19/11/2019

(AU) Australia's Bushfire Politics: The Parties Prevaricate While The Country Burns

The Guardian - 

Summer was yet to begin and the bush was on fire. But the last thing on the government’s mind was climate change
‘Those who linked the bushfires to climate change were “raving inner-city lunatics”, according to the deputy PM.’ Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian
Even for modern Australian political discourse, it jarred.
Michael McCormack, deputy prime minister and representative of regional and rural electorates, began the week by “calling out” those “raving inner-city lunatics” who dared to link climate change with Australia’s worsening bushfire season.
“We’ve had fires in Australia since time began, and what people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance – they need help, they need shelter,” McCormack told the national broadcaster.
“They don’t need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies at this time, when they’re trying to save their homes, when in fact they’re going out in many cases saving other peoples’ homes and leaving their own homes at risk.”
The comments were made early Monday morning as the nation woke to learn it was facing a “catastrophic” fire emergency along much of the east coast, with worse conditions to come.
Emotions were already high. Three people – Julie Fletcher, George Nole and Vivian Chaplain – had died in the 48 hours prior, as a firestorm swept across their northern New South Wales properties.
Australia has always equated the start of summer with bushfire season. But every year it seems to get earlier. It began in September, the first month of spring, for Queensland, when fire crews battled to save life and property in areas which had stood untouched by bushfires for decades.
Then, rainforest burned. Just over four weeks later and rural firefighter volunteers and emergency service personnel got the call again, with fires stretching from the mid-north coast of NSW to the Queensland border. Summer was yet to begin, and Australia was already on fire.
McCormack’s comments followed criticism of a prime ministerial tweet offering “thoughts and prayers” as the bushfire crisis took hold.
Scott Morrison, who less than three years ago smuggled a piece of coal into parliament as a question time prop, imploring “this is coal – don’t be afraid, don’t be scared” at the opposition, and now leads a government threatening to crack down on environmental activism against the resource sector, was condemned by Greens MPs for inaction on climate change.
It was in that context that McCormack, in the face of disgruntled rumblings within his own party room, where a former leader who maintains electoral popularity and media cut-through still sits, turned his outrage meter to 11, sparking Australia’s week of stupid in the process.
From the ABC studios in Sydney, the interview spread as quickly as smoke. From Ballarat in the south-east to South Australia’s border towns, Townsville in the north, Perth in the west and everywhere in between, McCormack’s “raving inner-city lunatics” comments overshadowed almost everything but the fire coverage itself.
It set the tone for the week in political discourse. Wanting to talk about climate change as a cause of the increasingly unpredicted and unprecedented bushfires marked you as a “leftie”. Those on the right pointed to “Green party” policies as having stymied hazard reduction efforts and other fire preparations.
Neither was true. But McCormack’s comments took hold, fuelling debate about whether or not Australia was allowed to have a debate on climate change as more than 100 fires scarred the landscape and capital cities were choked by smoky haze.
More than 2,000 news articles, opinion pieces, radio slots and TV segments were taken up by the comments. The prime minister and his opposition counterpart shared a “not today” unity ticket whenever climate change was raised, while authorities, past and current, stressed all preparations had been made within a shortening window of time, exacerbated by the record drought, as they tried to inject some facts into the debate.
McCormack’s comments were still ringing around the country as the man who used to hold his position, as deputy prime minister and leader of the National party, attempted to interject his own take into the debate. Barnaby Joyce didn’t want to attack the Greens, he told Sky News, because two of the people who died, had “most likely” voted for the party.
Joyce had raised his view of the deceased’s voting preference apropos of nothing.
He’d been asked about firefighting resources, but the man once described as Australia’s “best retail politician” strayed into voting beliefs in a garbled bid to explain sections of his northern NSW electorate.
“I acknowledge that the two people who died were most likely people who voted for the Green party, so I am not going to start attacking them,” he told Sky News, in comments that flashed around the nation.
“That’s the last thing I want to do. What I wanted to concentrate on is the policies that we can [use to] mitigate these tragedies happening again in the future.”
He agreed climate change was an issue but maintained the solution to Australia’s coming bushfire woes was to get back to hazard reduction burning, claiming fire authorities could do it in “the winter” and that the process “has been confounded by excessive bureaucracy”.
“And I think that the bureaucracy is driven by, let’s call it by conservation principle, by people who do not live in the forest, they do not live near the area.”
Again, fire authorities pushed back, calling out the claim as a furphy, and maintaining fire season preparation, including hazard reduction burns, had been done, but the old ways of preparing Australia’s bush no longer addressed the rapidly coming new normal.
But more than 1,000 media pieces later, Joyce’s words had taken hold. The following day, they were echoed by a fellow backbencher, this time from the Liberal party benches, with Craig Kelly taking one line from a scientific paper which found the amount of land burned by wildfires had decreased globally by 24% in the past two decades, and using it to explain to Sky News why Australia’s early bushfire season, already rated catastrophic, was not overly unusual.
But he neglected to mention the research pointing to human changes in the landscape, where environments had been altered for agriculture, as the leading explanation for the decrease. Instead, Kelly said, someone needed to tackle the Greens’ mentality that had led to a reduction in hazard reduction burns.
Again, apolitical fire experts, who had been responsible for preparing entire Australian states for bushfire seasons, dismissed the claims as false. Misleading. A furphy. A lie. But with talkback radio hosts and TV talking heads “asking the question” of Australia’s political armchair expert class, the narrative stranglehold remained.
On Tuesday, the same day Joyce was linking voting preferences with those who had died, the Greens senator Jordon Steele-John accused the major parties of being “no better than a bunch of arsonists” for supporting coal-fired power stations.
“How dare any of you suggest that in this moment at this time it is appropriate to be prosecuting a piece of legislation with the aim of propping up coal,” he announced to the Senate chamber.
“You are no better than a bunch of arsonists – borderline arsonists – and you should be ashamed.”
The condemnation was swift. But again, the comments had taken hold.
On Friday, after a week of back and forth about who was allowed to speak on what issues, and when, and a fourth death was announced, the National Parks Association of NSW issued a statement calling for the “all-too familiar claims after each fire disaster” – the lack of prescribed burning – to stop.
“[It’s] not only unhelpful, it’s dangerous and takes away from the importance of developing new ways to deal with the increased threat fire is having on our communities.”
What was needed, the group said, was pushing emotion to the side, and listening to the experts.
“Focusing purely on hazard reduction, and in one tenure at that, is a recipe for future disaster.”
At the same time, mayors of fire-stricken communities, representing a wide swathe of the political divide, came together to plead for the government to “acknowledge the link between climate change and bushfire,” and to provide more funding and leadership as Australia was pushed into a new reality: anticipating the previously unprecedented.
But from the major parties and their leadership, there was nothing, as the “not today” bipartisan narrative held.
With authorities warning the latest threat is not over, and to brace for a potentially catastrophic summer, it will be months before the smoke clears.

