The time has come to say fair’s fair

“How can we dance when our earth is turning, how do we sleep while our bed’s are burning?” – Beds are Burning by Midnight Oil

I remember my first onstage encounter well. The year was 1984 and the Oils were at the peak of their game and they were awesome! 10…1 had recorded amazing sales throughout Australia and my band (Huxton Creepers) were playing at the Entertainment Centre in Melbourne before the Oil’s, who were on their “Red Sails in the Sunset” tour.

So there we were, four 20 year olds who six months earlier had been playing to 15 of their friends in a tiny pub and now six months later we had record companies chasing us and we were about to go onstage in front of 10,000 people. The dream sorta stopped there, as soon as the stage lights went up and our singer said “Hi we’re the Huxton Creepers” an orange went flying by his head and just missed my head and then the Oils fans spent the rest of our set throwing coins at us during the songs and then chanting “Oils, Oils” between the songs. It was a rough initiation but at least our road crew got to buy cigarettes with all the change that landed on the stage!!

I was thinking of Peter Garrett again today given that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is set to be debated in Canberra this week and he is now the Environment Minister. It’s a real shame that he chose not to sing on the re-working of Beds are Burning which is the anthem of the climate change movement. This may be inevitable when people of principle enter politics.

Last week I spent a few days in Ha Tinh Province in Vietnam with our Country Director for Vietnam, the Head of our International Emergencies and Conflict Team and some colleagues from the ActionAid Vietnam Emergencies Team. During this time we visited Mrs Ca who is a 70 year old widow trying to survive on a quarter of a hectare of land on a flood plain near the sea with her daughter and two granddaughters.

This year she has been flooded out twice and when the water comes it is now two metres high rather than 1.5 metres as a result of climate change. This change is enough to ruin her wells, so she has no fresh water, destroy the productivity of her small plot of land and force her to raise the bottom of the walls of her house with bricks and rocks to enable to sea water to both flow in and flow out of her house. In a sense she’s living on a boat.

ActionAid has provided her with a water tank that is over two metres tall and can be filled with runoff from the roof when it rains. So now she has fresh water. We are helping her community develop a community action plan to use in future floods to minimize the loss of life and damage to property. No more lives should be lost in this village as a result of floods. We are also linking Mrs Ca up with the National Women’s Union so that they can take Mrs Ca’s case to the Commune Leader to help Mrs Ca and others like her develop a sustainable livelihood.

But this is just one story, please remember it Mr Rudd when you’re debating the CPRS this week. Australia should commit to a 40% reduction in emissions by 2020 (from 1990 levels) and contribute our fair share in compensatory funding to the global fund that is being established under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

We’re all watching.