It hasn’t been the greatest week for Scott Morrison, has it?
There was that moment where Scotty casually got casualty numbers wrong when speaking to bushfire-ravaged locals on Kangaroo Island before frantically trying to backpedal, not to mention Urban Dictionary honouring him in dubious fashion.
Needless to say that Scott Morrison has been under a lot of stress lately, which probably explains why he essentially told Australia to just give up in a trainwreck of an interview.
But let’s back up a little bit first.
Appearing on ABC‘s 7.30, Scotty was grilled by host Michael Rowland about the government’s lax response to the bushfires and how he should’ve “recognised [it] was a national emergency much earlier than [he] did.”
Rather than own up to it with a simple “we could’ve done better”, Scotty responded with a hell of a non-answer while dusting his hands of any responsibility, saying:
“We were operating under what has been the standing arrangements with the states and territories for many, many years … that is, we respond to requests and we work with them as they direct us.
“What became clear on New Year’s Day in particular as we had moved catastrophic fires in one state across two states and emerging threats in South Australia and other places, is that an unprecedented level of an event required an unprecedented response from the Commonwealth.
“Even just a week before that, the conditions were quite different.”
When asked about his little casualty numbers faux pas on Kangaroo Island, Scotty went on the defensive and tried to push the narrative that he was referring to “lost volunteer firefighters” instead of admitting that he royally cooked it, before trying to pass off his poorly-received visits to bushfire-ravaged towns as a big success.
But perhaps the most infuriating part of ol’ mate’s 7.30 interview was his response to climate change.
When Rowland pressed Scotty about his government suddenly going from denying climate change to saying that they’ve always accepted the link between climate change and extreme weather, before reminding him that Deputy PM Michael McCormack previously decried the issue as the concern of “woke capital city greenies”, ol’ mate doubled down on his denialism stance and tried to play the “people are politicising the issue” card:
“Of course, global changes in the environment and the climate have a broader impact on the world’s weather systems.
“What we’ve always said though, is you cannot link any individual single emissions reduction policy of a country … to any specific fire event. I mean, that’s just absurd.
“I think we should be meeting and beating our targets, and that’s exactly what we are doing.”
Scotty then brought up the idea of a royal commission into the bushfires and said it’s something the government will look into with the states:
“It needs to be comprehensive and deal with contributing factors, from everything from hazard reduction to climate change through to response issues, the national coordination matters and of course, resilience and planning for the future.”
Okay let’s unpack this.
Firstly, climate change is real and when you say you link that to extreme weather, then you should be doing a lot more about it instead of pushing the ridiculous angle of “oh one country’s carbon emissions are negligible” and “we shouldn’t be the only ones to do this, it’s not fair!”
Hell, we can’t prove that the cigarette some guy smoked on March 10, 2005, gave him lung cancer, but we’re damn sure smoking made it worse and that there’s a link.
And regardless of whether Australia is beating its Kyoto Protocol targets (spoiler: we’re not but it’s complicated), the real problem with Scott Morrison’s comments is that the government set incredibly weak targets and “meeting and beating” them isn’t a cause for celebration or that great of an achievement.
Throw in how Australia is ranked 57 out of 57 countries in the annual Climate Change Policy Index analysis, this doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the government is doing all they could for the environment and Australia.
So in a nutshell, Scott Morrison appeared on 7.30 to boost himself up while also essentially saying that Australia is in way too far and we should just give up on all this nonsense.
Not exactly inspiring words coming from a world leader whose country is being ravaged by bushfires that have been made worse by climate change.
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