Scotty's Bear Cares*

Scott Morrison, Saturday January 29, while clasping an unlucky koala in front of assembled cameras: "We love to throw our arms around koalas. And they love to throw their bear arms around us when we get to have a cuddle. What this is about is continuing to throw our arms around our koala population".

Continuing? In the last 20 years, Koala numbers have halved in Queensland & dropped 60% in NSW. Land-clearing, drought, and fire mean koalas are currently on track for extinction by 2050. The $50 million announced by the Prime Minister yesterday - should it ever eventuate - is earmarked for monitoring, research, and habitat restoration. The latter is near-pointless without climate action, and the previous two will confirm we need climate action. There are no mysteries as to why koalas are dying. Australia's climate, farming, and "development" policies are killing them.
Setting aside the accounting tricks, carbon emissions in Australia have risen 7% since 2005. Scott Morrison's assertions of a 20% fall in that period have been repeatedly fact-checked by multiple media outlets, and confirmed as false. The Morrison administration is populated by numerous individuals drawn from the extractive industries, and unsurprisingly, it's currently aiding the further expansion of fossil fuel production. Bizarrely, even amelioration of the consequences of that expansion is impeded - Morrison continues to refuse to purchase the recommended national fleet of large water-bomber aircraft, and the $2 billion recovery fund has been structured for anti-transparency, with its only-partial distribution thoroughly pork-barrelled. The denial goes bone-deep.
More than 61 000 koalas are estimated to have perished in the I-Don't-Hold-A-Hose-Mate bushfire disasters of 2019/20. And as the population continues to fall, land-clearing across Australia also continues apace. (In one example from just 15 months ago, Environment Minister Sussan Ley gave approval to clearing 52 hectares - 500 000 square metres - of koala habitat, for the expansion of a NSW rock quarry.) Still, how good are cuddles?
Yesterday's media event was just another cynical PR manipulation - a thin, pre-election pretence of policy. The $50 mill isn't even a single-year amount - it's spread over 4 years. That covers the full range of projects, nationwide, including $10m for the post-fire promise to count koalas. (For perspective, $50m is almost exactly the same amount promised in 2018 for the Botany Bay Captain Cook memorial.) And the PM's speech really did scale considerable heights of insincerity. Witness his attempt to shoehorn a reputational-boast into the species-preservation announcement: "These are the practical things that you do when you care for a country, you care for a country itself and you care for its people". Anyone not needing a bucket after hearing that hasn't been paying attention.
As ever with Scott Morrison, beyond the shameless marketing bullshit, there's little of any substance. The PM's only truly keen embrace is of dirty-industry dollars and climate catastrophe.

(*Yes I know koalas aren't bears, but the PM doesn't, so what can you do?)






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bad Calls - The Covid Helpline Fiasco And The Robodebt Connection

Image
Extract from The Saturday Paper article by Rick Morton: "The centrepiece of the federal government’s “Living with Covid” program is a call centre outsourced to former robo-debt collectors and staffed by workers on casual contracts with no medical experience. A cache of documents and testimony obtained by The Saturday Paper reveals the inner workings of the National Coronavirus Helpline, which is being run by private-equity owned Probe Group and its subsidiaries, on contracts worth more than $270 million." Morton's article discloses that the national helpline - listed as the first point of contact by multiple government departments - has been staffed by Probe with a small, badly-paid band of random recruits, who're tasked with triaging, despite often having only 2 hours training and no background in health care. Morton reports that the highly-stressed workers are overwhelmed by the volume, complexity and variety of calls - and that when problems arise they're tol...
Read more

Stop Him If You've Heard This One Before

Image
Last Friday, the UK's Court of Appeal found the Conservative government's deeply nasty plan to dump asylum-seekers in Rwanda to be unlawful. PM/Head-Prefect Rishi Sunak is still lobbying for the European Court of Human Rights rules that protect asylum-seekers to be "reformed". If the "disincentive" strategy of sending people who have fled persecution into fresh danger sounds familiar, that's because yes, it was copied directly from Australia's repugnant playbook of the last 20 years. Sunak has even campaigned using the slogan "Stop The Boats". This is perhaps unsurprising, given the cutthroat-desperation of his party and close links between the Australian and UK Tories - despicable Howard-era strategist/former Director of the federal Liberal Party/consultant-for-hire Lynton Crosby worked directly on campaigns for Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and Theresa May. Crosby is notorious for his simple inflammatory slogans, smear campaigns, wedge-po...
Read more

The Devil In The Detail

Image
On Thursday, April 14, the Fin Review ran both an opinion piece and an article based around Ipsos focus-group work which the Fin said showed undecided voters were leaning toward Scott Morrison. The paper described that voter-group's feeling as "better the devil you know". The Guardian's economics correspondent, Peter Hannam, noticed that no numbers were mentioned. When he contacted Ipsos to check, it turned out that two groups of voters had participated, with each group consisting of... five people. Yes - the work was indicative of the leanings of fully ten individuals. The journalist responsible for hyping this junk was Phil Coorey, who in recent years has been the AFR's contact-of-choice for leaks and briefings from the Prime Minister's Office, and who memorably penned the fawning "Woman Who Saved Australia" profile of Gladys Berejiklian just 5 months before her exit under a corruption cloud. The AFR was once a Fairfax publication. Then Malcolm T...
Read more