When I was a child in Townsville in the 1980s, the Great Barrier Reef still seemed immovable. It was a settled fact like the islands or the sea. As soon as we were old enough to swim the adults would take us out in tinnies to catch fish from among the gently swaying blots of coral close to shore. Later, with friends, I swam and snorkeled farther out, on the reef proper. I saw my first real ocean waves on its outer edge – among other things, the reef protected Townsville and its harbour from the wild moods of South Pacific.

Neither Townsville nor Australia has reciprocated that protection. The reef is dying. You can see for yourself in the videos and photos published by the ARC Centre of Excellence, based in Townsville, which studies the ecosystem that we will likely soon have killed. The videos are mostly taken from light planes. They show hectares of sepulchrally white, dead and dying coral spread out under their wings. The vision is accompanied by deadpan commentary from the crew. They’re doing important work, but the footage is pretty thin as a requiem for what may once have been the world’s greatest natural wonder. In our ecologically diminished future, people will be surprised that this was the best we could manage in the way of mourning.

Coal lobby ads biggest third-party political expenditure in Australia Read more

In Townsville itself, which is the biggest city on the reef coast, it may be hard for some media consumers to register the scale of the catastrophe. The local paper, the Townsville Bulletin, has not really been treating this as the matter of world-historical significance that it surely is. Its coverage is one symptom of a pathology that runs parallel to coral bleaching: News Corporation’s lock on local news in large swathes of the country, and especially in Queensland. In the newsagents you’ll find the Bulletin sold along with the Courier-Mail, News’s state newspaper, and the national daily, the Australian. All three have covered the events on the reef with a mixture of equivocation, “scepticism”, and misdirection.

The Courier-Mail has been justly criticised for barely covering the story at all; and the Australian remains the country’s foremost dissembler on the subject of climate change. The Bulletin has added its own twist to News’s cocktail of denial. It runs the odd article reflecting the truth of the matter, but alongside those are many boosting the views of scientists outside the consensus who insist that things are not so bad, and that the reef will easily recover. They have also given space to reef tourism businesses who are angry at the “doomsaying” of scientists and activists, and complaints about the camping etiquette of environmentalists.

For the last half-decade or so the paper has been much more concerned with the fallout from of the end of the mining boom. While it was going, it led to a housing boom in Townsville. It did the same in every place to which workers might conceivably fly out in their downtime from mining hotspots, like the coalfields of the Bowen Basin. At that time, real estate prices were pushed up by a mixture of demand and speculation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pauline Hanson in Townsville in November 2017, with One Nation candidate for Thuringowa, Mark Thornton. In 2017 Townsville’s three state electorates gave One Nation between 16% and 20% of the vote. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

Home ownership meant on-paper wealth for a wide range of people, and there was a frenzy of new construction. When the boom ended, and led to knock-on effects like the closure of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel plant, demand and confidence dried up. Jobs disappeared, such that last year Townsville had one of the highest-rising unemployment rates in the country. Crime spiked (which is one issue that received the Bulletin’s full attention). Even now, unused apartments still stand idle.

This meant that instead of the daily front pages that the death of the reef would seem to demand, during this period the Bulletin has been far more intent on its boosterist campaign for the construction of Adani’s Carmichael mine, with an attendant crusade against protesters. The paper’s zeal has only been exceeded by local luminaries in politics and business, including the Labor mayor.

there’s never been much room, locally, for serious scrutiny of the claims about the jobs the [Adani] mine would provide

Just this week, Bill Shorten visited the city and left the door wide open for the mine, which he described as “just another project”, after minimising the concerns of protesters. If the mine is built, the unquestioned logic seems to run, the good times will return. No one with any political authority has spent much time hosing this down.

So there’s never been much room, locally, for serious scrutiny of the claims about the jobs the mine would provide, about how much all of this would cost the taxpayer, and of whether the stars could once again align to deliver the historical circumstances that led to the boom. There was even less serious thought about the way in which the boom, and all that coal it caused to be dug up and burned, had any relationship to what was happening in the waters just over the horizon.

Meanwhile, those tourism operators who the Bulletin featured objecting to the “doomsaying” about bleaching did so on the basis that things are improving. You’ll hear, as I did repeatedly when I was back in Townsville over the holidays, that this is all a part of a natural cycle that is now righting itself. And as remarked, News’s outlets signal boost “experts” who encourage these beliefs. Now is not the right time to put tourists off, you’ll hear, when the advance of the bleaching has momentarily slowed.

As usual in contemporary Australia, the fight is mostly about the terms and tone of the discourse, rather than the truth that needs to be confronted. In fact, most data suggests that the reef and the region are to some extent bouncing along the bottom of things.

Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching has started early, biologist says Read more

The trend in tropical sea temperatures continues inexorably upward, and high temperatures lead to coral bleaching. Climate change is happening more quickly than many imagined it would. The bleaching event of 2016 may not have been repeated as severely in 2017, but those circumstances will reproduce themselves soon enough, probably during the next El Nino event – these too are slated to become more severe. Scientists are now concerned about how early in the season bleaching has begun this year. Any bleaching events in close succession will kill parts of the reef that are not already dead.

