Beware terrorists but don't sweat the climate crisis – how blind can Morrison be?

“Sydney’s burning.”

‘Morrison seemed particularly blasé about the whole bushfire
 business … he did, however, announce that anti-terror police
would patrol the nation’s airports over Christmas.’

That might be a headline from any Australian media outlet today, given the fires consuming New South Wales (and other states).

But it’s actually the title of Ian Turner’s classic account of the suppression by the Australian government of an international labour union, Industrial Workers of the World, in 1916.

Turner explains how, in an Australia deeply divided by Billy Hughes’s plans for conscription, a series of suspicious blazes provided pretext for draconian repression, with 12 members of the antiwar IWW imprisoned for, among other offences, “feloniously and wickedly conspire[ing] to burn down and destroy buildings and shops in Sydney and elsewhere in the state”.

Read the opinion piece from The Guardian by Jeff Sparrow - “Beware terrorists but don't sweat the climate crisis – how blind can Morrison be?”