Fifteen years ago, no one would have thought the city would embrace Mardi Gras and same-sex marriage. Now, the climate debate is amping up

The people of Wagga Wagga are famously stubborn. On the north side of the Murrumbidgee river is a low-lying village of homes that once flooded five times a year. The signpost at North Wagga Wagga has for decades served as a warning to town planners: “We shall not be moved.”

“We are a very conservative city,” says the local mayor, Greg Conkey. “A lot of people do not accept climate change.”

Last week, the Wagga Wagga city council voted to declare a climate emergency. In sum, 28 local government areas have made a similar declaration – but never before in a place such as Wagga, where they prayed for rain at the scorching height of the last major drought, and where the local MP is the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, who recently told a constituent he disputed evidence of global heating.

Conkey, a former journalist who ran the Riverina Leader community newspaper for 25 years, rejects the suggestion that his support for the emergency declaration might be brave or naive, even as local political attacks are being amped up.

Rallies and protests are a bit too aggressive for people in this area Dr Trudi Beck

“I find it unusual that we should be having this debate in the first place,” Conkey says. “The debate regarding climate change was done and dusted years ago. It’s a reality and 97% of scientists agree that climate is changing at a rapid pace.

“We believe it’s our job and our responsibility to plan for the future, to look after the future of the city.

“Some people you’ll never convert. There are a couple of companies who have come out publicly and said they’re seriously concerned about impacts on their business and I’ll be looking at that. But my argument is that if we don’t have a sustainable and resilient community, we won’t have jobs at all.

“It’s not going to be easy, it’s probably not going to be cheap. But we’re trying to mitigate the costs to the community that climate change will bring.”

On Thursday morning, Conkey’s face appeared on signs plastered around the town centre, along with those of three others who voted for the climate emergency motion, accusing them of selling out ratepayers. A vote to repeal the declaration will be held on Monday night. Progress won’t be won without a fight.

Droughts and flooding rains

In between two major droughts, about 9,000 people were evacuated from Wagga Wagga when the Murrumbidgee river hit a 159-year high, flooding large parts of the city.

“The droughts and flooding rains are part of the mythology of Australia. It’s in our poetry,” says Andrew Wallace, an education professor and climate campaigner, who is also the chair of the Wagga Wagga Conservatorium of Music.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A poster attacks the councillors who supported Wagga Wagga’s climate emergency declaration. Photograph: The Guardian/Ben Smee

Wallace talks about the way historical weather events, which experts say are made more extreme by climate change, often work to entrench beliefs that weather patterns are cyclical.

“Families have kept weather records on their farms ... that go back often 100-120 years. And looking back through that they’re seeing the droughts and flooding rains. So over generations, they have experienced this cycle, suffered through the bad times, maybe lose a crop or two, because they know the good times are coming.

“But now it’s different, and it’s really dangerous.”

Most of the local resistance to the emergency declaration has centred on councillor Paul Funnell, who during the debate last week compared parents taking their children to climate rallies to child abuse.

Funnell’s family were among the first European settlers in the district.

“I damn well know what’s going on in the climate,” he told Guardian Australia. “If you look back historically, it’s very similar to what we went through right through the 20th century. Every decade there were droughts.

“It’s interesting how this is discussed. I’ve never heard anyone say there’s no such thing as climate change. Of course there’s climate change, of course it’s changing. This is not the impact that people are making it out to be, some are calling it a new green religion.

“I’d say three quarters of people who speak to me [about the climate emergency declaration] say ‘make sure you get rid of this nonsense’. I go to the store, I go to the car mechanic, it doesn’t matter where I go, people are talking about it.

“The majority of people who talk to me say ‘if the experts can’t agree, then what hope have you got?’ It’s a realm where we shouldn’t go.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Andrew Wallace: ‘The droughts and flooding rains are part of the mythology of Australia.’ Photograph: Ben Smee/The Guardian

Wallace says he worries, as the debate becomes hysterical, that the “loaded” terminology about a climate emergency is perhaps “towards the edge for a community like this”.

“But just by having the debate, there’s benefit. Bringing it into consciousness means there’s always some people who think about it for the first time. These massive events, catastrophic weather events, those events trigger people to come back to the argument. You come back to God because you need him. This is one of those times, it’s time to move and bring those sorts of things forward.”

