<![CDATA[Australia's bush fires: the burning issue Scott Morrison refuses to discuss]>

Australia is on fire. The sun sits low over Sydney, an angry red wound in the sky, glowering amid its shroud of soot. Visibility in the city is somewhere between ludicrous and non-existent; at times the Opera House looks like it's an appropriate shade of sepia, a nostalgic reminder of clearer eyes and lungs, and the Harbour Bridge winks in and out of sight as the smoke roils.

The area burned in Queensland and New South Wales is 2.9 million hectares, according to the latest reports " about 40 times the size of Singapore. The air quality index for New South Wales quietly notes that a rating of more than 200 is hazardous; it is currently more than 2,000, worse than Beijing and some of the world's most polluted cities. Firefighters were last month battling a fire front of some 6,000 kilometres, the equivalent of a return trip from Sydney to Perth " or one end of Australia to the other, and back again.

There's a temptation to describe the whole scene as post-apocalyptic, only there's nothing post about it. This is happening right now. Six people have died, and close to 700 homes have been lost. Fire alarms are going off inside buildings as smoke worms its way inside. People are gasping and spluttering as they attempt to live out some semblance of normalcy in the gloom, with medical personnel responding to between 70 and 100 cases of respiratory illness every day. Some schools are closed, while others are not letting children outside to protect them from the smoke. And as for the animals " some reports quote experts as saying more than 2,000 koalas have died, with the fires so destructive that their bodies will never be found.

Smoke haze from bush fires in New South Wales blankets the Sydney Opera House on December 6. Photo: EPA alt=Smoke haze from bush fires in New South Wales blankets the Sydney Opera House on December 6. Photo: EPA

In terms of legislation, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has taken a measured, appropriate response to the situation. In Sydney on Tuesday, while the city choked, he unveiled changes to a religious discrimination bill that will allow religious bodies to discriminate in areas where it is done "in good faith [and] may be reasonably regarded as being in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of their religion". Rather than consider a federal response to the fires, his focus was on constructing extraordinarily large legislative loopholes in other areas with the potential to cause a great deal of harm.

But let us step away from metaphorical conflagrations and return to literal ones. In Sydney on Tuesday, Morrison also took the time to reject calls for help for the 2,800 or so firefighters in the field. Australia's rural firefighters are volunteers; as an SBS report points out, this is because when emergency situations arise, there is a need for a surge of extra hands " and for knowledge of local conditions and geography. They are unpaid, but this year's unprecedented fires mean many have been away from their jobs for weeks. This is not to say they should immediately start receiving a salary for their efforts, although if there's any time to have a discussion about the matter it would be now " and that's the crux of the whole situation.

In April, former New South Wales fire chief Greg Mullins and 22 other emergency leaders wrote an urgent letter to Morrison, articulating their concern over climate change and "increasingly catastrophic extreme weather events", and asking for a meeting to discuss how Australia could better prepare for the growing risks from natural disasters. They wrote to him again in September, warning that the fire situation was "entering uncharted territory". These meetings have yet to happen; apparently neither time was suitable for a discussion. Even Morrison's Thursday announcement of an additional A$11 million (US$7.5 million) to aid aerial firefighting efforts, while more than welcome, contained no talk of the circumstances that had led to the additional funds.

September also saw Morrison respond to Swedish activist Greta Thunberg's United Nations speech with the acknowledgement that climate change concerns were "very real issues", but the debate around it was subjecting Australian children to "needless anxiety". Making out that the discussion around an issue is as harmful as the issue itself is a masterful form of misdirection, and it's already had political consequences.

The remains of a property destroyed by fire in Bobin, 350km north of Sydney. Photo: AFP alt=The remains of a property destroyed by fire in Bobin, 350km north of Sydney. Photo: AFP

During the Pacific Islands Forum in August, leaders demanded action on climate change, with their countries first in line to bear the brunt of rising sea levels. More than this, they lambasted Australia's policy of offering aid in a bid for geopolitical influence while ignoring the "existential threat" they faced. At the time, Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga expressed grave concerns about Australia's coal policy, dismissing talk of partnerships "while you keep pouring your coal emissions into the atmosphere that is killing my people and drowning my people into the water". And on Wednesday, Australia was ignominiously ranked as the worst-performing country on climate change policy from a list of 57 nations, with experts noting that the Morrison administration was a "regressive force" in climate negotiations.

The point of all this is not to say that the fires ravaging Australia are the direct result of climate change, the inevitable, mathematical outcome of the abuse we have inflicted on the Earth. It is to say that the consistent and wilful refusal to acknowledge climate change is a prophylactic for any form of discussion about how we as a country, or a species, can do better " how we can look at the way our existence affects other living things and the very planet that sustains us, and build a future that does not leave a trail of extinction in the wake of humanity's bid for survival.

It is a cultivated and harmful form of denial, and a tactic not dissimilar to exiling human beings to offshore detention centres. That approach has had some success in reducing lives to statistics, proof that for some politicians and voters there is merit in obstinately looking away from an issue instead of talking about it. The outrage over this fire season is different, of course, because it is omnipresent " it is impossible to turn away from a problem when in every direction there is ash and smoke, which might explain the Australian insistence on burying heads in the sand.

Hari Raj is a production editor at the Post

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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