(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

You couldn’t get a more appropriate juxtaposition of the cluelessness of our ruling class with the grim reality of the real world than The Australian Financial Review’s Business Summit in Sydney yesterday.

While Scott Morrison dialled in to outline how brilliantly his government was managing things to the assembled economists, business doyens and whichever other suckers had forked out $600 to watch online, and while James Gorman, the Australian head of Morgan Stanley, told the gathering to “get greedy when everybody else is scared… Right now, everybody’s scared — there are opportunities”, the city outside was in chaos.

Not just flooding in outer suburbs, or around major rivers like the Nepean, the Hawkesbury and the Georges, but flooding on major urban infrastructure.

For a time the entire Northern Beaches — from where, undoubtedly, a great many of the great and the good assembled at the Hyatt Regency hailed — was cut off by road. Cars floated on the Roseville Bridge; Manly Vale residents, unaware they were at risk of flooding, were told to evacuate as Manly Dam spilled. The M5 tunnel briefly flooded.

And that was nothing compared with the havoc in areas like Richmond, Windsor and Camden. Which, in turn, was small compared with the disaster inflicted on northern NSW, where residents were still waiting for help to clean up the wreckage of their entire lives.

And Sydney was the second major city to flood after much of Brisbane went under last week.

Morrison’s culpability in climate inaction is well known, but for those who might be fooled by the recent conversion of business to the cause of decarbonisation, it’s best to recall Australia’s big corporations spent many years sabotaging climate action. They’d insist, hand on hearts, that we needed to do something about climate change, but vehemently opposed actual policies that might achieve it.

That’s why they all cheered when Labor’s highly effective and low-impact carbon price was repealed by Tony Abbott. And the Fin, which also professes to support climate action, eagerly provided them with a platform for their sabotage. 

Hopefully they glanced out the window yesterday to contemplate the consequences. Hopefully Peter Costello, who chairs the company that owns the Fin, did too.

Costello, who remains Australia’s highest-taxing treasurer, used the summit to urge the government to slash spending. For anyone who recalls the last days of the Howard-Costello government, which perished throwing money at anyone who might vote for it, Costello’s words were risible. But let’s not forget his failure, along with that of John Howard, to do anything on climate change — either emissions abatement or even adaptation investment that might have spared regional communities their current crisis.

That the people who see themselves as Australia’s leadership elite — the politicians, economists, business leaders and senior journalists — sat discussing how it was time to get greedy and how well the government was going, while Australians in regional centres got on with helping one another clean up after a colossal natural disaster because no government help was coming, says all that needs to about the chasm between that elite and the real world the rest of us live in.

And that’s even before you address the obscenity of saying it is time to get greedy while Ukrainians are witnessing their kids die from Russian bombardments.

This is an elite that calls itself leaders but refuses to lead. The prime minister who refuses to govern, likely because he knows when he tries to do anything he stuffs it up. The business community that devotes more effort to using political donations, revolving-door jobs and lobbying to influence policymakers in their own interests than to innovating and responding to community concerns. The dying legacy media that is no longer fit for purpose to serve the public interest but instead a tool for vested interests. The economists who reflexively demand “economic reform” and mass immigration when that simply serves corporate interests.

Accelerating climate change. Aggressive dictators. A pandemic. A retreat from globalisation. Commodity prices soaring. Rearmament. The prospect of stagflation. An ageing population and a dwindling workforce. The economic world is changing rapidly, presenting enormous threats and great opportunities, and a business-as-usual elite, perched above a flooded Sydney, can only think business-as-usual thoughts, chattering to each other inside a five-star, rain-lashed bubble.

For the rest of us in the real world, like the people of northern NSW struggling to clean up after their homes were washed off the map, we’re on our own.