As I write this, there are 217 bushfires being reported by the Rural Fire Service of New South Wales. There probably are more in other states but the RFS doesn't report on those.
This is not normal.
Also, in the 2019/20 NSW State Budget, $78m was stripped from both the NSW Fire Service and the Rural Fire Service. The Premier of NSW then tried to blame the NSW National Parks Service for not conducting fuel management burns, despite having fired 27 of the 36 regional managers and support staff and stripping funding from them as well.
This is not normal.
The Bureau of Meteorology has had to add a new category of "Smoke Haze" to their forecasts; this was after the fire services across Australia added the new category of "Catastrophic" to fire warnings.
This is not normal.
Rather than actually address an emergency which stretches on for more than 1400km, the Federal Government has decided to pursue changes to workplace and industrial relations law, as well as repealing evacuation of refugees from the Federal Government's offshore punishment centres on the grounds of medical emergency. This is also the same week as a reorganisation of government departments in preparation for a expected cut to budgets there as well.
This is not normal.
We have governments at both State and Federal level who are prepared to degrade what's left of public services and the environment, just for the private profits of fewer and fewer people.
Whether its giving an unlimited licence to all the water in the Great Artesian Basin, to deliberately denying that climate change is not only real but is starting to have serious mass systemic effects, to the enforcement and punishment of people because they have the audacity of being poor.
The fact that the skies are orange at noon because of smoke, and we have broken more than 260 heat records in the past five years, and that we have now experienced for the first time in Australian meteorological history a day where no rain at all was recorded on the continent and which had never happened in the 190 years from 1828 to 2018 (and has now happened five times since October), has gone beyond the point of being not normal.
The smell that I am smelling while the skies burn, is the smell of the lovely franking credits which everyone voted for. This is the smell of a country which is literally burning because of the repeated policies of cruel idiots.
This is why I am heartened at the thought that someone on Facebook has decided to organise an event which is called:
https://www.facebook.com/events/788738731574954/
Stand In Front Of Parliament House And Just Scream For An Hour
Dec 7 at 12 PM – 1 PM
Dec 7 · 18–25°C Smoke Haze
NSW Parliament House
Sydney, Australia 2000
Yes, this is a futile and ultimately stupid event because it will achieve nothing (largely because it doesn't intend to achieve anything) but I can't help but feel that a futile and ultimately stupid event is the best response to futile and ultimately stupid government. When you have no voice willing to speak for us or to us, then we had better learn how to yell.
When you have a political party which is chained to the proposition that burning public services, vulnerable people, facts and science and truth, and even the environment itself if it is expedient in securing private profits, and the other major political party scrobbling around in any effort to look part way relevant, then before we get to resorting to civil disobedience and revolution (which is almost always the last steps of response to government not giving a hoot about governing), then the only sensible response is satire and ridicule. When you live in an era of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The big problem with pointing out that things aren't normal is that after a period of time and things have changed, then those things are the new normal.
This is who we are Australia. We took deliberate and repeated choices to get here. We are cruel. We are selfish. We are stupid. We deserve the country being on fire.
This is normal.
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