Amazing when foreign journos get Australia more than we see in our own press:

As Australia Burns, Its Leaders Trade Insults

The country has long been a model for common-sense public policy. But this week’s fires have revealed once again that its pragmatism stops at climate change.

“Coal is our N.R.A.,” said Ms. Harris Rimmer, referring to the National Rifle Association, which has stymied changes to gun laws in the United States even as mass shootings have become shockingly common. “They have total control over Parliament.”

The comparison has its limits. Coal is not enshrined in the Constitution, as a right to bear arms is in the United States, nor is it a consumer product. But like guns in America, coal helped define the country in its early years of settlement — and is still an outsize presence in Australian life.

The industry’s economic benefits reach fewer people than many Australians believe. It frequently hires federal lawmakers after they leave office, and even now politicians often defend coal in patriotic terms. For conservatives in particular, extraction of natural resources in rural areas is a stand-in for values worth fighting for against condescending urban elites.

Just a few days before the fires, for example, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a mining group that new laws were needed to crack down on climate activists and progressives who “want to tell you where to live, what job you can have, what you can say and what you can think.”

“Climate change has become a proxy for something else,” said Robyn Eckersley, a climate politics expert at the University of Melbourne.

What’s galling for many scientists is that the public wants the federal government to do more; polls consistently show that Australians see climate change as a major threat requiring aggressive intervention.

And the problems emerging now — fires, cyclones, heat waves, drought, shifts in sea life and the death of the Great Barrier Reef — have been predicted in the public record for years.

In 2000, a Senate committee report criticized the government for a lack of action, stating that “Australia’s per capita emissions have shot to the highest in the world,” and making more than 100 recommendations for both reducing emissions and adapting to a more dangerous environment.

“Australia will be very negatively affected by climate change given the size of its land mass,” the report says, “its long coastline, current extremes of climate, vulnerability to cyclones and the El Niño/La Niña cycle, existing problems with soil salinity, and its economic dependence on agriculture and tourism.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/world/australia/fires-climate-change-pragmatism.html