There is a message woven into everything the prime minister says
about these fires, carefully threaded through every pronouncement – that
they are not extraordinary, not unprecedented.
With the skill of a man who made a pre-politics career of messaging, Scott Morrison’s narrative is of a disaster in no way different from disasters Australians have faced in the past. A terrible event to be sure, but one from which we will recover with the resilience and “Aussie spirit” we have always shown during our long history of similar crises.
“Whatever our trials, whatever disasters have befallen us, we have never succumbed to panic. And we will not do this now in the face of the current fire crisis … The generations of Australians that went before us, including our First Australians, also faced natural disasters, floods, fires, global conflicts, disease and drought,” he told us, in a New Year’s Eve video message.
“We have faced these disasters before and we have prevailed, we have
overcome …That is the spirit of Australians, that is the spirit that is
on display, that is a spirit that we can celebrate as Australians.”With the skill of a man who made a pre-politics career of messaging, Scott Morrison’s narrative is of a disaster in no way different from disasters Australians have faced in the past. A terrible event to be sure, but one from which we will recover with the resilience and “Aussie spirit” we have always shown during our long history of similar crises.
“Whatever our trials, whatever disasters have befallen us, we have never succumbed to panic. And we will not do this now in the face of the current fire crisis … The generations of Australians that went before us, including our First Australians, also faced natural disasters, floods, fires, global conflicts, disease and drought,” he told us, in a New Year’s Eve video message.
And so, by clear implication, suggesting that this disaster IS different becomes somehow unpatriotic, wimpy, or, perish the thought, unAustralian.
Except we know that this fire disaster is unprecedented, and no amount of spin can hide it.
We know it because holiday makers along the New South Wales and Victorian coast used to spend New Year’s Eve partying on beaches, not cowering on them to escape raging infernos. We know it because we’ve never experienced this choking air and this constant dread for this long, or at this scale.
We know it because we have not experienced fires this fierce over this vast an area. We know it because we haven’t experienced the worst air quality in the world before, or this constant ominous orange sun.
We know it from our lived experience and, as Guardian Australia’s environment editor Adam Morton detailed in this piece before Christmas, we also know it because the NSW Rural Fire Service, and scientists, and the public servants responsible for our health, all say the scale and impact of these fires is unprecedented.
Yes, we’ve always had fires, but not like this, and everyone knows it, no matter how diligently some news organisations compile lists of blazes from the past.
And we also know why the prime minister would seek to present this catastrophe as bad, but also somehow as situation normal.
If he acknowledges the fact that it is abnormal he would need to concede that global heating is part of the cause of this unprecedented situation, and that would increase pressure for Australia to do something about it, by developing a credible climate policy, instead of just pretending that we have one.
So, despite the evidence all around us, the prime minister keeps recycling the spin.
“We won’t destroy the livelihoods of Australians in the process by adopting reckless targets that force up electricity prices, now coming down under our policies, or by turning our backs on traditional industries that are especially important in regional Australia, as proposed by Labor and the Greens,” his New Year’s message said.
But we’re wise to the talking points, the claims about “meeting and beating” our emission reduction targets through creative tricks of accounting, that the renewable energy investment of which the prime minister boasts won’t continue with current policies, and especially the false binary of climate action versus cost, because the costs of inaction are all too obvious.
We know Australia needs a credible policy to be a force for international action rather than an impediment, no matter how loudly Angus Taylor protests that we should be proud of our policies.
We don’t know whether the world will succeed in limiting the heating that is contributing to this fire crisis. But we do know for sure that what we are experiencing is not “situation normal”.
No amount of patriotic messaging about the “Aussie spirit” can cover the fact that we are not doing what we could be to make sure it doesn’t become “situation normal” in the future.
- Lenore Taylor is the editor of Guardian Australia
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