> The issue of the reef and climate-change in general is a fairly untouched issue in Australian politics. I'm not sure that we are going to get anywhere without foreign intervention.

I'm surprised by you saying this.

I was in australia last year and saw TV news a couple of times. And multiple times climate change was mentioned as one of the election issues. Of course mentioning the issue doesn't mean it's being taken seriously or that politicians will do something about it. But I felt this seems to be at least a topic that is talked about.

Just to give you some contrast: Hillary Clinton completely stopped talking about Climate Change at all once Bernie Sanders was out of her way [1]. In Germany, there was a statistics about the topics of TV talk shows recently, which was picked up by a number of media outlets, because it had an overwhelming bias towards having the refugee crisis as the major topic. Talk shows about climate change? Zero.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/20/hillary-...