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(AU) Actually, It Is Climate Change

The Saturday Paper - Mike Seccombe

As the prime minister refuses to discuss the science linking climate change and the bushfires burning in eastern Australia, former Howard adviser Geoff Cousins compares the political strategy to the tactics of the American gun lobby.
Firefighters from the ACT on watch and act near Possum Brush, just south of Taree, NSW, on Tuesday. Credit: Stephen Dupont for The Saturday Paper
The quote you are about to read did not come from Scott Morrison, although our prime minister repeatedly invoked the same sentiments this week, every time someone asked him about the role of climate change in eastern Australia’s unprecedented bushfires.
“This sort of response isn’t helpful. Families are mourning. Offer a prayer and temper your desire for politics …”
Nor is this next quote from New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who deemed it “inappropriate” to talk about the causes of climate change while her state was burning:
“This is a time for people to grieve, to mourn, and to heal. This is not a time for political discussions or public policy debates.”
Those words aren’t attributable to Barnaby Joyce or Michael McCormack, or John Barilaro, or any of the other advocates of a bigger Australian fossil fuel industry. Nor was it Joel Fitzgibbon, or other “coalies” on the Labor side.
Actually, the quotes come from the United States’ National Rifle Association. The first was in response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, in which nearly 60 people were killed and more than 400 were injured. The second came after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which 32 died and 17 were wounded.
Whenever there is a gun atrocity in the US, the first response of the NRA and its political acolytes is to say words to the effect of “now is not the time to talk about it”. By expressing concern for the victims and the bereaved, and by implying insensitivity on the part of those who would debate the underlying causes of the tragedy, they seek to avoid scrutiny of their culpability. The expectation is that, given a little time, the populace and media cycle will move on.
Geoff Cousins has seen the tactic deployed before in this country. Some 23 years ago, the corporate heavyweight accepted a job as an adviser to the then recently elected prime minister, John Howard, just before Howard was called to respond to Australia’s worst act of domestic terrorism, in which 35 people were killed and at least 18 wounded at Port Arthur.
Cousins was privy to the government’s internal division about how to respond to Martin Bryant’s murderous rampage. He was there when Howard faced down those in his own party, and particularly those in the National Party, who argued it was the wrong time to talk about tighter gun laws, so soon after the event.
“Howard said, ‘Wrong, this is precisely the time to talk about gun control. And more than that it’s precisely the time to do something about it.’ And he did,” Cousins says.
“And now we have a prime minister who is doing precisely the opposite.”
When The Saturday Paper spoke to Cousins on Wednesday this week, he had just driven hundreds of kilometres through the charred and smoky countryside to Sydney from his own tinder-dry but mercifully unburnt property in northern NSW. He recalled one visual memory that remains particularly clear in his mind after so many years.
“As John Howard walked out of the memorial service for the victims, he saw one of the fathers whose son had died, and immediately went and embraced him.”
It was not staged, but the media caught the powerful moment. This week, there was a similar picture of Morrison hugging a man whose home had been lost to the fires.
A similar image, but an entirely different subtext, Cousins says. Howard’s spontaneous gesture conveyed not only sympathy but also a promise of change that might prevent future tragedies.
“It was,” Cousins says, “an absolute sign that action would be taken.” By contrast, Morrison’s embrace offered “some sort of hollow comfort, without any action”.
“Morrison and all the others – the deputy prime minister, all the cabinet ministers who refuse to talk about it – are hollow men,” Cousins says. “And their gestures are hollow gestures.”
Cousins says the response of government this week to those who talked about fossil fuel and climate change was straight out of the NRA playbook.
Fires around the Hillville area west of Taree, NSW, on Tuesday. (Credit: Stephen Dupont for The Saturday Paper)
But here’s the thing: the prime minister, who styles himself as the champion of quiet Australians, failed to make Australians quiet. People – not just the usual advocates of climate action, but also rural mayors, firefighters and fire victims – continued to demand the government acknowledge the causes of the disaster and commit to action.
Take Fiona Lee, for example. Until last Friday she lived with her partner and their three-year-old daughter in a house they built themselves at Warrawillah, near Bobin, south-west of Port Macquarie, on the NSW mid north coast.
“Actually, decades ago was precisely the right time to talk about climate change and a lot of people are furious, myself included, that the government has ignored the warnings.”
About 1pm that day, a fire that had been burning in nearby bush for about two weeks turned towards their property. They made the decision to evacuate. A few hours later, their house was engulfed by flames.
The now homeless family stayed one night with friends in nearby Wingham, but when that little town also came under fire threat they moved on to Newcastle. On Tuesday, they hit the road again, to Sydney, where they joined a protest outside state parliament. Among the several hundred gathered there were a few other people directly affected, and the crowd heard messages of support from other fire victims who couldn’t be there in person. Lee brought with her a small metal drum. In it were ashes of her home.
“We felt compelled to go down there and call on politicians to face the truth,” she told The Saturday Paper.
“The government has no right to tell us not to talk about what’s causing this. I feel that the majority of people that have been affected by this, and I’ve been talking to them, believe that now is precisely the right time to talk about it. Actually, decades ago was precisely the right time to talk about it and a lot of people are furious, myself included, that they have ignored the warnings.”
