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.