A Call for unified National Leadership regarding Climate Change
Let us draw the line now under what is past. Let us just get on with working together to prevent global temperatures rising further.
As soon as possible, can our Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition convene a Roundtable, shaping a bipartisan approach, drawing in civil society leaders, as may be helpful?
It would be best, wonderful, if this could be done before the crucial next UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP25), December 2-13 this year.
I came back yesterday from the Annual Pacific Church Leaders meeting in Suva to the discourse here about the awful bushfires.
In Suva, Church leaders from all over Pacific shared their current experiences of climate change: the trauma for communities displaced and forced to relocate inland and away from a swapped coast; the anguish then for traditional cultures of “leaving ancestors behind”; the dread of more frequent and more violent cyclones and even the monthly anxiety for places not far above sea-level at the time of a full and new moon’s impact on tides. Said folk from such places: “We don’t sleep so well those nights!”
It is a global issue. Humankind must find a quite unprecedented and sustained level of cooperation.
The human family could do with some places of hope where there was a unified national response.
We urge our PM and our Leader of the Opposition to meet together and shape a way forward, as soon as practicable.
Let Australia be an island of hope! It is a matter now of intelligent and cooperative leadership.
Bishop Philip Huggins
