David Penberthy: Greens’ bushfire blame game has exposed the worst in us
With most of the eastern seaboard ablaze this week, the message from some hasn’t been to come together, but to drive each other further apart, writes David Penberthy. What an utter disgrace.
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Once upon a time in Australia natural disasters were galvanising.
Natural disasters brought all of us together, regardless of our colour, creed or ideology.
In 2019 a natural disaster is polarising. With most of the eastern seaboard ablaze this week, the message from many has not been that this is a time to come together, but a time to drive each other further apart with name-calling, hyperbolic overstatements and grandiose, self-important gestures on social media.
Once, a natural disaster was a chance to share valuable logistical information, real-time weather data, to share the safety of shelter or a roadworthy vehicle with an embattled neighbour, to share food and clothes with those who had lost everything, and to share thoughts, and if you’re religiously inclined, prayers with fellow Australians stricken by fear and, in the worst cases, grief.
In 2019 a natural disaster is a chance to share damning CSIRO data on Twitter about world climate trends to prove that Scott Morrison has got blood on his hands.
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In 2019, a natural disaster is a chance to share your view that it’s the Greens who are basically murderers because they oppose land clearing – with the added ironic suggestion that that some of their supporters may have actually died as a result of the policies they support.
What a disgrace this past few days has been. This isn’t an Australia I recognise from the defining natural tragedy of my generation, the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983, where 75 people died in Victoria and South Australia. I don’t remember seeing it either during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria, which claimed 175 lives.
In less than a decade we have got to a point where the starting point for many, at the point the fires start, is to set up the deck chairs, chill the sauv blanc, and settle in for an afternoon of online ranting about who’s to blame.
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For the nation’s collective sanity, we should construct some kind of underground bunker so that the next time a bushfire starts we can house Greens MP Adam Bandt and his brethren, as well as former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, and keep them away from public earshot until the flames die down.
Both men have added nothing but bile to a horrible week as they play to their respective constituencies and, in Joyce’s case, chest-beat for internal party-positioning purposes.
Barnaby aside, it’s the Greens who have taken podium honours for outrageousness. The thing that struck me most about their posturing is how utterly useless and remote they are from the real lives of those Australians who have been fighting to survive.
Bandt is the most soft-handed waste of space you could imagine. There’s blokes you would ring if you were in a scrape, and then there’s Adam Bandt, the polar opposite of the King Gee guy, whom if you rang to lend a hand would be over in a jiffy, to make you some yoghurt.
This dweeby Melbourne academic spent much of last weekend revving up his base with accusations of bloodshed towards the Prime Minister. Not since the actor Sean Penn paddled around New Orleans in circles in a row boat after Hurricane Katrina has one progressive done so little to help so many. The Greens’ posturing plunged to a nadir when key members of their Senate leadership chose to hold a press conference with the domestic violence campaigner Sherele Moody.
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While I am reluctant to denounce Moody in a unilateral sense, as she is doing valuable work in mapping the scourge of domestic violence and its almost uniformly female and child victims, she had an absolute shocker this week where she misrepresented the work of an academic to state incorrectly there was evidence that male firefighters were more likely to bash their partners after bushfires. It was a terrible error, especially when you consider there are 3000 men (and women) across Queensland and NSW who still hadn’t even made it home yet from volunteering to fight the fires.
It tells you everything you need to know about the weird wiring inside the minds of these Green senators that, when presented with this hugely provocative and incorrect assertion, they chose not to ignore it, but stand there with the person peddling such tosh to hold a press conference about it.
Funnily enough, if not for the pigheadedness of the Greens, Australia would next month be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Rudd Government’s proposed CPRS, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which would have put a price on carbon and delivered certainty for investors in the energy space and producers of emissions. As always, they chose purity over pragmatism, and a decade on have the audacity to tell others they’ve got blood on their hands.
RELATED: Deputy PM says linking deadly fires to climate change is ‘disgusting’
There was a telling moment this week in my home state of SA where a private members bill to decriminalise prostitution was defeated in a conscience vote. The bill was sponsored by the well-meaning Greens MLC Tammy Franks, but in its original form, you could have driven a truck through it, as it contained no protections around planning laws nor safeguards about the character of people holding brothel licences.
A rearguard action was mounted by moderate Liberal and Labor MPs to knock it into shape, but it failed anyway as, in its initial laissez-faire form, it had already frightened undecided MPs towards a No vote.
Since its failure, Franks has been thrashing about on social media thundering about how the major parties have betrayed the cause of safety for women.
As with their climate change histrionics, this is a marketing device.
It suits the Greens tactically to be portrayed as the only ones telling the truth, the only ones proposing the radical changes needed, and to use something as existentially terrifying as a bushfire to kick their social media campaign into gear. You’d call it undergraduate, even, but most university students aren’t this screwed up.