Centrelink lives up to its growing reputation for incompetence

The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2019:

Confused and angry locals doing it tough in bushfire-ravaged NSW towns have been denied government relief payments due to outdated maps and technicalities.

Upset residents told The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Nine News they applied for the $1000 tax-free disaster recovery payment, only for Centrelink to knock it back because their "guide maps" showing the fire zone were out of date.

And several workers on the NSW South Coast whose employers have closed or reduced staffing levels due to a combination of fires, power outages, road closures and evacuations said they were also rejected by Centrelink.

Mogo resident Melinda Evans said she had been told by four Centrelink workers she was "not in the area [affected by bushfires] ... They're looking at their own map but if you look around here you can tell we're in the thick of it".

On New Year's Eve, fire tore through her rural property, destroying sheds and fences and affecting the health of Ms Evans' young son Michael.

"His breathing's terrible, he's stuffy, he's got a cough. There's nothing else we can do about it, there's nowhere else we can go."....

Read the full article here.

Lies and misinformation about Australian fires being spread on social media in January 2020

"Arson is the act of intentionally and maliciously destroying or damaging property through the use of fire." [Australian Institute of Criminology, 9 November 2004]

The first response of hard right politicians and climate change deniers when faced with the effects of climate change is to resort to lies and misdirection.

This has begun to occur with a vengeance in 2020 with exaggerated claims concerning arson during the 2019-20 bushfire season.

ABC News, 8 January 2020: 

Australia's bushfire emergency is being exploited on social media, as misinformation is spread through cyberspace via hundreds of thousands of posts. 

Out-of-date photos of survivors and inaccurate fire maps have been widely shared, including by international celebrities. 

As authorities fight the flames on firegrounds around the country, an ABC investigation has revealed a battle of a very different kind online. 

One area of misinformation has been the hashtag #ArsonEmergency on Twitter. 

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researcher Dr Timothy Graham analysed 315 accounts posting #ArsonEmergency and said a third of them displayed highly-automated and inauthentic behaviour. 

INFOGRAPHIC: Tweets downplaying climate change were shared tens of thousands of times. 

He said the topic appeared to be attracting a "suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts". 

The ABC found many of the suspicious accounts were amplifying unproven suggestions arson had been the overwhelming cause of Australia's disastrous bushfire season. 

Several Twitter users were misrepresenting a media report about police investigating whether some of the fires were deliberately lit, despite the same report noting the blazes on the NSW South Coast were likely caused by lightning strikes. 

Some incorrectly quoted Australian police as having dismissed the link between the fires and climate change. An article posted by an American far-right figure went one step further, claiming left-wing ecoterrorists were responsible for lighting the blazes.... 

Read the full article here.

The Guardian, 8 January 2019:

Victoria police say there is no evidence any of the devastating bushfires in the state were caused by arson, contrary to the spread of global disinformation exaggerating arsonist arrests during the current crisis.

A misleading figure suggesting 183 arsonists have been arrested “since the start of the bushfire season” spread across the globe on Wednesday, after initial reports in News Corp were picked up by Donald Trump Jr, US far-right websites and popular alt-right personalities.....

Queensland police said between 10 September and 8 January there had been 1,068 reported bushfires in the state, of which 114 had been deliberately or maliciously lit through human involvement and have been subject to police enforcement action.....

NSW police statistics show 24 individuals have been arrested for deliberately lighting bushfires during the current fire season.

But a Rural Fire Service spokesman told Sky News on Wednesday that the majority of the larger fires in the state were caused by lightning, and that arson was a relatively small source of ignition.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 2020:

A News Corp employee has slammed the organisation for its "irresponsible", "dangerous" and "damaging" coverage of the national bushfire crisis, urging executive chairman Michael Miller to think about the "big picture".

In an email distributed to News Corp Australia staff and addressed to Mr Miller, commercial finance manager Emily Townsend said she had been filled with anxiety and disappointment over the coverage, which had impacted her ability to work.

