Digital Arsonists
In human history, there has never been a company like News Corp. Not just the scale and reach of it, but also the insidious political agenda. It’s not a media company anymore (as Richard Cooke argued and NYT elaborated on in light of the most recent fires). It is a propaganda outfit, but unique in that it isn’t tied to a particular government. News Corp is transnational — it is globalised propaganda. The vestigial functions of the company are now a smokescreen: it claims to engage in reporting for the public interest, but the dominant messaging on its pages, the way it frames debate, the toxic way it engages in gaslighting/political campaigning…these are its primary purposes now. What good journalism it does do is used to legitimise the vastly greater volume of manipulation and lies that it propagates otherwise. These lies are the more effective because they are intermingled with these ‘legitimising’ articles.
Take the bushfires in Australia at the moment, and the way they have been reported. Does it matter how the fires started? Yes, of course ignition is important, but a simple ignition does not create a megablaze like those which have been rolling through the national parks around Sydney for the past few months.
During December, when news reports were rolling in and news outlets — the Guardian, SMH, ABC — were ‘liveblogging’ a day of ‘catastrophic fire danger’, a fire was ignited — likely by people — in the suburb of Turramurra. That’s close to Sydney’s centre. News images showed pink fire retardant splashed across the expensive houses of Sydney’s strong Liberal (conservative) voting northern suburbs. But that small blaze was controlled and extinguished relatively quickly. Fires flare up all over the country, there are many, many ignitions.
Even if the stories reported by News Corp about arson were true (that is, that there is some epidemic that is getting worse), that would still only be a small part of the picture. And it goes no way to explaining why the bushfire season this year has started earlier, will run longer, and has burnt more land than the combined seasons of the past 15 years. Arsonists have been around for much longer 15 years — they might start individual fires, but they don’t cause them to become out of control monsters. So what does?
The reason climate change has entered into the conversation so insistently is that intensified bushfire seasons have long been predicted as a consequence. In Ross Garnaut’s 2008 review to the Rudd government, research was cited that suggested Australia would experience these exact fire seasons in 2020. Here we are — exactly where the science said we’d be. The drought, the extreme weather conditions, the substantial fuel loads exacerbated by dryness, and the erratic winds and low levels of water have created a literal tinderbox in Australia.
Scott Morrison argued on 730 that no single emissions policy — or lack of policy — could be attributed to any single fire. He claims that’s absurd. And he’s right, but at the same time it is an absurd and disingenuous thing for him to say. Nobody in Australia is suggesting that repealing the carbon price, for example, directly caused an individual fire. Nor are they suggesting that any action by Australia alone could avert this present circumstance. Morrison is arguing against a strawman because he wants to divert attention away from the Coalition’s abysmal climate policies, and their bizarre ideological obsession with coal.
As always, the disagreement stems from a deliberate failure of imagination. Focusing on arsonists individualises the problem: it ignores massive structural issues (drought and environmental conditions, improper adaptation, global failure to act quickly enough on climate change, poor government allocation of resources, etc) which are the cause of the scale of the problem. Individualising it allows these actors — Morrison, conservatives, News Corp — to paint a simple picture and blame it on criminals. And not reckless policy making. Which is what makes this kind of propaganda all the more dangerous: if it works, then the problem is going to get much much worse. Because you can arrest all of the arsonists you like, but all it takes is one and the structural problems will take care of the rest.
Each of these fires has, in a sense, an immediate cause (the ignition factor), and a structural cause (the factors that make the fires huge and out of control). Systems and structure are always more powerful than individuals. A match is very small, but if you chuck it in an ocean of petrol the whole thing will go up just the same.
Why does that make the News Corp approach dangerous? It makes sense, of course, to arrest and punish arsonists. Of course, and nobody is arguing otherwise. But it’s a crime that doesn’t come up often, not as often as, say, domestic violence. It’s harder to profile ‘arsonists’, it’s almost impossible to predict when someone is going to do it. Starting a fire is one of the easiest things humans can do — we’ve been doing it before we even had language. Political leaders can legislate heavier penalties, they can throw the book at arsonists, but unless they can guarantee they’re going to stop every single one, then the argument is academic. It only takes one. The system takes over. The whole joint burns.
We don’t have a capability to prevent any crime from ever happening — else we’d have no need for police, we’d have no murders, drug trade, assaults, or anything. There is no logical reason for the focus on arson at this time, when it is one of a handful of potential ignition factors. Even if we could stamp it out — Minority Report style — we can’t control lightning strikes. Which, incidentally, experts suggest are responsible for most of these fires:
All it takes is one strike. The system takes over. The whole joint burns.
So it should be clear now that if we want to prevent these conflagrations in the future, or at least to mitigate them, we should be focusing on those structural issues. That means better land management, it means greatly increased resourcing to fire services, it means global action on climate change so the problem doesn’t get worse in the future. It requires vision.
One of the stupid furphies kicking around Facebook (one of the reasons I’m weaning myself off that putrid network) is that ‘greenies’ are responsible for preventing hazard reduction burns. This has been categorically refuted by Shane Fitszimmons from the NSW Rural Fire Service. Hazard reduction depends on optimal weather conditions: if it’s the rainy season, it can’t happen, and if it’s too close to the fire season it can’t happen. The fire season is getting longer, which means the structural problems are reaching a horrible tipping point where they feed into each other. These tipping points, like everything else in the climate debate, have been warned about by scientists for a long time as well. Given a shorter window of opportunity, it will take more resources to complete the necessary work. Which means more investment from government.
