the problem of addiction. So, it is not at all shocking or surprising that people are still getting addicted to things and dying.

People have also been getting measles since ancient times...but we did solve that problem. Hence, the very existence of measles cases is newsworthy.

2. Most addicts become so for reasons that most people can understand. It's a "there but for the grace of God, go I" situation. We can imagine how we could have ended up that way, and for most of us I think that only requires imagining a few small changes to our past.

Getting measles in a first world country, though, except for people who cannot be vaccinated because they are too young, allergic, or have weak immune systems, requires that you, or a guardian if you are a child, to be an idiot.

3. Politicians may disagree what do do about addiction and the associated deaths, but generally they all agree it is a problem we need to do something about.

With measles, there are some politicians who think it is not a big deal, or even that it is good for kids to get measles, mumps, etc., thinking that this makes them stronger and reduces there chances for things like cancer later. There are bills in several states to make it easier for parents to opt out of school vaccination requirements. In Texas, that bill also prohibits state health officials from keeping track of who opts out, which will make it harder to track and contain outbreaks.

A minor correction: vaccinated people with no previous health issues of note actually can catch measles if herd immunity isn't strong enough to actually stop the disease from spreading at a population level.

Can you elaborate on this?:

> It's for the same reason Canadians largely ignore the extraordinarily vast environmental destruction in their resource extraction territories

Oil and gas are a huge part of the economy, and a huge part of that is "unconventional oil", i.e. oil which is far more polluting during its extraction compared to other oil.

If the world actually committed properly to limiting global warming to 2C, there would be no point in extracting this especially polluting oil.

Besides that, they are allowing some very unique forests to be cleared to have the oil extracted from, with the promise of later rehabilitation that never happens, as the intermediate company that is responsible to pay for it goes bankrupt.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/articl...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/14/canada...

mining damage can be reclaimed. In a country as liberal as Canada are you saying they don't have to replant a single tree?

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp.

If you identify an issue with Australian media, it’s almost certainly due to that.

There's no collective shrug - unfortunately the inner city outrage becomes self-serving ignorance the further north you go.

Mining jobs have always paid better, and no one want's to change careers to work in tourism or reskill for supporting sustainable energy.

Places like Gladstone have seen a 50% collapse in property prices after a lot of mines shifted from construction to operational and demand dropped.

That same self-serving ignorance has now kept people like Peter "he who would be king" Dutton in Government.

It's not all bad though as there's currently money to be made in mine regeneration projects as mines are closed which is a good thing for jobs with hopefully environmental benefits.

For non-Australian readers, there is one very important thing to note about Australian elections and democracy: voting is mandatory under penalty of an $80 AUS fine and occurs on Saturdays.

In US federal elections, turnout is about 55%. Whereas in Australian federal elections turnout is about 90% [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/world/australia/compulsor...

Does that not just make it harder for informed opinions sway outcomes?

Or on the flip side does it actually make it harder to use a small subset of the population to steal an election from an apathetic population at large.

I.e. you'd still be able to take advantage of the apathy but it'd be a much slower moving change towards extremes and polarisation which is pretty good for democracy in general.

The pros and cons of mandatory voting : https://vittana.org/10-mandatory-voting-pros-and-cons

After reading that I think maybe a reward system would work better than a penalty?

Might encourage people w/ jobs who can't get to the polls to go and vote, but doesn't put unnecessary drain on their life.

They also should make voting day a national holiday, and give a tax deduction to companies who allow their employees to take as much time as they need to vote (given some lines can be hours long in places).

Edit: My comment is directed to the U.S.A. as that's where I'm from.

Free ice cream with each vote?

I'd vote a few times for that!

they have a 'democracy sausage' - i think it also may be compulsory to eat one.

maybe like $50, and $10 extra for each election in a row--like if you don't miss one else you start over at $50, including local elections. They could have a mobile app and have badges too, and 10'th election you get a free sub.

We currently have "I Voted" stickers.

“Informed” and “motivated to vote” don’t correlate well. I’d even argue that they might be negatively correlated; the people most fanatical about voting are the same people who get their news from extremely biased and inaccurate sources. Mandatory voting takes power away from the crazies.

It's sort of like a random forest algorithm and how it resists overfitting - lots of partially informed votes by people who lack 'single focus' issues driving their vote make it hard for the system to be swayed to extremes. It's mostly good but it definitely results in many issues (like freedom of expression) falling down due to apathy of the masses. For example there was just an election and the opposition leader had promised on passing controversial spying legislation last year that they did so only on a proviso it would be immediately revisited. He completely failed to do that, but having been proven a liar did not even get raised during the election. Literally nobody except vulnerable minorities care, and they don't count in Australian elections.

This means there will be no Trump for Australia

Well we had Clive Palmer get into the senate, who was effectively our low rent version of Trump.

That and the revolving door of prime ministers over the years means we've endured a similar level of political turmoil as Trump has managed to stir up on his own home turf.

Clive Palmer was elected to the House of Reps but had sway over a number of senators from his party. I live in that electorate and it was a shocker how so many Labor and possibly Green votes went to Palmer. Good example of how naive tribalism such as always voting the opposition party last can go very wrong.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/fair...

