A Sunburned Country

Last week both Melbourne and Sydney had a deluge of rain that cleared the major city’s skies of bushfire haze. No longer will the bushfires be right there in everybody’s face. What happens now will be a test of Australian’s ability to remember and translate smouldering anger into political action.

At last count the fires have claimed 25.5 million acres, at least 28 human lives, a billion animals and 2000 homes. And still they burn.

Australian’s have felt the centre of the world’s attention which has revealed our national leaders as inept, lazy, callous - a sad joke that landed flat garnering nothing but cynical smirks from those in the know.

There is plenty here to make a cynic’s case, although none of it new. Last year before the federal election, I had on the radio show journalist Michael West who had just released the documentary Dirty Power. Shot with Greenpeace’s Investigative Journalism unit - it revealed federal politics as a revolving door to the three pillars that block any real action on climate change: the Murdoch media, Fossil Fuel Industry Groups and Coal Lobby Groups.

It’s less that the LNP is influenced by coal interests than the LNP represents coal interests. The same people move back and forth in a seamless, unquestioned exchange between coal and politics, politics and coal.

This corruption is not isolated to the LNP either - in a frank response to a question I posed to West he answered that Labor was little better:
“Let’s say that Labor wins the next election. Well now you’ll have a flood of lobbyists to Canberra because their mates are in power…”

International attention has forced us to evaluate ourselves through another’s eyes. As a result, West’s third pillar - the Murdoch media - has been shown up as an absurdist theatre of ideologically driven fabrication and disinformation. Murdoch’s papers and Sky News have been forced to bend over backwards to deny the fires are related to climate change and to allege that they are unexceptional in size then when this was no longer possible, to explain they were the result of the Greens’ preventing back-burning and finally decry them as the fault of rogue arsonists.

This last point in particular recalls Soviet state run media during high Stalinism. The famous paper Pravda was hysterical over imagined saboteurs and wreckers undermining the great Soviet industry. It became clear why the USSR prevented foreign press from being published inside its borders - their media by comparison would be revealed to be blatant lies. Similarly, in Australia 2020 sober foreign coverage of the fires betray Murdoch’s media empire as a pedlar of fallacy, ready to close ranks around the government to the bitter end.

So where does that leave the LNP? In many ways the bushfires are a piece of mistimed cosmic justice delivered to them on an immense scale. That the animals, humans and homes all incinerated has rendered Morrison’s miracle victory hollow. So too the LNP defeat of the climate in Australia’s climate election on a platform of franking credits and tax scares. Morrison is not smiling anymore. Nor will we see the same smirk after snubbing Pacific leaders in Tuvalu, nor the utter cynicism with which the LNP have dealt with climate change and the endless litany of political and economic boosts given to coal, fracking and natural gas sectors. All have culminated in a calamity delivered right into the lap of the LNP.

Politics is a game that forgets the losers but remembers their mistakes. It’s deeply satisfying for those who felt despair at the last election to watch the fat bespectacled godboy sweat under the lights and proceed, watched by all, mocked by most, along a tightrope jerked rightward by his own party to the brittle sound long knives sharpening against a spinning and bloodstained circular stone. Comeuppance made public is comeuppance doubled.

All this schadenfreude does nothing to solve the crisis at hand which is daily spinning further and further out of control. If your house in the country survived this fire - what about next summer or the summer after? The baying for blood drowns out the salient fact that Australians voted for Morrison in the climate election. As a nation we were given a choice - posed in the frenzy of a federal election but posed nonetheless - either act on climate or take the economic hack that is franking credits. Australia made its choice. Whether the fires create action on climate or we simply sink deeper into the morass of denial and diversion is less a comment on our democratic system and more a question for who we have become as a nation. If there is such a thing as a national soul then we better start searching for it and quickly.