Peta Credlin: How to reduce Morrison’s burning issue? Focus on fuel loads
If Scott Morrison wants to cure his political wounds and prevent the green left’s political point scoring over bushfires, he must change the debate on fuel loads, writes Peta Credlin.
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Scott Morrison is in the political fight of his career. I don’t say that lightly; he’s been in plenty of scraps over the years, but few have seen him so wounded, up against an opponent so full of might, and spleen.
George Orwell wrote: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Isn’t this an understatement when it comes to the new “truth” of climate change?
No longer do we have any fact-based assessments on Australia’s 1.3 per cent contribution to global emissions — or what others are doing, or not doing as the case may be.
Instead, climate change orthodoxy has become the new religion for young people (and the not so young) who often mock more traditional institutions of faith. If you have tried to have a rational discussion with anyone on this subject or the fires more broadly, I’ll bet it quickly descended into regurgitated dogma and hysteria.
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Take the opportunistic Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, who last week again tried to turn bushfires into climate change with his now much-repeated line that “you can see it, smell it, and feel it”. By trying to use soot and ash whipped up by fires to further his political fight against the Coalition, Albanese does himself a disservice in his bid to one day lead the country. The left’s demon in all of this — carbon dioxide — is an odourless and colourless trace gas that is essential for life on this planet.
Like news outlets that show images of water vapour spewing out of power plants or smog-filled skies as evidence of climate change — conflating steam or pollution with greenhouse gas emissions is just another example of the lies and misinformation that masquerade as “fact” in this debate.
In a world where the only history we know comes from what we have personally experienced rather than proper study of the past, these fires are the “worst ever” so “something extraordinary must have caused them” regardless of historical fact. People don’t want to know that the 2009 Black Saturday fires and 1983 Ash Wednesday fires killed far more people, or that the 1974 fire season burned out at least 10 times the area of this one.
And while people want policy measures to avert similar devastation in the future, it would be a mistake to think these lie in agreements made overseas that most countries (unlike us) don’t even follow, rather than what can be done here at home.
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Can someone tell me the point of a new royal commission into bushfires if we are not doing what was recommended in the last one? After Victoria’s tragedy in 2009, officials were told by the royal commission to lift the rate of off-season hazard reduction burning. Yet last year, just one-third of the burn target was met. Yet rather than blame being attributed to the lack of action by state governments and their bureaucratic bodies responsible for managing fuel loads, we have this nonsense about “doing more” on climate change somehow being the answer.
It is not, never has been and never will be. Fires can’t burn without fuel. Fuel is something Australians in the past — indigenous Australians for centuries and the rest of us, until recently — managed to get down to acceptable levels as we approached the summer fire season. Farmers were allowed to manage their land, activists didn’t roll into town to stop hazard reduction burns, and fewer of us lived in high-risk areas close to native bush. That’s all changed.
If we want to prevent future fire seasons of this magnitude, we’ve got to have an honest debate about how we got here, and what can be done in the future to better manage the risks.
Fighting this issue on the basis of climate change policy is where the left want this debate. It lets state governments off the hook for what they haven’t done and gives the left their first opportunity to tear down Morrison since he killed off their fairytale last May.
But, for the Coalition, it’s a zero-sum game politically, as well as being a lie, to let climate change be the reason we’ve had these fires in the first place.
You see, it doesn’t matter how much Morrison does on climate change, it’s never going to be enough for the green left. They don’t so much want a reduction in emissions as a statement of belief, and a redirection of society away from economic growth towards a whole new means of income redistribution.
This is why the government gets no credit for the fact we’re on track to meet our Paris targets — unlike countries such as Canada, France and Germany, who talk big on climate change but invariably fail to deliver on their commitments.
Nothing exposes the left on emissions more than their refusal to debate nuclear power as an option for this country.
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Instead of trying to outbid Labor on climate change, a fight he can never win, the Prime Minister needs to drive this issue into areas where the government can make changes now that will reduce the severity of future fire seasons. Areas such as fuel-load reduction, because the PM can rely upon recommendation after recommendation in almost every bushfire inquiry to back him up. And it’s something that can be measured, so accountability is real.
In political terms too, it doesn’t hurt that it’s an area where the centre-right and the green left are poles apart.
If he wants to really change up this debate and get it off an area he can’t win, on to an area where he can — and where most Australians would follow him — Morrison should demand a new national approach to fuel-load reduction.
If the states are so keen to see the Commonwealth up-end the constitution and take more responsibility for bushfires, then give them what they want — by making a new national fuel-load reduction plan a standing item on COAG, with reduction data published quarterly and states that don’t do what the experts recommend named and shamed.
As well as being the best way forward for the 2021 bushfire season, it’s the PM’s best way forward politically too.