Apart from the threshold issue of fossil fuels’ contribution to climate change, she says, there are questions about government’s preparedness to deal with the megafires caused by global heating.
“On the basis of firsthand experience on the ground, it doesn’t seem to me that the RFS [Rural Fire Service] had enough resources,” she says. “In our local area there was just a handful of really dedicated guys protecting 30 or more properties. There was no sign of helicopters or other aircraft.”
Lee accepts they had to prioritise areas of higher population, but thinks they should be able to do both.
Back in April, more than 20 former fire chiefs from all states and territories issued a joint statement making the same points: that climate change was lengthening Australia’s fire season and making fires more intense. They called for increased resources for forestry management, national parks, and urban and rural fire services. And they noted that many governments were instead cutting the budgets for these services. They were ignored.
Another point the fire chiefs emphasised was that fires are affecting areas that have never burned before.
Mark Graham, an ecologist, can attest to that.
“There are areas now burning at an intensity and in a season at which they never have before,” he says.
“And there are communities, vegetation communities such as rainforest communities, which have ancient lineages, where fire has simply never occurred, moist refuges in the landscape since before the break-up of Gondwana, back 60, 80, 100 million years.”
When his father, also an ardent environmentalist, died five years ago, Graham decided the best way to spend his inheritance was to buy and protect some of this land. He acquired 400 hectares on the Dorrigo plateau, “recognised as one of the greatest refuges of ancient biodiversity on the planet”.
He had a little cabin on it and at night he could shine a spotlight on a big old tree, in which lived a family of greater gliders, the world’s largest gliding marsupial, and a species listed as nationally vulnerable.
“The tree is a pile of ashes on the ground now,” he says. “It burned in the first week of spring, and that fire is still burning, 10 weeks later.”
Even if the animals survived the fire, they will probably starve. Graham says the blaze took out 80 per cent of the vegetation on his property, along with the cabin, part of a cumulative total approaching 400,000 hectares.
“We’re basically dealing with walls of fire,” he says, “burning through landscapes that are not fire-adapted, and which have been refuges going back into deep, deep time. The consequences for the biodiversity will be dire.”
Fires around the Hillville area west of Taree, NSW, on Tuesday. (Credit: Stephen Dupont for The Saturday Paper)
There would be ongoing human consequences, too. Three major water sources beginning in the fire-affected area – the Bellinger, Orara and Nymboida Rivers – provide water for about 160,000 residents on the coast nearby. Those rivers now are laden with ash and sediment.
That’s what an ecologist says, but what does the government say?
On Monday the federal leader of the Nationals, Michael McCormack, went on ABC Radio’s RN Breakfast to talk about how people shouldn’t be talking about climate change.
He said Australia had always burned.
The thing that set McCormack off was a media release issued last Saturday by Greens MP Adam Bandt, in which Bandt noted that the government had ignored the warning of the fire chiefs about the catastrophic threat. He also pointed out that Australia’s coal industry was a major contributor to global heating, and that “apocalyptic scenes like these will not only continue but get worse in the years to come” unless Australia and the world stopped using fossil fuels.
All this was factually accurate and inarguable on the science. The tendentious bit was where he suggested Scott Morrison, through his support for the fossil fuel industry, had “contributed to making it more likely that these kinds of tragedies will occur”.
Bandt called on the prime minister to “apologise to the Australian people for putting their towns and lives at risk”.
McCormack was livid. What people needed now, he said, was real practical assistance, not “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies”.
When program host Hamish Macdonald repeatedly pointed out that concerns about climate change and demands for greater government action were not coming from only the urban Greens, but also from rural mayors, former and current firefighters, and fire victims themselves, the deputy prime minister dodged. He even suggested the 23 former fire chiefs might be a “front group” for the Greens.
Then he abruptly shifted his argument, moving to step two of the NRA playbook: shift the blame.
“We need our state forests and our parks [personnel] to be able to go in and clean up some of the fuel load,” he said. “What we want to see is not those areas locked up for just ecotourism …”
Later that day, on 2GB Radio, shock jock Ray Hadley and McCormack’s state counterpart, NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro, escalated the blame-shifting. The real culprits, they argued, were “lefties” and “greenies” who opposed hazard reduction burning.
“When are we going to have the discussion, after this is all over, about the fervent opposition from the Greens to hazard reduction burns?” Hadley said.
Barilaro asked a similar question: “While we lock up national parks and allow that fuel load on the forest floor to grow, why are we surprised when these fires hit they are at the intensity that they are at?”
They could not have been more wrong. For a start, just 9 per cent of NSW is “locked up”, the second-lowest proportion in Australia, after Queensland’s 8 per cent. Second, if those parks are less well tended than they should be, it is substantially because the Berejiklian government cut a total of $121 million from the parks budget for 2016-17 and 2017-18, and a further $80 million in its most recent budget.
More importantly, though, neither the Greens nor any of Australia’s main conservation groups express “fervent opposition” to hazard reduction. They accept that many of Australia’s ecosystems are fire-adapted and need occasional burning to maintain biodiversity.