Ms Townsend, who has worked for News Corp Australia for five years, thanked Mr Miller for the email about fundraising initiatives in relation to the fires, but said the efforts did not offset the company's coverage of the bushfires.

"I have been severely impacted by the coverage of News Corp publications in relation to the fires, in particular the misinformation campaign that has tried to divert attention away from the real issue which is climate change to rather focus on arson (including misrepresenting facts)," she said.

"I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies. The reporting I have witnessed in The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun is not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and start doing something about it."….

After the email leaked, Ms Townsend said she felt compelled to send it to Mr Miller's email group because of the "sickening" coverage the media organisation had given to the bushfires.

"Everything I said in the email I stand by. I feel sick, not because the email has been circulated but because I have been contributing to this deception by continuing to work for this organisation. I haven't been able to sleep, this has really preoccupied my thinking; it is unconscionable what this company has been doing when it comes to climate change," she said.

Ms Townsend's comments follow an influx of false and misleading posts spread on social media websites this week about the cause of the bushfires, which have raised concerns among politicians and academics....

It would not surprise me to find that Tophan Guerin - contracted by Scott Morrison to handle his social media election campaign in 2019 - had a hand in starting this fake news conflagration which News Corp has vigorously stoked on a daily basis.

NSW recorded crime statistics for the 2019-20 financial year will not be available before July this year. However, arson statistics for the 24 months up to September 2019 are publicly available.

These statistics show that there was a -36.1% trend fall in the total number of persons taken to court on arson related charges in those 24 months.

As of end September 2019 the NSW arson rate was 62.8 per 100,000 head of population.

According to NSW Rural Fire Service spokesman Ben Shepherd the vast majority of major fires in the state since August 2019 were the result of lightning storms.

A more realistic picture of what has been happening on the ground since August 2019 can be found on the NSW Police website and in online media articles under The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian mastheads, rather than posts or tweets with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency.

In the 23 locations listed below only 8 had fires which met the definition of arson and, of these only 6 involved grass or bushland fires.

Information from NSW Police website & non-News Corp mainstream media articles:

Wednesday 21 August 2019

* Three girls aged 12, 13 and 14 allegedly set fire to grasslands on thirteen occasions in the Kempsey area of the mid-North Coast, Grasslands which at the time were being controlled by NSWRFS.

Monday 11 November 2019

* 27 year old man during a total fire ban allegedly lit a campfire at Wallacia in the Sydney outer western metropolitan region.

Tuesday 12 November 2019

* 35 year old man living at Prestons in the Sydney outer western metropolitan region allegedly burned fence palings in a cylindrical BBQ causing a fire.

* Man living in Laylor Park in the Sydney outer western metropolitan region allegedly lit a coal BBQ during a total fire ban.

* 9 year old boy allegedly set grass alight with blowtorch causing a grass fire behind a street in Nowra on the South Coast.

Wednesday 13 November 2019

* 5 men in different locations were allegedly found to be breaching total fire bans by lighting barbeque fires, incinerating rubbish or lighting a candle at a campsite.

Thursday 14 November 2019

*51 year old man allegedly attempted a backburn to protect his cannabis crop and lost control of the fire which spread across est. 5,400ha in the Ebor region.

Tuesday 26 November 2019

* 19 year old NSWRFS volunteer firefighter charged with allegedly starting seven fires in the Bega Valley on the South Coast between October 17 and November 26

Saturday 30 November 2019

* 15 year old girl and 23 year old man allegedly set fire to a grandstand in Orange, destroying est. about 40% of the structure.

Thursday 5 December 2019

* 40 year old man allegedly deliberately set fire to grass on a vacant lot in Telarah on the Central Coast.

Sunday 22 December 2019

* Reserve at Wellington in the central west of the state caught fire and a number of boys were allegedly seen running from the area. An 11 year old boy attended Wellington Police Station in relation to the incident.

* Two 18 year old men allegedly set off fireworks in Bright Park, Guildford  (Sydney) causing grass fires.