‘This city has changed for the better’

On the surface, Wagga Wagga has changed very little in the past decade. The coffee shops have improved, and the trees along Baylis Street have grown taller. A few old pubs have gone out of business. At the same time, social progress has crept slowly through parts of the community.

This is a place where, in 1993, the editor of the Daily Advertiser newspaper wrote columns attacking “sordid homosexuality” and responded to backlash by branding himself homophobic.

Today, Wagga hosts a March Mardi Gras festival, which attracted about 10,000 people to a parade through town, and was embraced by many locals. The newspaper editor is now the local MP and Australia’s deputy prime minister.

Michael McCormack has distanced himself from those statements and other columns he wrote backing the death penalty and ridiculing women’s sport, saying they do not represent his current views.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A climate demonstration in Wagga Wagga before the council voted to declare an emergency. Photograph: Dr Trudi Beck

And while McCormack, who has hinted at his scepticism about man-made climate change, easily won the seat of Riverina at the May election, there is no longer a sense in Wagga that this is safe political territory for conservatives. The area’s state MP is independent Joe McGirr, a popular local doctor, who has been vocal in his support for the emergency declaration.

During his term as mayor, Conkey has marched in support of domestic violence victims, and with the council’s Mardi Gras float.

“People said 15 years ago, 20 years ago you’d never have had a Mardi Gras in this city,” Conkey says.

“I was one of those people who was marching. I walked with my wife, together with the deputy mayor and his wife, to show that we are an inclusive community. We have something like 112 nationalities represented in this city. We speak 107 languages, we’re a very multicultural city.

“We voted 65% in favour of the monarchy in the 1990s. It would be interesting to see what that vote would be now. We voted in favour of same-sex marriage, I was delighted that we did that. Again, 15 years ago, that wouldn’t have happened. This city has changed in recent times for the better.”

Labor councillor Vanessa Keenan, who proposed the climate emergency motion, says the past few weeks have shown that climate is not just a fringe issue, even in notionally conservative regional areas.

“If you asked a month ago, who are the people in this community who are passionate about climate change, then people would picture someone with dreadlocks, a tree-hugging hippy,” Keenan says.

“What we’ve seen are doctors, farmers, parents, business owners, pharmacists, people from all walks of life come out and say they want to see climate action happen at a local level.”

Fridays for the Future

Dr Trudi Beck, a Wagga Wagga general practitioner, has spent every Friday for the past few months camped outside McCormack’s office, holding a picnic protest and calling for action on climate change.

“There’s people like me who never cared about any sort of political activism who are saying we have to quietly and respectfully start to deal with this at a grassroots level,” Beck says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Residents take part in the Fridays for the Future picnic protest outside Michael McCormack’s office in Wagga Wagga. Photograph: Dr Trudi Beck

“We’ve always tried to do what we could in our backyard to have chickens and compost and vegetables, but once you start being interested in those things, the natural progression of that contact with nature is to start being concerned about the bigger picture.”

Like many people of her generation, Beck left Wagga Wagga and returned. The city has a growing number of professionals, many working in healthcare and education. Beck’s unique form of regional activism has been effective in bringing debate into the local mainstream.

“There’s a lot of people of my generation who have moved away, realised Wagga does have a lot to offer, and who have come back with different world views or experiences that they’re integrating into life here,” Beck says.

Deputy PM Michael McCormack accused of disputing evidence of global heating Read more

“Rallies and protests are a bit too aggressive for people in this area. So we thought how can we make this something where average people like us might be able to relate to the idea that climate change is important, and how can we do it in a way that’s peaceful.

“Initially it was just me and the kids, over time it’s grown to be more people than that.”

Beck says the Fridays for the Future demonstrations garnered “more attention than we necessarily wanted”.

“All you have to do is go on to any Facebook page of a local newspaper in an area such as Wagga when any environmental or climate change-related article is published and see the kinds of comments that are made there to realise those sorts of [conservative] sentiments can be deeply held by a portion of the city. I didn’t expect it to become as publicly nasty ... but the opposition didn’t surprise me.

“We just need to call it for what it is, say it’s an emergency and deal with it like it is an emergency.”