Bushfires: Malcolm Turnbull has exposed the opportunism and inconsistency of climate crusaders

Malcolm Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership in opposition and then again as prime minister because he was trying to do a bipartisan deal with Labor on climate policy.

We ought to be thankful for Malcolm Turnbull’s intervention. All summer the green Left have been shamelessly trying to use the trauma and tragedy of another deadly Australian bushfire season to promote their political and ideological goals on climate policy.

Undeterred by facts, history, context or decency they have attempted to capitalise on every burned building, every horrible death, as an excuse to promote their utopian goal of a carbon price and the forced closure of fossil fuel industries that would, they suggest, render horrific bushfires a thing of the past.

If you don’t think it has been as shameless as that just look at the twitter feeds of people like Green Leader Richard Di Natale. When firefighters were killed just two days before Christmas he tweeted: “We grieve with those who have lost loved ones and homes in this latest tragedy. This is what a climate crisis looks like.”

Another horror fire day has brought tragic results in South Australia and New South Wales. We grieve with those who have lost loved ones and homes in this latest tragedy. This is what a climate crisis looks like. https://t.co/cOftXQDr0S

— Richard Di Natale (@RichardDiNatale) December 23, 2019

More to the point, this is what ghoulish and cynical politics looks like.

There must be room for a sober and informed discussion about the relatively marginal future impacts of climate change on the prevalence of high fire risk weather conditions — but the rush to exploit tragedy for the climate alarmism cause, fanned by a largely compliant media, has been sickening.

What does this have to do with former prime minister Turnbull, who once suggested former leaders should not hang around like “miserable ghosts” but now seems intent on haunting Scott Morrison like Banquo? Well, Turnbull has accidentally belled the cat, he has exposed for all to see the opportunism and inconsistency of the climate crusaders.

If any of this is about science, then it is political science that is mainly at play. And not political science of the high-minded variety but of the personal and vengeful kind.

Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership in opposition (when I worked for him) and then again as prime minister — both times because he was trying to do a bipartisan deal with Labor on climate policy. Climate policy is his bete noire and it seems there are only two ways to rationalise what has transpired for him; either he has been so wrong on the politics for so long that he has allowed it to destroy his political ambitions twice, or most everyone else in his party (and the broader electorate) is wrong and have failed to recognise the wisdom of his national climate leadership.

Guess which version he subscribes to.

And so it is that this summer, while former prime minister Tony Abbott has been at the frontline of fires all over NSW as a volunteer firefighter and the current Prime Minister has been calling in the army reserves to help out, Turnbull has been using the tragedy to support his carbon emissions policy preferences and settle political scores. In order to do so he has been emphatic about the link between these fires and climate change.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, talks to Taje Lawson, 3, from North Narrabeen after his family bumped into the volunteer rural firefighter at Milton while he was on duty fighting bush fires on the NSW south coast. Picture: Sarah Lawson

“Australia’s fires this summer — unprecedented in the scale of their destruction — are the ferocious but inevitable reality of global warming,” he wrote for Time magazine. This statement is untrue, of course, both in its claims about “unprecedented” destruction and on the climate link.

One of the clearest explanations for why the climate link is wrong comes from Turnbull himself, when he was prime minister and had responsibility for national leadership. In 2018 fire ripped through Tathra in NSW and destroyed more than 60 houses while the Greens tried to link the episode to climate change.

“I’m disappointed that the Greens would try to politicise an event like this,” Turnbull said. “You can’t attribute any particular event, whether it’s a flood or fire or a drought or a storm to climate change.”

Quite. That is correct. And his own words expose his current politicking and that of so many advocates in politics and the media.

As the heat returns and the wind picks up today, that is where we should leave it this summer, until the annual fire threat is over. Then the climate activists should begin to make their arguments, and base them on facts and science rather than emotionalism and opportunism.