Thursday 26 December 2019

* 71 year old man allegedly lit fire for land clearance/fire break without permit/notice and permited fire to escape his land in Deua River Valley causing extensive fire damage to nearby Wandera State Forest (>100ha) and Monga National Park on the South Coast. This fireground merged with other fires, eventually covering est. 83,425ha and was still listed as out of control on 10 January 2020.

Friday 27 December 2019

* 23 year old man allegedly deliberately lit two fires in bushland at Neath and Aberdare in the Lower Hunter Valley region.

Monday 30 December 2019

* 18 year old man charged with 5 counts of malicious damage after allegedly setting fire to 3 cars and 3 garbage bins in the township of Raymond Terrace in the Hunter Valley.

Thursday 2 January 2020

* 84-year-old man on a rural property at Kalkite in the Southern Highlands allegedly lit a fire for land clearance/fire break without permit/notice.

Saturday 4 January 2020

* 63 year old man living in Cooma in the Snowy Mountains region allegedly had a small fire burning in a shallow pit dug into the ground in his backyard for the purposes of cooking.

Sunday 5 January 2020

* 38 year old man and his companion allegedly started a small scrub fire in the Taro area of the Hunter Valley after a cooking fire ignited brush.

* 44 year old man allegedly lit fires for land clearance/fire break without permit/notice and set fire to the property at Countegany in the Southern Highlands.

Friday 10 January 2020

* 40 year old man allegedly set alight two metal drums filled with plastic at Schofields in Sydney’s western suburbs, during a total fire ban.

Cartoon of the Week

Lindsay Foyle

Infrastructure toll in NSW since the beginning of the 2019-20 bushfire season

NSW North Coast repaying South Coast firies who came to our aid in the 2019 bushfires

Macquarie Port News, 6 January 2020:

Firefighters have flown in a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) cargo plane to help fight fires on the NSW South Coast.

Twenty Fire and Rescue NSW personnel from stations between Grafton to Taree boarded the RAAF C-130 Hercules flight at Port Macquarie Airport on Sunday, January 5.....

Mr Chetwynd said this is first time he has seen firefighters carried by RAAF planes in 30 years of working with Fire and Rescue NSW.

"We send crews all over the state, interstate and overseas for humanitarian and disaster relief," he said.

"But I've been doing this for 30 years and it's definitely the first time we have sent firefighting crews on RAAF planes to NSW.

"It's definitely an unprecedented situation and something which is very unique. The crews are happy because they are received support from both metropolitan and regional areas during our bushfire crisis here in 2019.

"They feel like they are paying back and giving their South Coast colleagues some support. We are also really appreciative of the RAAF for assisting with the efforts."

Clarence Valley RFS and Fire and Rescue crews have been deployed to assist and a Hazmat Tanker from 306 Grafton responded to the south coast fires on New Year’s Eve.

#ScottyFromMarketing needs to grow up or find another job

no_filter_Yamba 

#ScottyFromMarketing is simultaneously reminding us the crisis is still occurring & recovery has begun. He speaks as though all that is needed to recover is to replace bricks & mortar destroyed by fire and livestock lost. He just doesn't understand it will take more...1/4 

..than $$$. Mother Nature isn't impressed by $$$. They do not make it rain, keep baked & exposed soils fixed to the earth, cause new trees to grow on burnt ground, keep the few healthy rivers we have left alive & free of ash pollution, clean the air or lower high air/soil...2/4

....temperatures. Even if Scotty & his climate change denying mates commenced right now to lower greenhouse gas emissions instead of just pretending to, there will be no environmental, social and economic recovery across his next set of precious foreward estimates....3/4

2020 will likely end as it began - with some of the remaining forests burning, farms still not capable of past levels of agricultural production and water scarcity still a fact of life across Australia. Scotty needs to grow up & face these facts or find another job. 4/4 

This is how the world sees Australia and Australians in January 2020

A British perspective.....

