We seem to have no thread to discuss this topic. Personally I’m riveted to the feeds on it. By all accounts an unprecedented climate event although I’m sure some will argue it isn’t.
Anyway, the haze just reached Auckland. Here’s a pic from my sister;
I think I’m just missing mainstream news the last couple of days. I saw a couple of pictures that were horrendous.
Yeah, my uncle almost died yesterday. Fire went right up to the property line of his house in the bush. Idiot refused to evacuate. His daughter basically rescued him by driving back up there and alerting the local fire department that he (and some other idiot) hadn’t evacuated as they should have. He’s okay now. Fire trucks came just in time and were able to halt it.
Scott Morrison has to be the most unpopular world leader in the world right now. And rightly so. Over half a billion animals dead, scores of people, thousands of houses, and the burned area of Australia is larger than Ireland.
ScoMo is an idiot. Tried to ignore the whole thing believing it was some kind of seasonal burn off. By the time he realized the scale of the disaster no one had any time for his bull shit. Every fire commissioner in Australia collectively warned him of what was coming and he refused to listen and reduced their funding. I hope he burns in hell, sanctimonious god botherer that he is.
Plus he slashed funding for rural fire services and ignored warnings that drought conditions would bring devastating fires, so he didn’t make preparations like flying in water-bomber planes. And then the emergency head going on that New Years Europe trip.
My mom said it’s like President Bush and FEMA head Michael Brown’s response to Hurricane Katrina all over again, and I can’t disagree.
I don’t think Australia needs donation from foreigners at all. I find the fundraising effort on Facebook cringey af.
It’s really terrifying. I was just talking to a friend about bushfires in Australia a few weeks back and how it’s a regualr occurance. The severity and scale of this one is definitely not regular.
It is rather condescending.
And rather helpful. The fire services there are severely underfunded. So you can act cool
and sniff your nose at it all you want, but money (as long as it’s allocated properly) helps. That’s all there is to it.
Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. If the Australian fire services are underfunded it’s exactly because the money isn’t allocated properly like you said, not because there isn’t enough money.
It’s a perfectly normal failure of democratic governments everywhere, where budgets are created by representatives elected by citizens.
Certainly private donations are a fine stopgap measure, and have a significant advantage of being offered voluntarily.
We could donate them a new Prime Minister?
I’m deliberately avoiding reading anything more about this. I’ve got most world news on ignore. I’m just sick of hearing about stupid people doing stupid things, and the little I’ve heard about the Australian situation really bothers me. There’s nothing I can do about it (nobody’s going to give me $10 for my nude photos) so I’d rather just stick my head in the sand, thanks.
I guess, but another point I would make is that Australians themselves are more than capable of doing that.
People all say that now that the country’s on fire, but eventually the fires will cease and no one’s ever gonna bring this up again until the next bushfires season. Representatives create those budgets because they are elected by citizens who have the memory capacity of 2 weeks.
How about we all chip in so F gets his ten knicker. I’ll get the balls rolling with two…
I suspect if I sold 10,000 photos like that Instagram girl, I’d still end up with less than $10.
And I’m not really interested in seeing you rolling your balls, thanks all the same.
I’ll be surprised if Australians don’t make changes all around, including to the appropriate budget amounts.
National emergencies are by definition unanticipated events. Government will never get it perfectly right, and that’s ok.
Environmental activism?
This one was fully anticipated. The fire commissioners beseeched ScoMo to get the infrastructure in place to cope with it. He told them to go fuck themselves.
