It seemed simple at the time. By pricing carbon, we would ‘internalise the externalities’: make capitalists pay, and they’d change their behaviour. Of course, that only makes sense if you accept that capitalism does what it says on the box.

Many of us are grieving today. There are jokes about moving to New Zealand, and memes about excising Queensland. More seriously, though, here are some initial thoughts to prompt discussion on what lessons there may be in this moment.

Part of what underlies this debate is that the Yes campaign for marriage equality in 2017, in its most formal organised form (under the banner The Equality Campaign), emphasised LGBTIQ equality in private family life, rather than broader public life. The campaign quite explicitly decided not to defend Safe Schools, gender diversity, or to confront the homophobia and transphobia stirred up by the No campaign.

‘It all starts with learning how to read, to write, to count and to think in the national language. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an important role for culture in remote schools but nevertheless people need a decent education in the national language.’

The Yes campaign’s singular focus on marriage equality in the face of conservative attacks on trans people and the Safe Schools program represented a cautious, small-target approach to social change – and it stands in stark contrast to the revolutionary aspirations of Gay Liberation. Whereas the Yes campaign was anxious to assure conservatives that it would not challenge gender roles, the gay liberationists of the early 1970s openly critiqued the nuclear family and other oppressive institutions.

The Intervention’s promise to improve the lives of children and young people in remote Aboriginal communities has resulted in exactly the opposite, and now children are being taken away at a rate higher than during the Stolen Generations. The Intervention era has produced a three-fold increase in children in out-of-home-care in the NT.

While the right’s response to the postal survey has been somewhat predictable, what has also been hard to watch is the response of some in the ‘yes’ campaign. Despite the unfolding homophobia and transphobia around the postal survey, it is clear that groups like Australian Marriage Equality and GetUp have decided to steer away from these topics. These groups have rolled out doctors and heterosexual families to provide reassurance that marriage equality does not involve a gay agenda of radical ‘gender theory’.

Workers are providing free labour for Shires and private companies, and they face eight weeks suspension if they miss work. ‘It’s a form of slavery,’ Matthew Ryan explains. ‘We’re working hard for peanuts. People are hungry under the CDP changes … There’s less money to provide food for the kids. It’s starving our people … you might as well give us rations, like back in the old days.’

In July last year, ABC’s Four Corners aired ‘Australia’s Shame’, a disturbing exposé on the abuse of juvenile Aboriginal prisoners at the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. The story was picked up by a Yolŋu radio station, but the newsreader soon ran into a problem: there is no Yolŋu word for torture. They substituted the English.

As an Australian colonial possession from the First World War to 1968, Nauru was the ‘prize of the Pacific’, in the words of historian Nancy Viviani. Nauru, along with New Guinea, was part of what the Australian ruling class felt to be its legitimate claim: colonial control over the Pacific. Often called the ‘Father of Federation’ in Australia, Henry Parkes thought ‘we ought to hold mastery of the hemisphere’. Australia ousted Germany from both Nauru and New Guinea, and fought for joint British-French control of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), where Australia also sourced slaves.