You know the way it goes: SIEV X sinks and hundreds of people drown, but we shouldn’t get political about it because it would be wrong to blame John Howard, because making political capital out of personal tragedy is just offensive opportunism. Fast forward a few years and Labor are responsible for all the drownings at sea and there’s no problem.
Or when people die installing the pink batts, it’s brought up at every opportunity by the Liberals because they argue that the scheme should have had better planning and more oversight… This was, of course, at the same time as they were arguing for a reduction in red-tape because such things just slow down projects. We never hear of all the workplace deaths that this may have caused because death shouldn’t be used for political reasons.
And so, we have the current fires raging in NSW and Queensland but, hey, don’t mention climate change because we’ve always had droughts and flooding rains, and it’s not the time. Just like in the United States when there’s another shooting, it’s not the time for a discussion on gun control. It’s a time for thoughts and prayers.
If you don’t believe me, just check out the Prime Minister’s tweet.
So let’s not politicise things. Let’s not talk about how the NSW government cut funding to fire services. Let’s follow the lead of Campbell Newman who contradicted someone by tweeting that there have been worse bushfires in the past and then posted a link to a story from last century about a number of bushfires that covered almost as much territory as the current ones, in much the same way that I’m nearly as tall as the tallest man in the world when you compare us to a wombat. This is not being political this is just being factual with alternative facts.
And certainly, let’s not have a look at this from last week’s “The Guardian”:
Mr Mullins is one of 23 former senior emergency figures trying to get the Australian Government to listen to their concerns about climate change and the missing capacity to fight fires in a new era.
“It’s up to the retired fire chiefs who are unconstrained to tell it like it is and say this is really dangerous,” he said.
However, his written requests for a meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison have failed.
“We were fobbed off to Minister [Angus] Taylor who is not the right minister to speak to,” Mr Mullins said.
“We wanted to speak to the Natural Disasters Minister and the PM. We asked for help with that, we never got a reply.
“You had 23 experts willing to sit down with a PM and come up with solutions, but he’s just fobbed us off.
“What does it take to wake these people up in Canberra? I don’t know.”
No, let’s do what the meme on Facebook says and ask those protestors why they’re not out fighting the fires. After all, isn’t it better to deal with a problem after it’s happened than to suggest remedies to prevent it happening in the first place? Complaining about these protestors is ok, because they’re the ones who are making things political with their constant whining about the government’s lack of meaningful action.
Let’s say that this is not unprecedented and that Australia has always had droughts and flooding rains because the poem tells us so and don’t you love Australia and its wide brown land? And let’s pretend that it’s just bad manners to even say the words “climate change” in the midst of such unprecedented disaster because we should be thinking about the victims and hey, how good is the government response, with the army reserve on standby and the coordination and no, we don’t need help from overseas and that’s not because they have none to spare because their fighting their own fires.
How good are thoughts and prayers?
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