North Queensland is just at the sharp end of what’s happening across Australia

As I write, metropolitan journalists are doubtless making their way to north Queensland, whose voters have been cast as a principal actor in Labor’s defeat.

I’m from Townsville, my family still lives there, and I visit as often as I can. I can easily imagine the articles coming our way. Reporters will certainly find people who are less guarded in expressions of racism than white Australians in metropolitan areas. Others will utterly deny global heating, or perhaps talk in dark or conspiracy-minded terms about opponents to Adani’s Carmichael coalmine.

This kind of quasi-anthropological trekking to conservative rural areas is depressingly familiar fare in Trump-era America. Calling it fetishism won’t stop it happening.

Related: Australian election: Queensland drives a stake through Labor's hopes

But this prospect has some people offering a pre-emptive defence of Queenslanders. On Twitter, some have insisted that these people are no different to other Australians, sharing similar attitudes and anxieties.

It seems to me that both of these perspectives are wrong but in complex ways.

There clearly is something quite specific going on in north Queensland. It’s obviously partly related to the mine, which local media obsessively highlighted as the only real issue. Just look at the numbers.

Labor easily lost Lindsay and other suburban swing seats in the south. But in Herbert, centred on Townsville, the loss was of an unprecedented scale.

Their incumbent received lowest primary vote in the seat since the first national election 1901, when north Queenslanders sent Labor’s Fred Bamford to Canberra after he campaigned on excluding South Sea Islander workers from the sugar cane fields.

In Herbert only one in four voters gave Labor a first preference. Labor also recorded its lowest primary votes in nearby Capricornia (24.7%) and Dawson (20.6%), where the scandal-plagued incumbent George Christensen got an 11.3% swing in his favour. All three electorates have returned Labor members in recent times, and Capricornia in particular was, until recently, a relatively reliable Labor seat.

In Dawson and Herbert the combined total of the far-right and populist-right parties — One Nation, Clive Palmer’s United Australia party and the Katter Australia party — eclipsed Labor’s tally. In Capricornia Labor only just edged out that combined tally. And now One Nation, in particular, looks comfortable and established as a part of the mix in these electorates, which have contributed significantly to the election of their Queensland senators.

North Queensland politics have always been volatile and subject to the lure of populism and protest votes but this is new.

Some – from the Coalition and Labor camps – have pointed to the Stop Adani convoy, organised by the Bob Brown Foundation, as a direct cause of this heavily depressed Labor vote.

This is a convenient but unsatisfying explanation that leads us directly to a dead end. If Labor’s electoral prospects are this dependent on Bob Brown no longer doing the kind of thing that Bob Brown has always done, it is more fragile and hapless than even I could have imagined.

Also, this suggests that transient intrusions by national figures are more decisive than local factors – bearing down hard on these lets us put the results in national context in more convincing and disturbing ways.

One thing that has been so far underplayed is News Corp’s newspaper monopoly throughout the region. Those newspapers have mounted a sustained propaganda campaign in favour of the new mine. On the reef coast they have downplayed the damage to the Great Barrier Reef owing to the climate crisis. And if anyone can be blamed for turning Bob Brown’s visit into a harbinger of doom, it’s these papers.

The virtual collapse of other regional news media means that News has an outsized agenda-setting role in the area. This resembles an exacerbated version of News’s national position, which became a subject of broader debate during the campaign. News’s malign influence is fractal — it distorts debate at the local level just as surely as at the national level.

But there’s a far bigger problem – historical, existential – which can’t simply be laid at News Corp’s, or even wholly at north Queensland’s feet.

A friend, artist and researcher Rachel O’Reilly said on Facebook on Sunday that “Queensland is not a discrete geography but a dominant mode of production”. O’Reilly is from Gladstone and some of her artistic practice has focused on the destruction of its national environment in the operation and extension of its port. That port in turn serves a hinterland dominated by extractive industries.

Her point is about Australia’s present and its history, which from a certain distance has been a series of extractive land grabs, starting with the foundational, violent dispossession of Indigenous people, continuing through immigration exclusion, and through to the present of blind, heedless and reckless coalmining.

People in the southern cities have been able to maintain some psychological distance from this – from what goes on in whatever they imagine Queensland to be. But they too – as financiers, realtors, landlords, lawyers, state functionaries, speculators – have always been complicit in what happened on the frontier of extraction.

All of us have benefited from theft and environmental degradation, all of us have depended on new mines, new finds. North Queensland is just at the sharp end. There’s a real question after this election as to whether Australia knows any other way to be.

The country has foundered for so long on the issue of the climate emergency because no one has a clear, politically salient vision for a post-extractive, post-carbon, post-colonial economy.

The Liberals and those to their right deny that any such thing is necessary, just as many of them deny Indigenous dispossession. They nurse lumps of coal in parliament, or claim that the science of climate emergency is a globalist plot, or personally plan yet more mines. Labor has dithered between half-hearted action and half-hearted agreement with the right for years, as if the climate can be met halfway, and is constantly punished for whichever emphasis it chooses. Bill Shorten’s equivocations on Adani exemplify this perfectly. The Greens, so far, are incapable of persuading sufficient numbers of people that their proposals are viable, or can incorporate just transitional arrangements for the people dependent on extraction.

And none of the parties are connected with, or pressured by, a climate-focused social movement of sufficient size or force. Climate change policies are mostly experienced as triennial retail offerings to atomised voters who are encouraged to think in terms of their own individual economic interests.

People in a district which was rich during the boom and presented with no real alternative prospects voted transactionally. At one level this is unsurprising, and all the safari journalism that southern media can muster may not yield deeper insights.

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This is not to absolve the voters in my home region, or elsewhere in majoritarian white Australia. It is high time to stop pretending, for example, that people vote for One Nation out of any other sentiment than racism; or that extractive industries have not been connected with colonialism, environmental destruction and racism from the beginning; or that coalmines are not directly connected with the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, which is happening under north Queenslanders’ noses.

But while racism is a more or less permanent factor in Australian politics, what has dramatically eroded, clearly, is any confidence in the idea that Australia’s political system can generate ideas and viable plans for addressing the crisis in our midst. Many people appear to have opted to derive what they can from the status quo, while they can – north Queenslanders as much as anyone else.

Perhaps our political system as it’s now constituted will never frame an adequate response to the climate crisis. And elections probably cannot save us in the absence of popular pressure, resilience and creativity.

But we can be certain that if north Queensland and Australia cannot remake themselves on a wholly new basis, they will nevertheless be remade.

• Jason Wilson is a Guardian Australia columnist