I don’t think it helps, incidentally, when people on ‘the left’ decide to attack governments for budget cuts that the Fire commissioner himself — a non-political role — says have not happened (though the picture is complicated). Fitszimmons explained that RFS funding is at the highest it has ever been, so apportioning blame to the Berejiklian government for this might not be the most helpful critique at the moment (though governments should be investing more in emergency services in light of the climate crisis). Accuracy is important, especially when there is a well-oiled propaganda machine like the Murdoch organisation fueling lies which are then propagated on Facebook. News Corp looks for exactly those instances of overreach and exploits them — it is part of the rhetorical strategy of ‘individualising’ systemic problems. It pulls the focus back to ‘greenies’ and ‘lefty activists’, rather than the systemic issue of fuel loads, drought, adaptation and our response to climate change. And it leads to the propagation of absolute rubbish:
The tactic of individualisation is part of reactionary politics’ stock and trade: people in burnt out towns who criticised the Prime Minister were called ‘ferals’ and their personal lives dragged into the story.
The failure of leadership from Scott Morrison — going on holidays in the middle of Australia’s peak fire season, during an existing emergency — was reduced to a question of annual leave: “He’s entitled to go on a holiday, he’s worked hard”. Perhaps, but there are very few jobs in this country that let people go on leave any time they want without exception. I work at a University — I can’t take annual leave for the first four weeks of semester.
Surely the Prime Minister of the country — and we only have one of those — surely he should recognise that when a national crisis is likely, or is taking place, that is not an appropriate time to take leave: his individual desires were put before his duty to the system. He is paid to sit at the top of governance in this country, he has a function, it’s what he was elected to do. He can take his holidays in winter. When he returned, he individualised again, suggesting that people wanted him in the country as an emotional support:
“They’ll be pleased I’m coming back, I’m sure, but they know I don’t hold a hose, I don’t sit in a control room.”
Nobody expects the Prime Minister to hold a hose or sit in a control room, but he does head a government that has sole constitutional power of taxation in this country, and which has presided over increasing federalism in commonwealth-state relations. His role is not ceremonial — if people wanted to be comforted by a symbolic head of state then the Governor-General would be front and centre. The Prime Minister is head of the executive, and as such has legal powers he can exercise to help remedy the structural problems that have caused these fires. It’s for that reason that people in fire-ravaged towns were angry at him, not — in an explicit case if individualising the issue — because they were looking for anyone to lash out at:
“I know people are angry and they’ll often fixate on … a prime minister or someone else…People are angry and people are upset … well, whether they’re angry with me or they’re angry about the situation — all I know is that they’re hurting, and it’s my job to be there to try and offer some comfort and support.”
These people were not ‘fixating’ on him as a kind of Freudian transferrence, they were criticising his performance of the duties for which he was elected. It’s not his sole job to offer comfort and support, that is only a part of his role as Prime Minister. He is the head of a government that has manifestly not taken adequate steps to mitigate the structural causes of these megafires. That doesn’t mean fixing the individual arsonists — it means making sure there is less chance for small fires to become giant ones.
No change to Australia’s climate policy would have prevented these fires. That is a fact, and we can’t pretend otherwise. But that is not an excuse for failing to act. Notwithstanding the moral obligation for us to prevent worse disasters affecting future generations, we shouldn’t think of our contribution as the only one in town: we are part of a global community responding to a global problem. Every country must do its part to fix this problem. We need allies — like world wars, or global pandemics, or the hole in the ozone layer, these problems are too big for one country to fix. During the second world war, even though Australia could not defeat the Japanese Empire on its own, even though our only chance in the Pacific theatre was with American leadership, we still contributed troops to the war effort. We have even despatched troops to the far side of the earth — Gallipoli, the Somme, Crete, Tobruk — to fight in wars that don’t directly affect us. We have been good global citizens. This latest problem is one that does directly affect us — the same spirit that energised us in those wars should be motivating us as a nation today.
And Australia needs new economic opportunities if we want our growth to continue into the future. There are opportunities — in technology, manufacturing, energy production and sale, financial instruments around carbon trading — which we can exploit, but the opportunity to be a first-mover is vanishing (and was hugely forfeited by the repeal of the carbon price).
This current crisis in Australia is frustrating because it is exacerbating political tensions at exactly the sort of time when people should be coming together to pragmatically solve problems. The suggestion that ‘both sides’ or that ‘extremes’ are responsible for that polarisation is incorrect: there is an irresponsible propagation of misinformation and misdirection coming from the Government’s backers, and it’s happening, I can only assume, in order to frustrate any policy that addresses climate change in a meaningful way.
This issue should not be one of ‘left versus right’. Climate change mitigation is good economics, it is philosophically conservative at the same time as it is philosophically liberal. There is no logic behind opposing action on climate change, which leaves only the emotional-identity nexus which characterises politics in the age of social media. I don’t know if these Coalition MPs, or News Corp generally, have a financial stake in the continuation of coal-fired electricity. If there was a cheap and effective way for Australia to get nuclear power, I’d back it, incidentally — but I wonder if these pro-Coal politicians would do the same. In any case, it’s bad economics. I can only assume that they are ideologically blinkered, and that they have dug into this position so firmly that to move wouldn’t just mean losing the argument: it would be an identity crisis. The debate has become emotional, even existential for some people.
What is needed in all of this is a bit more pragmatism, a bit more sensibility, and a whole lot more reason — the kind of thing that News Corp seems to avoid because passion and fire sells copy. Cooler heads are what it will take to cool the climate. The debate, as always, has become too heated, and social media has become the digital tinderbox to complement the dry and dangerous bush that is currently burning.
Facebook is littered with fuel that inflames the climate debate — lies, memes, propaganda. In that volatile environment — a system and structure that is designed to burn quickly and spread fast — the last thing we need is a digital arsonist to strike the match.
