by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations
Acknowledgment rather than denial of a crisis’s reality is the key to coping with it, but the 2026 Australian Government budget is a continuation of the Labor Government’s denial of the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions before the climate reaches a tipping point.
The 2026 budget speech was titled ‘Resilience and reform’. ‘Resilience’ – a very fluid term favoured by political communicators these days – was deployed 13 times, but the word ‘climate’ failed to appear even once.
This glaring omission reaffirms the government’s reluctance – seemingly intentional – to discuss climate change risks, as I have previously discussed in P&I.