In Australia, A Self-Immolation In Political Idiocy And Denial - New Republic

[hatrack]

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On December 21, Michael McCormack, the acting prime minister, argued there was “a lot of hysteria about climate change” and that other factors were equally to blame for the bushfires: “There has been dry lightning strikes, there has been self-combusting piles of manure, there has been a lot of arsonists out there causing fire.” Self-combusting piles of manure: With that, Australia’s leaders called—quite literally—bullshit on the fires, and the curtain was raised on a two-week parade of political idiocy almost as monumental and catastrophic as the fires themselves.

McCormack was acting as prime minister because the real prime minister, Scott Morrison, had skipped off on a family holiday to Hawaii just as the bushfires entered their most destructive phase. Canceling the holiday would have disappointed his daughters, Morrison explained; besides, his family had not enjoyed a vacation since May. Meanwhile, vast swaths of the country’s southeast were going up in flames: While the prime minister was off doing shakas on the beaches of Hawaii, Australia endured its hottest day ever, with the average temperature across the entire continent, a land mass equivalent in size to the contiguous United States, reaching 41.9 degrees Celsius (107.4 degrees Fahrenheit). On his return, Morrison found a nation engulfed and a population enraged. His response was to carry on as if the fires were nothing out of the ordinary, a bit of summer heat like the heat of any other summer. Among the many violent spectacles of this fire season—the thousands stranded on beaches and long stretches of country road stacked with torched cattle, the birds dropping dead in the middle of the day, the baby kangaroos immolated on farm fences, the fire tornadoes and bloody skies—perhaps the most hellish has been the march of the pyrocumulus clouds, the product of smoke plumes so big they can generate lightning that spreads fire even further. Just as these fires have created their own weather systems, so too Australia’s political leaders have created their own kind of reality to address the destruction.

First there was a studied prime ministerial silence. Then, on New Year’s Day, came a pantomime of normality: Morrison recorded a message in which he cheerily assured Australians that “we live in the most amazing country on earth.” Later that day, he hosted the cricket teams of Australia and New Zealand at his Sydney residence and posed, amid the smoke haze still choking the city, for a photo with the players. Those fighting the fires, he said, would be “inspired by the great feats of our cricketers.” Children played in the background on grass turned as gray as a dead man’s teeth. By this point, the bushfires were so ferocious that many of them blew through containment lines built up through back-burning, forest-clearing, and other hazard-reduction methods: One firefighter witnessed a fire in an area that had burned only two weeks previously, but “the burnt leaves were burning again.”

The next day, when Morrison finally toured fire-devastated communities south of Sydney, the scale of the destruction—and the depth of people’s anger at him—was obvious. The most consistent message he heard from people on the front lines of the inferno that day was “Piss off.” Fronting the cameras after he’d run away from the heckles of one town’s inhabitants, Morrison looked genuinely bewildered. What I saw in his eyes was not sympathy or sadness but fear: fear at the full, murderous force of climate change and at the unvarnished fury of those left behind to battle it. Here was a man utterly unsuited to the challenge, with no idea what to do.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/156137/australias-infernal-denial

[Mickju]

1. "Here was a man utterly unsuited to the challenge, with no idea what to do. "

Hmmm, sounds familiar somehow.