And while they apply certain caveats – about fire intensity, which ecosystems should and should not be burned et cetera – their position on fire, like their position on climate change, reflects the best science. To suggest otherwise is to be guilty of either ignorance or deliberate untruth.
Many experts – among them Professor Ross Bradstock, director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, and former NSW fire and rescue commissioner Greg Mullins – are signatories to the statement about climate change and fire risk that the government ignored.
“Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim,” Mullins says.
Hazard reduction burning – that is, low-intensity burning of the combustible litter on the ground – can be very effective in the right place at the right time, says Brendan Mackey, director of the Climate Change Response Program at Griffith University.
The major impediment to such burns, he says, has actually been climate change itself. As the fire season lengthens and south-east Australia dries out, the opportunity for using controllable, low-intensity fire to burn off the litter shrinks.
And there are some forest types – wet sclerophyll and rainforest – that are not amenable to hazard reduction. They are not fire-adapted and, furthermore, most of the time they are too moist to ignite. When they are dry enough to burn, it is too dangerous to burn them.
For the type of fires we are seeing at the moment, Mackey says, hazard reduction burning would make little difference.
“When you have catastrophic fire weather, you have catastrophic fire irrespective of the fuel load. It doesn’t matter if you have burned off the litter, because a catastrophic fire goes through the canopy and showers embers kilometres ahead of the fire front.”
We now are faced, he says, with a “different type of fire”. The fire hazard index, a formulation from the 1970s based on temperature, dryness, fuel load and wind, had begun to register values greater than the maximum on the scale. Hence the new category of “catastrophic” – used for the first time in Sydney this week.
“That’s what has happened with 1 degree of climate warming: we’re getting higher fire hazard ratings, earlier and longer fire seasons, and we’re getting them in areas of Australia where we have never had them before,” Mackey says.
“If the world fails to mitigate greenhouse emissions, quickly, by 2040 we will get 1.5 degrees of global warming … By the end of this century, three to five. You can only imagine the consequences.”
This week those consequences became a little easier to imagine, and that is the problem for Australia’s major political parties, neither of which betrays any intention to seriously address the climate crisis.
As the week wore on, the efforts by right-wing politicians and their media surrogates to distract and lay off blame grew more ridiculous. Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, a climate change denier of long standing, told Sky News that changes to the sun’s magnetic field could be the cause of the fires. He also, unaccountably, speculated that two people who died in the fires were probably Greens voters.
Graham Lloyd, the environment editor for The Australian, managed to find an elderly hippie from Nimbin – Michael Balderstone, who has stood on multiple occasions for the Help End Marijuana Prohibition Party – who blamed “greenies” for the fires on the grounds that he had been prevented from gathering firewood in national parks.
This was how desperate some in Australia – in the press and in politics – were to avoid talking about the reality of climate change. That reality is that Australia will not – on the evidence supplied by the government’s own bureaucrats – make the necessary reductions to our domestic emissions to meet our Paris carbon reduction targets. Despite this, both major parties remain committed to mining ever more fossil fuels.
Morrison said as much two weeks ago, to a meeting of coal interests in Queensland. His government is working on new laws to punish people who lobby against investment in fossil fuel projects. More effort is being directed here than to climate mitigation.
In the next couple of weeks, the NSW Coalition government hopes to pass new legislation specifically prohibiting its Independent Planning Commission and Land and Environment Court from considering greenhouse gas emissions when assessing proposals for new export coalmines. The Queensland Labor government recently fast-tracked approvals for the Adani megamine.
Fires around the Hillville area west of Taree, NSW, on Tuesday. (Credit: Stephen Dupont for The Saturday Paper)
The burning of fossil fuels already causes millions of deaths each year, according to the World Health Organisation, through air pollution. The organisation calculated that, from 2030 to 2050, there would be 250,000 additional deaths a year linked to global heating, as a result of heat stress, malnutrition and the spread of disease.
Two weeks ago, air pollution in Delhi rose to more than 20 times the WHO limit of safety. Breathing the air was equivalent to smoking 40 to 50 cigarettes a day.
This past northern summer saw hundreds of wildfires burning across millions of hectares of the Arctic, from Alaska to Russia to Scandinavia and Greenland. In California last year, fires raged across more than 750,000 hectares. Some 100 people died and the cost in insurance claims alone was more than $US12 billion. This year, another 100,000 hectares burned.
Spain and Greece were ravaged by deadly fires driven by dry winds and record temperatures this northern summer. Across the countries of the European Union, 1600 fires were recorded to mid-August – more than three times the long-term yearly average.
The litany of disaster goes on and on. The science is unequivocal; the changes are happening even faster than it predicted.
According to the most recent Climate of the Nation survey, released by The Australia Institute in September, 76 per cent of Australians believed climate change is causing more bushfires. No doubt recent events have increased that number.
In the US, a similar percentage of people tell pollsters they support tighter restrictions on guns. Yet the NRA remains powerful. Nothing changes.
The fossil fuel lobby in this country, like the gun lobby there, retains its hold on politics with its playbook and its chequebook. And it will keep on winning until the people muster the political will to back their beliefs.
Maybe this week shows that is beginning to happen.

