The bushfire crisis has shown a way forward for Australia – and revealed who we truly are
I started to avoid too much of the bushfire coverage after I heard the stories of the NSW Rural Fire Service volunteers traumatised by the sound of koalas screaming as they burned to death.
We had already had our “watch and act” notice at our small cottage in the countryside, the fearful hours of soaking compost heaps and woodpiles with the hose, tearing anything too plastic and flammable out of the garden, packing our bags.
The evacuation alert sounded and I stood in the spare room, emotionally reckoning with the chance that our clothes, books, artworks, photographs, ornaments and beloved pieces of furniture I may never see again. My spleen emptied and I trembled. Seven minutes later, the wind had changed, the fire was under control, the evacuation was called off … but I was still flooded with adrenalin and shaking.
Some stories you can’t avoid. The photographs of tennis players collapsing from smoke inhalation at the Australian Open have become, in the worst way, iconic. The catalogue of birds and lizards, frogs and mammals burnt, frightened, starving and threatened are too provocative to contemplate, a childhood terror ignited that there would come trouble that Blinky Bill could not escape, that something is killing Dot’s kangaroo.
The human suffering is carved into the lines around exhausted firefighters eyes, the grime on their uniforms, they parched lips. It doesn’t need details.
Our last months as a nation are summarised in the burnt fur of our innocent icons, the images of our children, still and terrified, wearing oxygen masks under our thick, smoky skies. I learned this week that in the remains of the flattened town where a friend’s father’s house burned down, there’s a man living in a chicken coop because there are no other options. I couldn’t read on.
The toxin that saps the Australian body is a hybrid of crisis fatigue and grief fatigue. Everyone’s suffering.
How do we find hope in this? Australia has, of course, known national miseries before. Living memories of the annihilating Great Depression grow faint, but the recorded histories are indelible.
So devastating was the impact of global economic events upon this country that in the early 1930s, rates of national unemployment rose to 30% of the population – a tally second only to Germany.
In a country that had not yet built a welfare state, government assistance was discretionary and families were fed by charity and soup kitchens. In New South Wales, communities of homeless families sheltered in coastal caves. The experience was no less apocalyptic for being economic, not environmental.
Then came a world war. Australian deployed troops from 1939 to fight the existential threat of fascism and not with any certainty of victory. There were 100 air raids on our soil; Darwin lay in ruins. We buried 27,000 soldiers.
We convalesced a generation more.
But it’s from our country’s own material reckoning with these historical horrors that our present hope must spring.
The economic phenomenon John Maynard Keynes predicted of government spending in the war economy came to pass; the obligation on the government to meet wartime demands of productivity remedied the malaise of unemployment and deprivation that defined the early decade.
In 1945, towards the war’s end, the prime minister, Labor’s John Curtin, applied the insights gained into a White Paper on full employment.
War economy, it said, “has taught us valuable lessons which we can apply to the problems of peacetime, when full employment must be achieved in ways consistent with a free society”.
The resulting expansion in infrastructure spending and public works over the next three decades created an economic engine so powerful that Australia was able to absorb two million post-war migrants with unemployment averaging around a frictional 2%.
The devastation of the fires offers a similar opportunity for government investment and public works consistent with these principles of economic growth.
The obligation of rebuilding scorched forests and shattered communities is one in which government can do more than speak to theoretical “transition” processes for bluecollar workers in fossil fuel industries.
This window is one in which the demands of our crisis can provide good, stable government employment in reforestation and forestry management, in a regional redevelopment based around low-emission, fireproof infrastructure – and employ even more Australians in conception and design processes that can then be exported internationally.
The imperative of fireproofing communities while meeting climate mitigation targets offers a screaming opportunity to build a fireproof kithome manufacturing and construction industry, of employing and investing in precision and regenerative agriculture, of expanding low-emissions transport infrastructure. And government-led industry enables not only leadership on fair workplace conditions and wages, but also the responsibility of adhering to strict safety and emission standards in everything we design, develop and produce.
The sad history of privatisation in this country demonstrates that the alternative of just leaving reconstruction to market forces is a logic of prioritising private profits for corporations over meeting the diverse challenges of public need, especially when it comes to climate. Nation-building, or rebuilding on a post-fire, multi-billiondollar scale demands a governmental vehicle to realise our best ambitions. Will we demand it?
I suggest if we want to see our country and our people not only served but represented than we must. Because if there’s a second optimism we can seize from the fires, it’s the example of a collective selflessness that has come to define Australians through this crisis.
From the unpaid, relentless firefighters to the neighbourhood volunteers, the heaving instinct to charity to the painful empathy that we realise in our grief and sadness, we’ve learned a nation-building truth about ourselves.
There may indeed be one instinct alone that culturally defines what it means to be Australian. It’s community.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
The toxin that saps the Australian body is a hybrid of crisis fatigue and grief fatigue. Everyone’s suffering