Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Australia faces another widespread, unseasonal and possibly extreme rain event. How damaging will it be? Time will tell. More extreme weather events are occurring all over the globe. An single event may not tell us much about trends unless perhaps its intensity is “off the scale”. Multiple events begin to show a pattern and provide clear evidence that climate fundamentals are changing.
What we see in these more intense and more frequent events is that our existing infrastructure cannot cope. It is badly sited. It is not robust enough. In Australia, it does not even meet current standards in most cases. Our existing infrastructure is not being built to meet current challenges, let alone the forthcoming ones, and it is not being re-sited or hardened as appropriate.
“The issues surrounding building quality in Australia have been highlighted in a new report from the Australian Housing and Urban Institute (AHURI).
It found about 70 per cent of existing homes have building quality problems, while more than two-thirds of homes have an energy rating of three stars or lower.” – ABC.
There is no sign of current standards being met, let alone of Australia creating new standards to meet climate change and then actually acting upon them. I see an Australia that is falling further and further behind the requirements of reality, in this matter as in so many other matters. I foresee an Australia of crumbling infrastructure where our total build each year will be less than losses to climate change damage.
We are going backwards now. In the future we will go backwards even faster. Nothing is being put in place to arrest any of this. In this regard, we are no different from almost all other countries. They are going backwards too. This is the end point of neoliberalism. Dollars and protected compounds and enclaves for the rich 0.1%. Collapse for everyone else.