Your Views: Letters to the Editor
This week, InDaily readers respond to Sam Dighton’s opinion piece and question whether Golden North can keep its name.
Responding to If Adelaide is going to host COP31, we need more climate action
Sam Dighton is right: hosting COP31 would put Adelaide under the climate action microscope. But if South Australia wants to be taken seriously on the world stage, we need more than talking points and solar stats — we need a structural shift in how we plan, build, move, and govern.
Yes, the state has made real progress in renewable energy generation. Our grid is now more than 70 per cent renewable. That’s no small feat. But climate leadership today is no longer about what percentage of your electricity comes from wind or solar. It’s about your whole-of-society carbon metabolism: what you build, how people live, and whether you’re cutting emissions across all sectors—including transport, buildings, and land use—not just the electricity grid.
And this is where South Australia is still failing.
We are building the wrong things in the wrong places. While Premier Malinauskas talks up a green future, his government is approving climate-negative megaprojects like the Walker Corporation’s 38-storey office tower on public land at Festival Plaza – built for fossil-fuel investors, not future generations. Meanwhile, 20 hectares of Adelaide parklands are being seized for a high-emissions, private LIV Golf facility – complete with new roads, new car parks, and an indoor driving range in the middle of a biodiversity corridor.
So yes, Adelaide boasts green space and renewable energy. But we’re also destroying some of the very assets that make us climate-resilient: open space, tree canopy, biodiversity corridors, permeable soils. A Port Jackson shark washing up on West Beach isn’t just a disturbing image – it’s a harbinger of how much we’re already losing.
We’re lagging on transport too. EV uptake is slow, but more importantly, we’ve failed to build a walkable, low-car city. While cities like Vienna, Oslo and Paris reclaim streets for people and transform urban mobility, Adelaide continues to sprawl outward, subsidising car dependence and rezoning green wedges for housing estates. Meanwhile, the Adelaide Hills face increased bushfire risk, and low-income suburbs face heatwaves without adequate shade or transport alternatives.
The climate crisis isn’t a branding opportunity. It’s an existential threat. Hosting COP31 must be more than a pitch for hotel bookings and government grants – it must be a mirror. A chance to confront how property developers, car culture and weak planning laws still dominate this state’s political economy. South Australia could lead. We have the scientists, the Indigenous knowledge, the community energy groups, and a deep history of democratic reform. But real leadership means drawing lines – halting urban sprawl, defunding destructive megaprojects, investing in regenerative infrastructure, and aligning every portfolio – housing, planning, transport, education—with climate goals.
It means protecting our parklands, not paving them. It means banning fossil fuel sponsorships from our cultural institutions and sport. It means taxing high-carbon activities and using the revenue to fund housing retrofits, nature restoration and just transitions. It means viewing climate not as a branding tool or a future aspiration, but as a non-negotiable lens for every decision made now. The world will not be impressed by a glossy brochure of past achievements. It will ask: what are you doing today – on land, housing, equity and emissions? And are you willing to stand up to the powerful interests still driving ecological collapse? If Adelaide is serious about hosting COP31, it must be ready to act like it. – Stewart Sweeney
