A lot of people, in defence of Scott Morrison, are asking what more can he actually do – as prime minister of, and most powerful person in, Australia – in the face of these catastrophic bushfires.
Well I’m no politician, but here are some ideas:
1. Stop trying to deflect attention away from the tragedy. We’re not going to watch the fucken cricket and forget about the fires, and all the free propaganda you wrote for the Murdoch press imploring people to be more optimistic in the face of future disasters is offensive and severely sours the national mood.
2. Don’t use the fires as a smokescreen for you to hide your religious discrimination bill behind. We know that your bizarre religion is important to you, and that you owe them a favour for helping you get a bunch of votes from the sky fairy mob, but pushing through legislation that allows people to discriminate against the LGQTBI+ community on the basis of their faith is not what Australia needs right now. Some of the more pessimistic among us would say that it’s downright devious.
3. Forget about your budget surplus. People don’t care about going into a bit of debt if it means that we have millions of hectares of land that aren’t decimated, houses that aren’t turned to ash, and native fauna that isn’t burned alive in the 100s of 1000s (edit: 100s of 1000s of 1,000,000s – as in half a billion and still plenty to perish.). Borrow some fucken money and let’s get some equipment to the people out there fighting these fires. They need equipment.
4. Don’t go spending the budget you do have on ridiculous things, like the 140 BMWs you just ordered for your colleagues at $100,000 a pop. Or the $111,000 you gave to your church. For sure, the country needs to function still, and we can’t expect all tax money to go to the fire fighting efforts, but it hurts to see money wasted on your little fucken passion projects while firefighters are buying their own boots.
5. Try and be an actual human being, not an alien in the skin of a marketing executive, and try to be really, truly empathetic and act with genuine compassion when consoling the people who have lost everything. They’re going to be mad at you, because they’ve lost everything, but forcing handshakes and running away at the first sign is not what a compassionate human being does, even less a leader. Stop, listen. Maybe turn up with some food and drink, even. Jesus Cripes, Scott, it’s not hard.
6. Mobilise the army to do more. I’m unaware of how they can help, and don’t expect them to fight fires, but food drops, evacuations, and even getting the engineers to create fire breaks would all be things well within the armed forces’ skill sets.
And these are just a handful of things that a real leader could be doing immediately. In the longer term he could really do some top knotch leadering, although we know that the fart sack most certainly will not. But if he wasn’t such an incompetent bag of bullshit, he could:
7. Really acknowledge that climate change is upon us, and that Australia is hotter and drier than ever, and that we really need to invest big money into bushfire research and then bushfire hazard reduction. Actually, the Greens have a great policy that sees them consulting scientists and First Australians before setting any fire reduction policies. So we’re not out there like cowboys burning everything every day and inadvertently starting more fires, but enacting a considered and thought out plan to reduce future threat.
8. Realise that it’s not in Australia’s best interest to be so reliant on a handful of mining companies from here and overseas who don’t pay tax, who receive subsidies from the tax payer, and whose business is directly responsible for polluting our country, sucking up all of our water, and raising the temperature of the planet with its carbon emissions. It will take time, but why don’t we work towards being a green energy leader and be at the forefront of making that profitable, if you insist that profit is god still.
9. Instead of outlawing environmental protests, and instead of telling kids to cheer up when they’re concerned about their future, understand that people are concerned and that they’re looking to you for leadership in the face of the biggest threat to human life ever faced. If the scientists are right, and we’ve had no problem trusting their method so far, we’re heading towards extinction and we can do something to change it still, so long as we don’t bury our heads in the sand and stick our fingers in our ears, and scream LA LA LA while we pretend it’s not happening.
10. Or probably just fuck off, Scotty. You’re too compromised, too beholden to the right wing of the coalition, to your faith and the lobby groups within it, to the Murdoch media, to big business and corporate donors, to international mining companies, to be able to act in the best interests of Australians. You’re a traitor and you’ve taken the Aussie people for granted and treated us with contempt when you were most needed and you’ve just had a chance to be a national hero and you fucked it up so much that now you’re a bigger villain than Tony Abbott was and so look, buddy, just fuck off somewhere else, please. You don’t want this, and we don’t want you.
Wade Gravy