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(AU) Barnaby And The Idiot Foghorns: Not Everyone Got The Memo About 'Quiet Australians'

Sydney Morning Herald - Jacqueline Maley

The Uluru Statement From the Heart, with its reasoned call for constitutional recognition, has become such a politicised issue that it is easy to forget what a beautiful piece of writing it is. It is not even 500 words, but within it is a world: the struggle, tragedy and dignity of one of the world’s oldest living cultures.
It discusses the ancestral ties of First Nations peoples to the land, unextinguished by colonisation. It talks about children stolen and incarcerated.
Did I really say that? Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
"This is the torment of our powerlessness," it reads.
The torment of that powerlessness was splashed across television screens and newspapers this week when a Northern Territory cop allegedly shot and killed 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker in the remote community of Yuendumu, his home.
It was tragic news at the end of a tragic week, and I keep thinking about that phrase, about the torment of powerlessness, because it seems to be everywhere at the moment.
It’s there in the voices of the coalition of 23 fire and emergency leaders from across the federation, the Emergency Leaders for Climate Change, who say climate change is the key reason that fires are harder to control and why the fire season is lengthening.
They have tried to relay this message to the Prime Minister but he can’t find time to meet them, so this week they went public.
Others are taking back power by marching in the streets in frustration, and some are doing it by spending their money consciously, or pressuring companies through the secondary boycotts the Prime Minister has said he wants to outlaw.
The Prime Minister loves to talk about the "Canberra bubble" and its irrelevance to the lives of everyday Australians.
I wonder if he’s noticed the bubble is spreading, and enveloping more aspects of our lives, so that little is sacred anymore, from being politicised in the vilest way.


And the people doing the politicising – stop press – are not ordinary folk. They’re politicians, idiot foghorns like Barnaby Joyce, who this week referred to two of the people killed in the bushfires as "Greens voters", followed by an assurance that he was not going to attack them.
A close second was Greens senator Jordon Steele-John who used his Senate platform to call Liberal and Labor politicians "arsonists" over their support for the "big stick" energy legislation – a long bow even for the politically desperate.
Politicians like to talk sentimentally about how much Australians pull together in a crisis, putting aside differences to help out their neighbours. And of course they have during these bushfires. We always do, when it comes to natural disasters. It was the politicians who failed to. And they keep failing.
Increasingly it feels the government, so keen to invoke its "quiet Australians", is using the phrase as a gag on debate. "Quiet Australians" is a genius political term – mystical and impossible to disprove. If you self-nominate as one, you ain’t one.
Strangely the quiet Australians’ biggest boosters in the media tend to be the loudest, un-drown-outable voices.
Elsewhere, the quiet is spreading and it’s starting to feel eerie: talk about climate change during the bushfires was treated as a ghastly breach of an invisible etiquette code, with politicians behaving like characters from a Harry Potter book who fear naming the saga’s arch villain.
On Tuesday Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gave a landmark speech about the great economic challenges of our times, but didn’t mention the C-words.
I didn’t want to write about bushfires and climate change this week because surely everything has been said. But it is impossible to escape the conclusion that it is the story of our times, permeating everything.
Illustration: Reg Lynch
Take Thursday’s paper: pages of bushfire coverage, more pages of political reaction to the fires, a story about how NSW public servants were specifically told not to answer questions about climate change at a media briefing on the fires, a story about an exhibition of works by the artist Banksy closing early because humidity threatens to damage the works, a report on research published in The Lancet by 120 experts from 35 institutions which says climate change poses an unprecedented health risk to children.
Ah, to the world pages, I thought, for some light relief in the form of impeachment proceedings, or unrest in Chile. Nope. The main story was floods in Venice: 80 per cent of the Unesco world heritage site was under water. The Mayor of Venice blamed climate change.
Soon it will be Christmas, and then January, which used to be a lazy month and is now edged with fear. Stand by for a tedious culture war around Australia Day, and on the "un-Australian" attacks on our national day by those of us who support the Change the Date campaign. This movement is yet another example of ordinary Australians circumventing their inadequate political leadership and voting with their feet.
The extraordinary intervention of the federal government, forcing councils to conduct citizenship ceremonies on January 26, is yet another example of it quashing a form of political speech. And yet again, civil society finds another work-around – this week the Inner West Council announced it will drop its Australia Day celebrations altogether.
Every Australian can and should make their own mind up on the issue, but to increasing numbers of non-Indigenous Australians, it feels off-key to celebrate our nationhood on a day that represents tragedy to First Australians. That’s not a denial of our history, it’s a true reckoning with it.
It’s a small recognition of the torment of powerlessness, and a small effort to ameliorate it. The government needn’t get involved.

