Australia’s burning questions

The great tragedy of the Aus­tralian bush­fires -- that even after sev­eral months are still con­sum­ing huge parts of the coun­try -- is that so much of the de­struc­tion is en­tirely avoid­able.

How can this be? Why have more than 1 bil­lion an­i­mals per­ished? Why have over 2,000 thou­sand homes been de­stroyed? Why have 23 peo­ple died and how is it pos­si­ble that a total area of land big­ger than Por­tu­gal or Hun­gary has al­ready been burnt out?

The sim­plest cor­rect an­swer is that Aus­tralia has al­ways suf­fered from these kinds of wild blazes but that this time around the ‘fire sea­son’ started much ear­lier and the spread of the fires was much wider than usual, with hun­dreds of them burn­ing out of con­trol at any one time.

Fire­fight­ers (most of whom are un­paid vol­un­teers) have been al­most com­pletely pow­er­less to stop the hydra-headed in­fer­nos be­cause of con­tin­ued fierce winds and the ex­treme high tem­per­a­tures that the fires them­selves have partly made worse.

An­other major cause of the dev­as­ta­tion can be ac­cu­rately put down to state and fed­eral gov­ern­ments un­der­fund­ing emer­gency ser­vices for year after year.

ln an at­tempt to push any re­spon­si­bil­ity away from his own ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive party, Prime Min­is­ter Scott Mor­ri­son has used all kinds of po­lit­i­cal trick­ery and lies across the main­stream media (which fully sup­ports him). He has also been widely con­demned for choos­ing to go on hol­i­day to Hawaii dur­ing the cri­sis, as did the rel­e­vant state min­is­ter from his party.

As well as that, Mor­ri­son has re­peat­edly ar­gued that the global cli­mate cri­sis is not a fac­tor in this dis­as­ter, de­spite over­whelm­ing sci­en­tific ev­i­dence show­ing it un­doubt­edly is.

As a fun­da­men­tal­ist Pen­te­costal Chris­t­ian, he has in­stead main­tained it is all the fault of ar­son­ists or “gree­nies” who op­pose tar­geted ‘back-burn­ing’ to stop fires spread­ing. (The Green Party has al­ways sup­ported it, in fact.)

Ac­cu­sa­tions of cli­mate de­nial against Mor­ri­son have come as thick and fast as the air that has choked the pop­u­la­tions of Aus­tralia’s big cities of Can­berra, Mel­bourne and Syd­ney over pe­ri­ods of weeks and months.

Even sev­eral for­mer lead­ers of the PM’s own party have called for rapid ac­tion against car­bon emis­sions and emer­gency poli­cies to com­bat the years-long drought across the na­tion.

In many Aus­tralians’ ex­pe­ri­ence, these fires have come on top of con­tin­u­ing and se­vere tap water short­ages in many of Aus­tralia’s rural towns. Some, such as the small rural vil­lage of Mur­ru­rundi (lo­cated in a once rel­a­tively fer­tile area) have al­ready run out of water and are hav­ing to buy in sup­plies pri­vately. An in­creas­ing num­ber of towns are ex­pected to fol­low this dis­turb­ing prac­tice soon.

Of course, water run­ning low in Aus­tralian drought pe­ri­ods is noth­ing new.

What is caus­ing out­rage though amongst groups as di­verse as farm­ers and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists, is the mas­sive (and often un­mea­sured) amounts of nat­ural water from rivers, lakes and un­der­ground sources that are being sold off to pri­vate com­pa­nies.

The In­dian (multi-na­tional) min­ing com­pany Adani (which has the ab­surd, dou­ble-speak slo­gan of “Growth with Good­ness”) ex­tracts coal from the earth, among other things. It runs a busi­ness that is a major cause of global warm­ing through car­bon emis­sions and it re­quires large amounts of water in the coal clean­ing process.

Adani -- which has paid not one cent of com­pany tax in Aus­tralia -- will be al­lowed to siphon off 12.5 bil­lion litres of local river water up until the year 2077. An­other of its mines is being given $4.4 bil­lion in pub­lic sub­si­dies from the gov­ern­ment. An open se­cret mud­dies the wa­ters here: min­ing in­dus­tries have been major fi­nan­cial donors to the con­ser­v­a­tive po­lit­i­cal par­ties in Aus­tralia for many years.

Cor­rup­tion? You bet it is. For the gov­ern­ing par­ties, it’s rain­ing money. This at a time when both rain and money are what’s re­ally needed across a land that is dying of thirst and from fires on a bib­li­cal scale that Mor­ri­son had only ever read about.