At the moment half of this state NSW, the same for QLD. Is burning up in flames.
THere is one burning just 2 suburbs away and it has done so for about 2 weeks. THe prime minister doesn't believe in climate change.
The premiere i.e the leader of this state has just taken away 14 million for the rural fire service budget. None of any of the leaders will talk about climate change.

So this what this side world looks like.

2 kids were arrested today starting a grass fire.

Most of these fires are started by fire bugs. i.e arsonists.
Some have being caught wearing firefighters clothes.

We've got a permanent thread on climate change called "Too little too late". You might be interested in following it.

Australia always strikes me as being rather like America. They both have this idea that because they are relatively new self-made nations, they don't have to worry about things like climate change. If things really go wrong, they can fix it with money or technology.

Wash your mouth out ...

Unfortunately, it's becoming more and more like America (the United States of America - just in case anyone wants to nit-pick and point out America is a continent and not an actual country - not necessarily talking about you in that regard Hazel ) each and every day. So you're not far from the truth in saying that, unfortunately. Although, nobody here I know wants an American-style health system here, or any other American-style system here strangely enough...

In regards to the fires, it's only going to get worse since it isn't even officially summer yet...

There is the problem. It has nothing to do with climate change.

But climate change has made them far more intense - there is a group of former fire chiefs that are currently lobbying our useless "federal government" about taking proper action on climate change.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-...eting/11705330

Its not so much climate change, but long term habitat mismanagement that causes fires like this to rage out of control. These habitats require some fire to be healthy, but after a significant time of preventing these fires from happening when they do inevitably happen they explode since all of the dead brush which would have been cleared out by smaller natural or controlled fires has been piling up for so long. Also I would not be surprised if invasive grasses and plants can exacerbate this problem.

Some reference materials.

https://www.anbg.gov.au/fire_ecology...diversity.html
https://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/managemen...cribed-burning

Of course, what you say is absolutely true, and bushfires/wildfires are certainly nothing new here. But there is an indirect link between the intensity of bushfires/wildfires and climate change. As climate change is resulting in hotter temperatures, seasons that would have started later on, starting earlier instead (as has happened). So it's not true to say "climate change has nothing to do with it".

I read both of the above linked articles from the Government of Australia, and would recommend them to all that are concerned with the fires in Australia.

The first linked article deals with previous fires in Australia and the effects on the trees and bushes.

The second linked article dealt with how the Government of Australia does controlled burns to eliminate brush and undergrowth.

Oh, dear .

We've been projecting a misleading image, sorry about that.

You're confusing the government for the country.

Surely in a democracy, the government reflects the way the country thinks and feels. How else did they get voted into power?

Because people didn't like the alternative and turned their nose up at the Labor Party (basically Queensland voted against the Labor Party).

Here it's really only two major parties that can realistically form a government (well actually three if you include the current government's fanatical coalition partners, the National Party as well), being the Labor Party, and the Liberal-National Party coalition (at federal level since other than Queensland with it's LNP Party, then the Liberal Party doesn't generally need the National Party to have enough numbers to form government at a state government level).

Same way every crooked politician gets into power, lobbyists, lying, cheating and the virtue of only bad choices to choose from.

All of the above for both of the major parties here... well said orbea!

You'd expect that, but unfortunately orbea put their finger on the problem.

The setup here is that the "conservative" side is a weird mixture ideologies and the "progressive" side is an equally weird mixture of different ideologies. Both sides are "pragmatic" enough to ignore long term planning in their efforts to play the power game, and right now the environment is not seen (wrongly, IMO) by the political heavyweights as a vote winner. The Greens (appear to) care about environmental (ie survival) issues, but they have their own weird mixture of ideologies when it comes to other matters.

To get into government here you only need to fool (or scare) some of the people some of the time because of the closeness of popular votes for the two main sides.


Edit: fixed misplaced parenthesis