The damage he contributed to by supporting the repeal of Rudd's emission trading scheme and the mining tax was right up there with Trump's rollback of EPA standards and attacks on renewable energy. He promptly retired and went back to his mining interests once he got what he wanted.

His reappearance at the last election was bizarre and pointless, but may have contributed to the Liberals looking likely to only need to deal with Jacqui Lambie to pass any legislation in the Senate.

I think in general 'big visions' are pretty bad and dangerous -- they're what get you the anit-encryption data logging laws. In general things are pretty good and so anyone making radical changes would most likely move in a worse direction.

I really don't classify the anti-encryption data logging laws as a big vision. To me, they're the continuation of the erosion of Australia's (somewhat implied) privacy rights. They were one of the bigger single moves in that space recently, but I by no means see it as a 'big vision' change.

It's really interesting I remember in the 90's when I was a kid during the height of the Australian republican movement there were ads on tv celebrating our democratic traditions "Our Country was founded by a vote, not a war" and all that.

Seems to me like the Coalition has done a really solid job of wedging Labor on National security to the point now they can introduce increasingly draconian laws and the second Labor speaks out against them suddenly Labor are "weak on national security" so they don't dare go against them.

Does anyone remember the Ads about terrorism they used to show on tv advising Australian's to "Be Alert not Alarmed" (I'm not kidding these actually aired) the government has done a really good job of conjuring up this atmosphere of fear whether it be terrorism, cybercrime or refugees and most recently "China" the electorate has responded to it ever time.

The Last politician I was excited about was Kevin Rudd when he stood up and declared climate change "was the moral challenge of a generation" mind you this was in 2007. He then promptly walked away from doing anything after he realized it would cost him votes, I've been completely cynical about politics in this country ever since.

As an ex Australian, left well before the current situation/ malaise. Still informed well. >These raids have been highly condemned amongst the public here, and (at least my echo-chamber of) people seem to be pretty wholly against it.

Yes there seems to be some distaste among the public, its been a significant story. But people that really care about it are in your and our echo-chamber. This has happen before and will happen again, it is clear they are emboldened, there was just a big election, the good guy were going to win and then they didn't...

>Of course, we're also an apathetic people because we've had it so good for so long that no one will force any change, and it'll just keep getting worse.

Yes Australia implemented some pretty bad economic policies, yet very little of it has come due, some of it is because of our/your big seemingly kindly neighbour to the north, but well all pay eventually it will just be later.

>It's also seen in our elections. There's no big visions. No bold statements from politicians about producing changes to make a better society. It's all attack ads and pandering to key demographics just to win votes and stay in government.

Or stay out of government. Labour screamed harder about non existing terrorism. Promised to crap even harder on immigrants. They then went on to lose a completely unlosable election. You won't win in 2019 even if your Tony Blair. Sure as hell not with Ed Milliband... The economic policies was OK, if you read an economic professors blog. Quite incoherent. Raising taxes without raising anyone's taxes, huh? Not dumbed down, just dumb. To little to late. I can go on forever. They thought they were going to win anyway, so who really cares? And then they didn't.

>Hell, our current PM literally brought a lump of coal into parliament as a prop to taunt the opposition by saying "this is coal, don't be afraid". They are quite gleefully mocking you, they are enjoying themselves and this very much, they are "owning the libs" like never before.

Politics has always been attacks and pandering. The only time you get really grand vision is before & during war, and that usually has the worst outcomes for the most people, including permanent loss of liberty when the whole thing is said and done.

I am curious about why you think climate change is an important issue in Australia. It's a relatively small country, without much of a manufacturing industry.

40% of the worlds coal and new mining in a place called the Galilee basin and shipping it to India. I think if they mine the whole thing it can create 1deg of warming just by itself.

Yes, if Australia stopped it's export of coal then it may very well make a difference. But as far as I'm aware, that wasn't even part of the debate as the economic impact would be too great.

Digging new mines was part of debate, there was a path with minor party balance of power where it might have been stopped - but that looks dead now.

Australia is a globally influential country with high per capita wealth and emissions. Australia has the capacity to show leadership to other similarly-sized countries, by incrementally addressing (potentially at economic cost to itself, a wealthy country) a global challenge for which everyone is responsible, regardless of the size of the country they live in.

Perhaps if Australia pulled it off successfully without too much economic damage, this could be true. But from what I've heard, the states that adopted green policies suffered power shortages and soaring energy prices. Hopefully in the future this will change.

If you are talking about the blackout event in South Australia back in 2016, it was due to misconfigured wind farms:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/wind-farm-settings-to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

Soaring energy prices are because of privatisation, not because of green policies.

Because we are a regional leader. The pacific islands most affected by climate change look to us and go 'you are rich and have the means to lead by example. Why aren't you?' and that's a valid criticism.

Or, in other better words than my own, exactly what sjy's sibling comment said.

edit: Climate change is a quintessential tragedy of the commons. It really should be our obligation to lead by example since we have the capacity to, even if our actions in isolation do not make a sufficient enough change. In fact, I'd argue that taking a lead on it is in our best interest. It helps to cement our position as a regional leader and exapnds our soft power, which is the best way we can hold regional influence outsized to our comparitively small population.

Because they catch fire every summer.

Because it’s everyone’s problem. Nobody gets a pass.