‘New’ is thought to be the most powerful and influential word in advertising, and ‘change’, it seems, is the most feared.
Here in Shepparton, people regularly avoid anything that might constitute change and, with a damning regularity, opt for what exists, steering toward tradition, the known and the understood.
Taking that course is the rock upon which the Goulburn Valley has been built, but change, even though many might not approve, is forcing us to see life through a different prism.
All this is strangely contradictory, as Australians are known as early adopters of new technology. Yes, change when it comes to some new gadget is accepted without hesitation.
However, some in our community are changing what they do and how they live, but, of course, many more are not, for they prefer life just the way it is.
It was in 2015 that the Canadian bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed books and a professor of climate justice at The University of British Columbia, Naomi Klein, said, “To change everything, we need everyone”.
Her observation was made in the shadow of climate change, and many saw it as alarmist, extremist and the view of a minority and certainly of no relevance to the great bulk of humanity.
Klein’s eight-year-old observation now seems to have more gravitas than ever.
Change — that is, changes to Earth’s climate systems — is clearly afoot.
Take a forensic and honest look at what is happening around the world, and you’ll note that climatic changes are disrupting life on Earth.
Just recently, a storm tore through Victoria, destroying major power lines and disabling one of the state’s coal-fired power stations.
Half a million Victorians were left without power after all four units at AGL Energy’s Loy Yang A power station shut down, and wild storms brought down power lines.
Was this a product of climate change?
It’s difficult to attribute any one event to climate change, but it plays a role in worsening weather events such as that which left much of the state without power.
So if climate change is exposing weaknesses in our existing power systems — a centralised system rooted in the energy from fossil fuels — it is time we made a change and adapted to this new world.
Rather than a centralised system with many points of weakness, we need a dispersed, localised, community-based network, relying on solar and wind, with battery back-up.
Each Shepparton house, business and building, public or otherwise, would be equipped with a generous array of solar panels with excess power feeding into a community battery (a true community battery) to which all were linked.
And, of course, a city the size of Shepparton would have many such mini-grids, all linked and able to operate as one, yet set up in a way that each could operate independently.
Sound complex and impossible?
Yes, of course, it does, but it reminds me of what I heard late last year from a Monash University professor who talked about Australia’s existing power network.
He said the power system we have today took about a century of false starts, mistakes, journeys down dead ends and resets before it was “perfected”.
And so a mini-grid system powered by solar and wind and backed up by batteries is no different, meaning those in the Goulburn Valley who prefer the known, the understood, need to remember the difficulties we experienced in arriving at where we are today.
Interestingly, I spent nearly five hours just last week at a Shepparton workshop about change; well, that is, adaptation to climate change.
The conversation was lively and took us into areas that would frighten the more conservative among us.
Ironically, I noticed while taking notes that I was using a ballpoint pen handed out a few years ago at a Universal Basic Income seminar held at the University of Queensland that had the motto ‘Create change’.
Considering change, let’s recall what the late Nelson Mandela said: “It all seems impossible until it’s done”.
Robert McLean is a former editor of The News