According to International Monetary Fund estimates, the Australian government has been subsidising the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $29 billion per year (if you don't believe it, google it).
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Yet, it turns out that burning fossil fuels adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which fuels more and more climate-change linked disasters.
The disastrous fires that we are suffering are linked to the fossil fuels that the government is so keen to subsidise.
At the same time, the neo-liberal economic model has led successive Australian governments to defund emergency services, national parks staff budgets, environmental research, climate science and social services, so that we are not adequately equipped to deal with the disaster that is now unfolding around us.
Author Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, explains how neoliberal theorists advocate the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people are distracted.
Now, while we are currently 'distracted' with the present crisis, Scott Morrison is due to leave for India.
Will he be negotiating exporting more Aussie coal? (ABC headlines in June 2019 stated the Adani mine could be the 'ice-breaker' for six more proposed Galilee Basin mines.)
We cannot afford to let that happen. If Australia is to support the developing world's need for energy, it could and should be through renewables.
The issue is not about jobs, growth and the economy. The issue is about our very survival, and the survival of the wider ecology and biosphere on which we depend.
Carol Baker
Port Macquarie