"..the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security" [TheObserver columnist Nick Cohen writing in The Guardian, 5 January 2020]

The Guardian, 5 January 2020:

There are worse leaders than Scott Morrison. The “international community” includes torturers, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers 
and kleptomaniacs beside whom he seems almost benign. But no 
leader in the world is more abject than the prime minister of Australia.

He cuts a pathetic figure. A leader must speak honestly to his people in a crisis.The sly tactics of climate change denial, the false consoling words that it’s a scare and we can carry on as before, have left Morrison’s words as meaningless as a hum in the background. Nothing he says is worth hearing.

Australian English is rich in its descriptions of worthless men: as useful as tits on a bull, a dry thunderstorm, a third armpit, a glass door on a dunny, a pocket on a singlet, an ashtray on a motorbike, a submarine with screen doors, a roo-bar on a skateboard. Morrison is all of the above, but a British saying sums him up: “too clever by half”. Morrison won last year’s Australian general election, although his conservative Liberal party was expected to lose, by slyly mobilising opinion against tax rises in general and environmental taxes in particular.

The climate change denialism he espoused is a moving target. In the 1990s, lobbyists funded by the oil industry acted as if the overwhelming majority of scientists who understood the subject were in a conspiracy against the public. They accused the authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports of being guilty of a “major deception” when they discussed the human influence on climate. Many still hold to the original sin of this denialism.

Even as Australia burned last week, Tony Abbott, Morrison’s conservative predecessor, was still saying the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”. Abbott proved he was willing to make others suffer for his wilfully ignorant belief by scrapping a carbon tax when he was in power in Australia in 2014. A fallback position is emerging. It accepts that manmade climate change is real but withdraws the concession as soon as it has been made and loses it in an obfuscatory smoke.

The final fallback and the final degradation will come, I predict, in the mid-2020s when the right abandons denialism completely, admits that climate change is catastrophic, but adds it’s far too late to do anything about it, which it may well be.

Scott Morrison is hunkered down in stage two. He grudgingly acknowledges the existence of man-made climate change but hurriedly adds that other causes are at work. The climate has always changed and it’s not worth bearing the costs of challenging a polluting culture. It worked in last year’s elections, but sounds absurd today.

“By not recognising climate change as a serious threat you fail to prepare overworked, underappreciated first responders for larger, more frequent bushfires that devastate communities,” said one previously solid Morrison voter, after he had learned the truth about conservatism as his family waited to be evacuated from a New South Wales beach.

Despite its failure, perhaps because of its failures, the do-nothing Australian right remains admired across the conservative world. The 2019 election was meant to be a climate change election about the killing of the Great Barrier Reef, the extreme drought and average summer temperatures across the continent hitting 40C. Yet Morrison and his campaign team managed to turn it into an election about the Australian Labor party’s tax plans.

So impressed was Boris Johnson that he hired Morrison’s boys to win the British general election. Fawning coverage followed of the digital “whiz-kids” from New Zealand: Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24. In Australia, the hotshots refined their technique of dumping hundreds of crude variations on the same theme on social media. They described how Labor would raise taxes and warned that a proposal to encourage electric cars threatened motorists. Labor wanted to hit “Australians who love being out there in their four-wheel drives”, said Morrison, as his propagandists targeted ads at owners of Ford Rangers, Toyota Hilux and every other popular model, saying that Labor would increase the price of “Australia’s most popular cars”. In Britain, the same team banged home the crude message in a thousand different ways that Johnson would “get Brexit done”.

Politicians and political journalists who eulogise the cunning of clever operators aren’t being wholly asinine. How a party wins a campaign remains a matter of importance. But not one of them added, after the praise for the wise guys and whiz-kids had ended, that the boys from the Morrison campaign were the Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics who had convinced Australians to ignore the greatest threat to their nation’s security. It’s as if crime writers spent their time detailing the cunning of criminals while never mentioning the victims left bleeding on the floor.......

Read the full article here.

An American perspective.....