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18/11/2019

(AU) 'There's A Passion': Encountering Extinction Rebellion

Sydney Morning Herald - Julie Perrin


After a week of disruptive action and widespread demonstrations activists have warned their work has just begun.

The week that the Extinction Rebellion protests begin to block the streets of Melbourne I am parked in a camping area at the southern end of Gariwerd - the Grampians National Park in western Victoria. The bush around the walking trails is studded with wildflowers. But when camping in wild places, your neighbours are an unknown.
One evening my friends and I find ourselves watching a couple of vehicles roll into our remote campsite at dusk. Three people spill out of two four-wheel-drives and begin setting up. One appears solo, down the steps of his car-top camper, wearing his dressing gown. Bemused, we figure that - unlike last night's group - he won’t be staying up late and yahooing into the wee hours. A bit later, the woman comes by our campfire and introduces herself.
Angela Crunden and her partner Tony Peck are from Gippsland. When this composed, silver-haired woman tells us that for the last three days they’ve been protesting with Extinction Rebellion (or XR for short) in Melbourne, our eyebrows lift. These are not the young ‘anarchist’ ratbags Peter Dutton would have us repelling.
“There were 30 of us from Gippsland,” says Crunden, adding with satisfaction, “nine from Gippsland were arrested, including a previous mayor from Bass shire.”
The next day we peel off to other parts of the park, but I arrange to speak with the couple when they’ve returned home.
I discover both have had careers in nursing. They have brought up their children while living off the grid in East Gippsland for 25 years. Retired now, they have moved to Bairnsdale but are still immersed in sustainability practice, from which there is no retirement. The couple have been part of a local environmental coalition for years.
Angela Crunden and her partner Tony Peck came from their home in Bairnsdale, East Gippsland, to take part in Extinction Rebellion protests in Melbourne. Credit: Tony Wells
Crunden tells me about earlier lonely moments in which she’s been a sometimes unwelcome presence, setting up a one-person climate change information stall outside her supermarket. When the couple speak about Extinction Rebellion’s group training, artists’ offerings, and practices of non-violence, it is easy to see the appeal of solidarity after such solitary vigils.
I ask them why they were pleased about the arrests. Crunden says: “There’s a passion attached to the sacrifice.”
Peck adds: “When people tell us to stop wasting time protesting, we ask them what alternatives they’d suggest. Invariably they say ‘Talk to local politicians, write to your local member.’ We have been doing that politely for 20 years, and we will continue to do it. But it has not brought about the needed change.”
Prior to the phone call I had researched Extinction Rebellion in Melbourne and internationally. The weight of opinion is against their actions in stopping the traffic, but something else catches my eye.
I see snatches of video and photos of people wearing whiteface and flowing red costumes. At first the red people’s appearance is reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. But there are no white bonnets. Draped in red, the performers wear headdresses all of a piece with flowing red garments. Performing stylised gestures with great slowness, they offer utter attentiveness towards what is happening around them. Their movements are made in unison, they walk in slow motion and silence.
These visually striking ‘Red Brigades’ remind me of the chorus in classical Greek drama, only in this instance there’s no speaking.
Red Brigade protesters in Russell Street, Melbourne.
When Peck describes the Red Brigade in Melbourne, his voice catches. “There is a yearning in their movement. They stood nearby and leant towards the people being arrested. We all felt embraced by their presence.”
Following our call I watch a Red Brigade group from Britain in a YouTube clip called “The Rising Tide”. I am mesmerised. A group of 20 or more descend a sea cliff in Cornwall and process along the beach below - first in rows of pairs and later in a V formation. The video and soundtrack are just over two minutes long - no words are spoken, but there are subtitles and hand-painted banners. The Red Brigade members walk calmly into the sea and stand immersed to their waists, unflinching. The ritual action is complete. Fully clothed in the water they stand together: they are a flock, a massed appearance to remind us of what is disappearing.
There is something about the considered gestures and silent action that speaks to me, a leaning-in to give ear to what is happening. They are bearing witness. I want protests that look like this. Would beauty and sorrow persuade people?
A friend says to me: “You can’t make change elegantly, it doesn’t come without discomfort. Someone has to be rude.”
Remembering the outcry about traffic congestion during the Spring Extinction Rebellion, I ask Crunden and Peck their thoughts on the inconvenience and disruption caused to commuters; it does not sit easily with them.
Police intervene to protect Shaun Islip, lying on the ground, from protesters outside the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre during the climate protests on October 29. Credit: AAP
They are horrified when I tell them about Shaun Islip, a choir leader I’ve met who was thrown to the ground by environmental protesters at the International Mining and Resources Conference (IMARC). Islip had nothing to do with the mining conference - he was going into the venue on October 29 to do a sound check for the WorkSafe conference the following day. The protesters refused to hear this.  Islip was wearing a suit - that, it seems, was his mistake.The Gippsland couple say the XR training they have received is to avoid blaming and shaming any one individual. And Crunden reminds me that in a public context it is hard to control who is representing you. At the rebellion in early October, she felt very concerned when a man in sunglasses and a balaclava tried to attach himself to their group. She spoke to him: “We don’t wear masks like this, it is not XR practice.”
The protests at IMARC were organised by an alliance of groups including Frontline Action on Coal and Socialist Alternative. Extinction Rebellion maintain that they chose not join the blockade part of the protest, as this type of confrontation is not what they seek.
Miriam Robinson, a spokesperson for XR Melbourne, says: “One of the hallmarks of Extinction Rebellion actions is a creative element, often involving music and costumes. We organised actions during IMARC such as a bicycle ride, a 'disgust-ation dinner' and a 'Dance with Death'. The Red Brigade did not attend the IMARC blockade. They decided that this event was not for them.”
She adds: “Some of our people came in the morning, they were free to come as individuals, but when they saw the police, the horses and the shouting, they put their flags away and left."
Several people from XR Gippsland had travelled up to join the actions, but they turned around and went home again.
The Gippsland contingent at the Extinction Rebellion protests in Melbourne.
The federal government’s business-as-usual attitude admits little need to respond to extinctions. In his defence of the economy and the "quiet Australians", our prime minister is beginning to shout. But there are thousands of Australians on both sides of the political divide who protest this denial. They come from the country, the suburbs and the city; they have jobs and farms and businesses and children and grandchildren. They are unlikely to accept being dismissed as anarchists or members of cults. And they are less and less likely to remain quiet.

