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?”

The Climate Science Denial Promoters Behind Queensland's Energy Scare Election Headlines.

In the final week before an election, the biggest-selling newspaper in the Australian state of Queensland screamed a front-page headline that cut into one of the poll’s most divisive issues.

“Nervous Energy” read the headline, claiming an “Exclusive” on a “Dire warning of power station closures, blackout.”

According to the Courier-Mail, a just-published report had warned that the center-left Labor Party’s target of 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 would cause “statewide blackouts” for “up to 15 percent of the year.”

According to the report, the policy would also cut dividends to the state’s treasury and push power prices up even further. Labor rejected the claims, saying the state owned the coal power stations and it had no plans to close any prematurely.

The report was from the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP) and provided a perfect echo of the center-right Liberal National Party’s (LNP) warnings to prospective voters in the state poll. But this is not surprising, when you learn who is behind the AiP.

Read Graham Readfearn’s Desmog story - “The Climate Science Denial Promoters Behind Queensland's Energy Scare Election Headlines.”