Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is back trying to pretend the politically inconvenient fact of climate change is not occurring in the leadup to the 2022 federal election

Australian Bureau of Meteorology

On 5 November 2021 Australian Prime Minister & Liberal MP for Cook (NSW) Scott Morrison issued a lengthy media statement which ended with these three lines:

“High Risk Weather Events

National Cabinet received a briefing from Emergency Management Australia on the 2021-22 High Risk Weather Season, and noted that a La Niña watch has been issued in 2021.”

NOTE: Emergency Management Australia falls within the Dept. of Home Affairs. It organises the National Catastrophic Natural Disaster Plan (NATCATDISPLAN) last updated in 2017, republished in 2020.

To be honest I did not think why those three lines had been tacked on at the end of a statement which covered Vaccination and Booster Plans, Ensuring COVID-19 Outbreak Readiness for Indigenous Communities, National Plan to Transition Australia’s COVID-19 Response, Living with COVID-19 - Revised Test, Trace, Isolate and Quarantine (TTIQ) and Public Health and Social Measures (PHSMs), Living with COVID-19 - Health System Capacity, Borders and International Travel, along with this live link Doherty Institute COVID-19 modelling: 2nd tranche [PDF 651 KB].

At most all I thought was ‘Oh yes, the La Niña ALERT. North Coast Voices covered that in October and November posts'.

What I didn’t know and the Prime Minister did, was that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology had put together a rather more pointed weather outlook and forecast in power point form, which brought together the dry technical language on its website & its YouTube videos in a way that clearly showed where climate change had landed us all in 2021-22.

It must have been as obvious to the Prime Minister, as it was to me once I sighted segments of that presentation, that this was not information that a notorious climate change trivialising federal government would want to highlight going into an election year. However, as a slippery, slithering game player who is always looking for plausible deniability, those three brief lines would allow Morrison to say 'but I told Australia about it!' if a journalist thought to ask.

Here are a selection of slides from that presentation courtesy of Senator Rex Patrick’s Twitter account:

Click on images to enlarge.

The Guardian, 4 December 2021:

Tropical cyclones and flooding are set to pummel Australia over summer, national cabinet documents reveal.

The Bureau of Meteorology briefed the meeting of premiers, chief ministers and the prime minister on 5 November about the high-risk weather facing the nation until April.

National cabinet documents are usually kept secret, but South Australian senator Rex Patrick obtained these under freedom-of-information laws.

Last week Patrick, the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, and One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts all launched attacks on the prime minister’s department for its secrecy. There is a broader legal question about whether national cabinet is entitled to the cabinet-in-confidence protection, with critics saying that merely calling it a cabinet does not actually make it one.

The bureau director general, Joe Buffone, presented Emergency Management Australia’s 2021-22 High Risk Weather Season briefing.

The PowerPoint presentation shows there are increased chances of widespread flooding, coastal flooding and erosion, tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves, compared with average summers and early autumns.

There is a lower chance of drought and dust.

The overall risk of severe storms is on par with other years, while parts of Queensland and NSW have an increased risk of bushfire, and there is a higher chance of heatwaves than usual.

Warm waters mean slightly above average tropical cyclone numbers – the average is 11 per season.

La Niña means the weather is likely to be cooler, wetter and stormier. Areas that had above-average rainfall during spring, and therefore more grass, could lead to a heightened grassfire risk, while parts of the east coast will have a lower risk – because the 2019-20 fires reduced fuel loads.

The bureau’s presentation was prepared with publicly available information.

Patrick said the prime minister, Scott Morrison, should have released the documents when he released a media statement about the national cabinet meeting. That statement focused almost entirely on Covid, with a single line about the briefing.

That line prompted Patrick to make the FOI request to the Department of Home Affairs…….

And so it starts.

NSW and Victoria floods: rivers break banks as rain and wind lash Australia’s eastern states, The Guardian, 13 November 2021.

NSW flood damage bill expected to exceed $1b as November rain submerges crops, ABC News, 1 December 2021.

Man dies in Queensland floodwaters as heavy rainfall causes Inglewood to be evacuated, cars swept off road in state's south, ABC News, 1 December 2021.

BOM issues flood warning for Chinchilla on the Western Downs, as parts of southern Queensland begin clean-up, ABC News, 3 December 2021.