CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
As rural New South Wales towns like Lithgow and Bilpin continue to lose properties to out-of-control bushfires, regional Australians are beginning to wonder what is more important to the coalition:
Maintaining the mining lobby’s powerful stranglehold on all federal policy and environmental impact assessments, or possibly addressing the current catastrophic bushfires that have been hammering the east coast for two months that can only be explained through acknowledging the politically inconvenient science of climate change.
At this moment, it appears the former may be a priority, as Scott Morrison remains in the air on a business class flight home from a fucking horribly timed holiday, and the National party opts to talk about how South Australia has fucked Australian farmers because they enjoy a Murray-Darling river system that ‘flows’.
However, as well over 3000 rural residents lose their homes to the non-stop and accelerating climate fires – Australians are starting to wonder why we aren’t getting a needles-in-strawberries-like reponse.
In a food safety crisis beginning shortly after Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull in September 2018, numerous punnets of strawberries grown in Queensland and Western Australia were found to be contaminated with needles.
The incidents took full control of a relatively slow news cycle, as the Nationals took full advantage of a crisis that had the potential to hurt regional people but also didn’t require them to address the fact that climate change is real.
Senator Bridget McKenzie, the Minister for Regional Services, issued a media statement, describing the contamination as “deliberate sabotage” and urging consumers to “exercise caution and cut up their fruit before consumption. David Littleproud MP openly called for the execution of any perpatrators, who we have since found to be little shit kids.
Scott from Marketing, Peter from Security and Michael from Wagga were also seen to offer daily press conference related to this weird youth trend – with constant updates and aid packages on offer for the fruit farmers affected.
However, comparisons between the strawberry contamination crisis and current bushfire season don’t appear to hold up that well, considering the fact that both the media and the Australian government didn’t spend three months berating anti-needle protestors for causing needless anxiety before the first pundit was contaminated – and therefore had no problem acknowledging the crisis publicly.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a point of saying anybody who hid a needle in a strawberry was “a coward and a grub.”
“It’s not a joke. It’s not funny,” he told reporters, at the time, when he wasn’t in Hawaii.
“You are putting the livelihoods of hardworking Australians at risk, and you are scaring children.”