"Perhaps more than any other wealthy nation on Earth, Australia is at risk from the dangers of climate change. It has spent most of the 21st century in a historic drought. Its tropical oceans are more endangered than any other biome by climate change. Its people are clustered along the temperate and tropical coasts, where rising seas threaten major cities. Those same bands of livable land are the places either now burning or at heightened risk of bushfire in the future." [Journalist Robinson Meyer writing in The Atlantic, 4 January 2020]

Think how many Australian lives, homes and forests could have been saved if Scotty From Marketing had done this in September-October 2019

Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison literally spent months denying the widespread mega fires were something that as a nation and as a people we had never experienced before.

He stubbornly and callously ignored the mounting death toll, the loss of so many homes and businesses, the environmental devastation, the crushing fatigue of volunteer firefighters, because he wanted to stay on message - coal is king and climate change is something 'greenies' use to scare the kids.

It wasn't until bushfire victims and firefighters began to get right in his face, when he realised that he might lose that lucrative prime ministerial paypacket, that he finally began to provide a decent level of federal assistance.

It's just a pity that this below is over four months too late for most of New South Wales from the Great Dividing Range to the Pacific Ocean.

We’re putting more Defence Force boots on the ground, more planes in the sky, more ships to sea, and more trucks to roll in to support the bushfire fighting effort and recovery as part of our co-ordinated response to these terrible #bushfires pic.twitter.com/UiOeYB2jnv

— Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) January 4, 2020

One bushfire refugee's perspective

EchoNetDaily, 2 January 2020:

Fire fighters battling flames at Woombah, Iluka Road in November 2019. Photo Ewan Willis

As one of many bushfire refugees in Australia and beyond this year, I was faced with that classic question – what do I take and what can be left behind? A houseful of stuff and a small car are very different sizes, but when time is short, it’s amazing how it sharpens the mind, and the Tetris skills.

Turns out, not much is really necessary, or even desirable when it comes down to it. Being human, quite a few sentimental things of no practical use during an apocalypse found their way into the car. A few books. Also lots of ones and zeroes on hard drives of various sizes. Pretty much everything else was excess to requirements.

This is something more of us are learning as we move into this new reality, which has been predicted for some time, but not many expected would arrive so soon.

But what should we call this over-cooked era? Anthropocene has been suggested (or Anthrocene, as Nick Cave prefers) – the age when humans are the main drivers of everything that happens. Then there’s the under-sevens favourite, Plasticene. You only have to walk along a beach anywhere in the world and see the colourful detritus of our species to understand that one.

For me though, the one that takes the cake (a bombe Alaska, naturally) is the Pyrocene, or the age of fire. That’s what international fire expert Stephen J Pyne calls this era we’re living in, and after 29 books on the subject including Fire: a Brief History, he should know.

Burning stuff (especially fossil fuels) got our civilisation cooking with gas, made a lot of people rich, and now it seems everything else has to burn as a consequence......

The words of an Australian prime minister who still hasn't grasped the reality of climate change

As Australia literally burned from the mountains to the sea*, with thousands fleeing the flames after being told to evacuate ahead of extreme fire conditions expected on the east coast for Saturday, 4 January 2020 .

This was Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott John Morrison, speaking at a press conference on the afternoon of 2 January 2020:

“Let me be clear to the Australian people, our emissions reductions policies will both protect our environment and seek to reduce the risk and hazards we are seeing today. At the same time, it will seek to ensure the viability of people’s jobs and livelihoods, all around the country. 

“What we will do is ensure our policies remain sensible, that they don’t move towards either extreme, and stay focused on what Australians need for a vibrant and viable economy, as well as a vibrant and sustainable environment.”


NOTE

* According to Canadian field geophysicist and disaster researcher, Mika McKinnon, by Friday 2 January 2020 the combined size of burned areas across Australia was getting close to 40,000 sq km or 10 million acres - roughly the size of Switzerland. While the smoke plume was 5.5 million sq km or 1.3 billion acres - half the size of Europe.

Headlines of the Week

The start of 2010......