Meanwhile, coal is a diminishing part of the energy mix in many countries, and the price of thermal coal has been declining for years. A major reason that Adani have had so much trouble nailing down their mine is that it’s not clear that it’s viable. We may never be able to sell as much coal as we once did in China, or anywhere else. Renewables are becoming cheaper. The question is not whether coal will somehow once again become the fuel of the future, but whether or not renewables will become cheap, efficient, and widespread enough to preserve civilisation from the worst effects of climate change.

It’s not yet clear why anyone who has left would come back

The small recovery in house prices in the region is patchy and partial. The capital invested in real estate at the top of the boom may never be fully recovered. It’s not yet clear why anyone who has left would come back, unless it was for one of the jobs in the sectors that really do generate jobs in the area, like healthcare. While other parts of the country struggle with a deepening affordability crisis, in Townsville the bubble has long since popped.

All of these things are related to one another – the environmental devastation to the decline of coal; the decline of coal to the decline of resource economies. None of them are being properly considered or planned for.

This drift has had political repercussions. In recent elections, the citizens of Townsville have voted in droves for One Nation – in 2017 the three state electorates gave One Nation between 16% and 20%; in 2016 Herbert gave them just over 13%. Their vote has not been sufficient to elect them to representative offices of late, though their preferences played a role in determining close results in Townsville seats.

The votes have, of course, made a contribution to the election of two Queensland One Nation senators. This high vote for a party which has never looked more dysfunctional is beginning to look like a fixed feature of local politics.

And One Nation, famously, does not just dismiss evidence of climate change, as other conservatives might. Malcolm Roberts, who was a Queensland senator until he was ejected for violating the constitution, has argued that the whole discussion of local warming is the outcome of a globalist conspiracy. For him, the reef is not only not dying, but the claim that it might be is part of an attempt to deny Australia its sovereignty.

There’s no point in denying that racism feeds into the One Nation vote. But racism is a more or less permanent political factor in Australian history. It doesn’t explain why the One Nation vote has been building and stabilising.

Partly, no doubt, it has happened because of the declining legitimacy of the major parties. Current events in Canberra do not suggest that this problem will be dispelled any time soon. Partly, however, it may be because One Nation aggressively push a particular kind of nostalgia. People are using their vote to voice their resentment at the passing of a particular version of Australian life.

This nostalgia has two objects. The first is the most recent boom, which mostly took place during the tenure of the Howard government. It seemed like a time when Townsville, and Australia, needed to do very little in order to become, and remain, very wealthy indeed.

The measure of our wellbeing is taken from the value of real estate, and the availability of ... “real blue collar jobs”

This was true of individuals as much as it was true of the culture as a whole. It percolated into the culture as a little cluster of myths. It was a time when people with few skills travelled north looking for the six figure jobs that they were told were waiting in the Bowen Basin for anyone who would ask for them. It was a time when everyone knew of the tradies who got rich, bought jet skis and utes, and went shopping for pied a terres in fly-out towns like Townsville.

The end of this prosperity, and the attendant fear, anger, insecurity and resentment, are all grist for One Nation’s mill.

The second is the longer history of extractive colonialism, and the ethos that went along with it. Once the land was in possession of white settlers, progress was measured in tons yielded, trees cleared, ships filled with the products of the mines and farms north of the Burdekin. These priorities were seldom questioned. Once it started, environmental destruction and Indigenous displacement weren’t just a by product of this process, they were its central aim.

In the cities, development was defined as buildings built, population added, additional ships in the harbours. Townsville was founded for the purpose of shipping out primary products from north of the Burdekin, and it has never ceased to fulfil this function. Nor have many of its leaders seen beyond this as its destiny.

Jobs bonanza? The Adani project is more like a railway to nowhere | John Quiggin Read more

But Townsville does not stand apart from Australia as some kind of outlier. Too often, metropolitan Australians flatter themselves by comparisons with the regions that aren’t justified. There’s a better case for thinking that Townsville is Australia, and that in miniature, it shows us with clarity one likely future for the whole country.

After the boom, the city, and the country are adrift. With no new ideas, a humdrum group of leaders resort to modes of thought that aren’t relevant to the options before us. Research, and higher education, is defunded or ignored. The measure of our wellbeing is taken from the value of real estate, and the availability of Bill Shorten’s “real blue collar jobs”. (The real, major sources of employment, like the retail sector and health, go under the radar).

A particular kind of economic populism, which asserts the ongoing relevance of the old patterns of extraction and growth, is substituted for serious consideration of what kind of future the community has, in a world less desirous of what it has to offer. Instead of sketching out a future in our parliament, our politicians hold up lumps of coal for public veneration.

For now, like the rest of the country, Townsville’s politics are beset by wishful thinking and denial. What the city, and the reef alike need is hope for the future in a world of impermanence, which is changing faster than either can adapt.