Australia’s goldfish-brained journalists and politicians act predictably and stupidly, every summer. It’s Australia: it gets hot, there are bushfires. Every decade or so, there are mega-fires. And, every time, the memory-challenged idiots in newsrooms and electoral offices act with the same, predictable faux-horror and opportunistic “outrage”.
All sides of politics are guilty of the political necrophilia that sees them scrambling atop the bodies and the ashes to wave their little, self-righteous flags. Most odious are, naturally, the patron saints of predatory sanctimony, the Greens.
Greens MP Adam Bandt has no need to battle bushfires in his downtown Melbourne electorate, but that is not the reason he should shut up until the crisis is over. He should do so out of basic human decency […]
Among low ebbs, it is hard to recall an instance in which Australian politics has been dragged as low as Mr Bandt blaming Scott Morrison and his ministers for the tragedy engulfing NSW and Queensland and touching other states…Greens leader Richard Di Natale came a close second.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/greens-pour-fuel-on-fire-to-score-political-points
While the Greens are sickening, it’s almost as galling to have to stomach the likes of Barnaby Joyce kicking their own little can into the ashes.
Barnaby Joyce says the policies of the Greens have increased the bushfire threat, as he claims a lack of hazard reduction burning has helped fuel fires in regional NSW and Queensland […]
“We don’t have access to dams because they have been decommissioned on national parks because of green policy. We have trees that have fallen over vehicles and block roads, so people cannot either get access to fight a fire or to get away from fires. And we can’t knock over the trees because of Greens policy.”
theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/deputy-pm-michael-mccormack-slams-raving-innercity-lunatics-for-linking-climate-change-to-fires
There is at least some small measure of truth in what Joyce says, along with a heapin’ helpin’ of ignorant drivel. Nonetheless, he is still doing exactly as the Greens are: exploiting a tragedy for political gain.
Senior Coalition and Labor MPs have launched a bitter attack on the Greens for suggesting climate change policies are responsible for the catastrophic bushfire threat confronting NSW and Queensland.
[…] Federal Labor agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon, who is facing fire threats in his NSW seat of Hunter, lashed the Greens for politicising the catastrophe.
He is correct. But there is also blame-shifting and opportunism at play, too. Especially from state governments, who bear the primary responsibility for managing fuel loads in their forests.
What, exactly, contributed to these latest fires will be determined in due course by the inevitable Royal Commission. But, then, we’ve already had a Royal Commission into catastrophic bushfires.
The royal commission into Australia’s worst bushfires, on Black Saturday in Victoria in 2009, found communities and local flora and fauna were safer by reducing combustible fuel and the risks associated with fire. It also warned that vegetation along roads needed to be managed to allow egress and entry during bushfires and to maintain the roads as firebreaks.
What remains to be seen is whether those things have been adequately done. You can be sure there are a lot of local councillors, state politicians and parks and wildlife bureaucrats getting ready to cover their arses as best they can.
Meanwhile, the shrieking ninnies of the media and the swivel-eyed zealots of climate change alarmism might be served by picking up a history book.
Appalling as it is, the crisis is not unprecedented. Several of Australia’s deadliest bushfires occurred in years of below-average temperatures — in Victoria in 1926, when 60 people died, and in 1939 when 71 died and 650 homes were lost; and in Tasmania in 1967 when 62 died and almost 1300 homes were lost. The Federation drought saw a third of the continent stricken from 1891 to 1903. What is different now is that climate change is being blamed.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/greens-pour-fuel-on-fire-to-score-political-points
Was climate change responsible for the fires in 1967, 1939 and 1926? Or how about the devastating Black Thursday fires in 1851? The smoke from those fires blew across Bass Strait to Tasmania and blacked out the sun. Residents of Ulverstone on the coast thought that the end of the world had come. Flaming embers set fire to ships in Bass Strait. Five million hectares were burned – by far the most widespread devastation in Australia’s recorded history. Even before then, the earliest explorers continually remarked on the constant sight of fires and smoke wherever they went.
There is some evidence that indigenous land management first dried out the eastern seaboard of the continent, then maintained a regular regime of frequent, low-intensity fire. Fire is an inescapable part of the Australian landscape.