I swear one day first generation Australians are going to rise up and slap some perspective on the broader masses.I see you’ve played this game before
Australia in the early 1960’s welcomed my parents when they each arrived as young adults fleeing a pretty bleak post-war Europe. They got jobs, they travelled, eventually they met, got married and raised a family here. Along the way the country helped them and in my mothers last few years provided outstanding medical care, it loaned (and also provided) my sister and I enough money to move away and undertake tertiary studies.
Now I sit back and watch the rhetoric around immigration, about “user pays” and the ever increasing meanness of welfare cutbacks and wonder where the country I was raised to love and respect went.
They came in a era when bipartisan politics was commonplace to ensure many basic ideals were above party lines - something successive governments tried to do until the later terms of John Howard became mired in conservative politics when his ego refused to allow more dynamic leaders to step up and continue along those lines. Since those days the ideals of Australia have been displaced by a culture of “what’s in it for me”.
It’s only at moments of true disaster where we see it dragged back into light, even though our increasing right-aligned media likes to always bring a tinge of incumbent bigotry “look at these Muslim migrant builders giving up their time to feed a town” instead of “here’s another story showing how all Australians are coming together at a time of crisis”.
The politics of Climate Change will be dirty and hard fought, because of blame is assigned then liability can be attached.
Maybe the wake up call is these fires, but perhaps the resounding message needs to be “stop being shit to the planet”.