"NSW bushfires destroy dozens of properties on South Coast, ABC understands" [ABC News online, 1 January 2020]

"Supercell bushfire thunderstorms and other deadly fires that spin" [Journalist Kate Doyle, writing in ABC News online, 1 January 2020]

And two I missed from last year......

"We Are A Burning Nation Led By Cowards" [National Affairs Editor Hugh Rimminington writing on 10 Daily, 19 November 2019]

"Scott Morrison, the flim-flam man who rode the Peter Principle all the way to the Lodge" [Leo D'Angelo Fisher in a blog of that name, 2 October 2019]

Tweets of the Week

What, like, "on the other hand, it's ONLY 4.6 million hectares of Australia that are burning". A rare editorial engagement: go fuck yourself https://t.co/wcIaU7q2eQ

— Laura Tingle (@latingle) December 31, 2019

Do Australia’s politicians feel that children should be huddled in cars fearing for their lives at all times?

It’s 2020. The time to act on climate is now.⁣
⁣#ExtinctionRebellion #auspol pic.twitter.com/wBczdwp0lk

— Extinction Rebellion Australia (@XRebellionAus) December 31, 2019

How fabulous! Scott Morrison the most reviled man in Australia was forced to flee by car from #Cobargo due to the force of anger from #bushfirecrisis affected residents Whoever thought it was a good idea for PM to go out in public thought wrong

— SeditiousSarah💧VictoriousVictorian 🌱 (@WhistlingWhist) January 2, 2020

An angry protester has told Scott Morrison he should be "ashamed of himself" and that he's "left the country to burn" during a tour of the burnt out town of Cobargo late this afternoon. #auspol #NSWbushfires

— Victoria Pengilley (@vicpengilley) January 2, 2020

Disaster tourists Scott and Jenny Morrison have been booed out of Cobargo this afternoon.

This. Is. The. Australia. I. LOVE! #WeAreAllCobargo#cobargo#AusPol#ScottMorrison

— Susie (@TheSusieTweets) January 2, 2020

Yes, just saw a snippet on ABC24 news.
Morrison was snarky when asked about it and Jenny looked rattled. #Cobargo #WeAreAllCobargo#NSWbushfires

— Susie (@TheSusieTweets) January 2, 2020

YES just saw #Morrison having abuse hurled at him, victims venting at him, called him an idiot, he had to be hurried back to the car! #deserved #auspol
Also @The_Nationals copped an absolute bollocking!@MadFckingWitch @slpng_giants_oz

— 💧The Angry Goddess (@Bishop64) January 2, 2020

Weather conditions expected to worsen on Saturday 4 January 2020 as south-eastern Australia once again gears for widespread severe fire danger

A total of 18 people have died so far in Australia's 2019-20 bushfire season and, sadly this number may yet rise.

Tomorrow, Saturday 4 January 2020 is expected to see the same fire conditions as those experienced on 31 December 2019, when parts of the NSW South Coast and East Gippsland in Victoria burned to the sea and at least 8 lives were lost.

IMAGE: news.com.au, 1 January 2020

NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons stated on Wednesday:

“We’re expecting widespread severe fire dangers dominated by very hot conditions, up into the 40s, dry air coming out of the centre of Australia and westerly winds that will dominate.”

Fortunately for the NSW Northern Rivers region it is not expected that Saturday's heatwave conditions will affect us.

With the Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicting daytime temperatures from 29°C at Yamba to 33°C at Lismore.

In other news:

The Australian Defence Force scaled up its assistance on New Year’s Day with a Black Hawk helicopter rescuing three people from the New South Wales town of Moruya while another Black Hawk evacuated at least one person from Mallacoota in Victoria. 

But a decision is yet to be taken on whether the military will be needed for large-scale evacuations from Mallacoota and other towns ringed by fire, amid forecasts that conditions will worsen on Saturday.


UPDATE

Naval evacuation of civilians going ahead with reports up to 1,000 Victorian bushfire refugees expected to board HMAS Choules and MV Sycamore by early morning on 3 January 2020.