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(AU) We Mustn’t Bring Politics Into The Disastrous Situation That Was Created By ... Wait For It ... POLITICS

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

Should we only talk about climate change outside the fire season?
 That’ll soon be one (single) Thursday in July (at long as it’s raining)
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(AU) If You Can’t Talk About Climate When The Country Is Burning, When Can You?

The Guardian - *

Performance is at the heart of politics. That’s why Labor needs to seize this moment of crisis to push for climate action
‘The PM is expected to be there, touring around, being seen listening to briefings by the local emergency services chief, with a bit of looking at maps and so forth, and showing emotion.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
In weeks like this one it becomes quite clear just how much of federal politics is performative. Politicians do things for no discernible reason other than to be seen to be doing something, or to put on a show that will elevate their profile or position.
Once the New South Wales and Queensland fires reached a critical level, politicians were always going to do all they could to be seen to be involved.
The problem is that during such a crisis there is very little for a prime minister to do. He actually has no role – the fire services are state based, and anything that will require federal coordination, whether it be Australian federal police or Australian Defence Force, does not really need the prime minister at all.
In reality, he just gets in the way.
But getting in the way is expected of prime ministers at such times.
When an emergency such as this occurs, the PM is expected to be there, touring around, being seen listening to briefings by the local emergency services chief, with a bit of looking at maps and so forth, and showing emotion.
Scott Morrison this week was not actually doing anything of note – and to be honest, neither was the ALP leader, Anthony Albanese, who also toured parts of NSW and received a briefing on the situation.
About the best the PM could have done this week was made sure the NSW fires services had the phone number of the ADF to contact and then to let them get on with their work.
But had he done that, the criticism of course would have been about where was he, why hadn’t he visited the scene, talked with emergency services and so on.
Back in 2011, Julia Gillard was accused by Tony Abbott and others for being too “wooden” when she visited the Queensland floods. It was all the usual sexist crud that was directed towards Gillard. She was regarded as not emotional enough compared to Anna Bligh, who was premier of Queensland at the time and had an actual role, whereas Gillard – like Morrison this week – really had nothing to do.
Gillard’s failure was not about action, it was about the performance. (And the reality that she could do no right – even when she later cried in parliament. Andrew Bolt wrote a column in which he was at pains to say that while he thought her tears were genuine, “it will seem calculated to some” because she needed to show that she was not wooden.)
Morrison, the man from marketing, sure as heck was not going to make the mistake of appearing too wooden – he is very much a politician in tune with the performative nature of the job. We saw this during the election campaign when he would “do things” that made the travelling press pack happy because it gave them something to report about.
He also knows how to make use of a crisis.
Does anyone remember the crisis of needles in strawberries? In reality the biggest concern was the risk of copycat acts due to the attention Morrison gave the contamination scare, but nevertheless he used the occasion to perform the role of the leader who was tough on crime.
He also used the occasion to rush through laws that were neither asked for nor needed, but which show that while we might dismiss the performative art of politics as a sideshow, politicians on their game will use it to push their agenda and get their way.
Our media system is driven by what Italian media academic Gianpietro Mazzoleni calls “spectacularisation” – the demand for the spectacle in our political news – and good politicians use it to their advantage.
And so Morrison brings in a lump of coal to parliament. Why? The performance – it annoys the left and it is a good spectacle.
The ALP this week has tried their best to not provide any spectacle. There was no fightback of any real note against the idiocy of Barnaby Joyce or Michael McCormack – a lot of “now is not the time”.
And that might seem the mature and sensible response, and yet with the spectacle and the performative aspect of politics comes the opportunity to sell your policy and push your agenda.
Australia is burning, and it is burning because of climate change. Scientists and fire chiefs know this – and they have been ignored by the government. That’s reason enough for the ALP to raise the issue with fervour.
This week the Swedish central bank sold off Australian government bonds because of our high emissions dependency. That won’t be the last time climate change has a major impact in international finance.
We all know it is coming, but the government chooses to ignore it and suggests we put off discussion for another time.
We should be talking about it now – no debate on climate change is going to hamper the ability of firefighters to do their job.
No firefighter is standing off to the side waiting for Albanese and Morrison to finish their debate so they can go off and put out a fire.
It might seem mature to wait for a more appropriate occasion to talk about climate change and bushfires, but politics is about capturing the moment. The conservative side of politics knows this, and uses it again and again on issues of national security and crime.
Conservatives want to wait, because they want to wait until a time when the public will be less invested, less angry and less attentive. Next month it will be Christmas holidays and the attention of voters will be gone.
Progressives too often cower and take the mature road and let opportunities go begging.
The performance and spectacle of politics might be annoying and distracting but it can’t be ignored. The ALP did not need to come out this week going over the top like Joyce and McCormack, but they need to use these occasions to capture the imagination of the public and push for action.
Because if you can’t bring yourself to talk about climate change while the country is burning, then you can’t blame voters for thinking it must not be that big of a deal, or just as bad, that the ALP doesn’t really care.

*Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia

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17/11/2019

Venice Is Underwater — And A Preview Of What Climate Change Will Bring To Coastal Cities

Washington Post - Alex Horton | Andrew Freedman

The Washington Post's Rome bureau chief Chico Harlan spoke about what Venice was like after floodwaters submerged the city as of Nov. 13. (Alexa Ard, Chico Harlan/The Washington Post)

More tidewater roared into Venice on Friday, layering more catastrophic floods into the lagoon city and panicking residents over the viability of living on the lip of the Adriatic Sea.
Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said the “dramatic situation” was brought on by climate change, in an appeal for additional donations to repair the devastation caused by the worst flooding in half a century.
While the city may recover on the surface, as it has before, climate scientists have said Venice is a harbinger of the problems facing all coastal cities, as melting ice sheets and warming oceans raise sea levels to unprecedented heights.
“Venice is the pride of all of Italy,” Brugnaro said in a statement, the Associated Press reported, as officials said the city was 70 percent submerged. “Venice is everyone’s heritage, unique in the world.”
St. Mark’s Square, the city’s famous piazza, was closed as seagulls swarmed the knee-high water. The flood rose to over six feet in some areas. Italy declared a state of emergency and released 20 million euros to repair the extensive damage.


Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro closed St. Mark's Square on Nov. 15, deeming flood waters too high to be safe as high tide peaked at five feet. (Reuters)

The total damage could run into the hundreds of millions, Brugnaro said.
Because of rising seas, extreme flooding that used to occur in Venice once every 100 years is expected to recur every six years by 2050, according to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This could become far more common by 2100, recurring every five months. This only takes sea-level rise into account, which will become a progressively greater concern as time goes on.
The bigger issue: Venice is sinking. That means these flood recurrence periods, calculated for the IPCC report, are on the conservative side.
People walk in the flooded street near the Rialto bridge in Venice. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)
Friday’s floods are due to another storm in a similar position southwest of Italy, with winds blowing from the southeast to northwest across the Adriatic, piling water toward Venice. Coming atop astronomical high tides and long-term subsidence plus sea-level rise, it’s becoming easier to flood the city to severely damaging levels.
All around the busiest parts of the city, water slicked the floors of cafes and Murano glass shops and seeped into hotel lobbies, leaving a smell of sewage in its wake.
Venice, over the centuries, has diverted rivers to protect the lagoon and extended the barrier islands. But now, the sea level is rising several millimeters a year.
Offshore, at the inlets between those barrier islands, a massive project known as MOSE could potentially boost Venice’s protection — with floodgates that could be raised from the sea during high tide, sealing off the lagoon.
The project, launched in 2003, was once forecast to finish in 2011. Then 2014. Now, projections call for completion in 2022.
Venice has thrived since the fifth century. But even locals with canal water in their blood are taken aback at the flooding and predictions to come.
“It’s a city full of history,” said Vladimiro Cavagnis, a fourth-generation Venetian gondolier who chauffeurs tourists on the city’s trademark boats. “A history that, little by little, with water, will end up like Atlantis. People are destroyed, anguished, sad. They see a city that is disappearing.”

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