As we formally enter summer in Australia I feel the PTSD from last summer rearing its ugly head. In truth the fires went on for months and months – it wasn’t just summer. Living in an area surrounded by tall gum trees in Sydney gives me peace and sanctuary and saves me from staring at the mundane similarly over-priced brick walls that my neighbours own, but it comes with a risk.
Last summer I thought I was stressed and exhausted after evacuating my home with every catastrophic fire warning, waking to the scent, taste, and sight of smoke outside the window every day and not knowing if it was the bush meters from my door that was on fire or if a fire near someone else’s house was simply suffocating me.
I didn’t know that a whole new level of stress and exhaustion was yet to come because that was 2019 and this is 2020 and our house is on fire once again.
Sadly it seems as if we’re possibly worse off now than we were then. Sure, we’ve had some significant rain which briefly quenched the thirst of our scorched, barren earth but our wildlife has barely had a chance to breathe clean air. The trees in areas like Lake Conjola are only just starting to show regrowth because they were ravaged by flames like we’ve never seen before. And yet we are left to lament another year that has passed and our government seems to have failed to learn the lessons that have already threatened to choke and burn us if we dared fail to heed mother natures warning.
What is happening with the aerial fire fighting fleet? If it exists or has been expanded as the royal commission recommended it should be, why hasn’t it been sent to help with the Fraser Island fires? Blind Freddy could see that climate change is playing a role in our misery and that places like Australia and California are going to continue to burn until politicians pull their fingers out, stop blowing smoke up other rich men’s asses, stop lining their own pockets and – for once – do what is right.
Thankfully at some point soon the White House will be fumigated and have its locks changed and America will rejoin the Paris Agreement. Why Australia and other countries aren’t doing more amount climate change baffles me.
If you were to look at the bigger picture and really acting for the greater good of the people and the economy you would be investing in renewable energy options and alternate sources other than fossil fuels. There’s an initial outlay of costs in order to change things up, workers that need time to be re-skilled but even a gradual step away is better than nothing. It seems crazy not to start shifting towards renewable energy in a climate where you’re looking to create jobs and improve Australia’s independence so that, if something like COVID ever kicks the world in the nuts again, we’re not left high and dry by other countries grabbing for, or preserving resources we also need. Once you’ve dug everything out of the earth it’s too late to say ‘Oh shit, we probably should have done something before we’d depleted our natural resources.’ You need to look ahead.
The trouble is we’ve all become so dependant on instant gratification. Many of us can barely take a photo for our memories sake now without thinking, on some level, about how many likes it will get. People can’t bear to see wrinkles forming on their faces as time leaves its marks and they pump their faces full of Botox and fillers so they can look better now. They don’t seem to think about what all that toxin will do to their long term health. Everybody wants everything now and if they can’t have it now perhaps not worth having.
In my work as a physio and a healthcare clinic owner this is really apparent. I remember one specific example where the gentleman wanted to see one of our senior physios who also happened to be a qualified podiatrist – a one in a million therapist with the two degrees to her name. When he was told he would have to wait a few days until her next available appointment he abused our receptionist and hung up after declaring he would find another therapist who was a physio-podiatrist in the area and see them today. We had rolled our eyes and took a deep breath because he was obviously delusional but it was a classic problem I encountered as a small business owner over and over – people want what they want now. They don’t want to wait for it, they generally don’t want to pay for it, they want world-class service and expertise but they’re not willing to pay $10 more to consult a therapist who has spent thousands of dollars on courses external to university (because university teaches you nothing). Great therapists can’t afford a deposit on a house but their clients want instant gratification, instant healing, all with no effort and a low price tag ideally in an Instagram-friendly moment.
I digress.
My point is that the government doesn’t do what they should – pockets aside – because people want instant gratification and they can’t focus on any sort of long game. They want to look good now so instead they do photo-op moments and talk crap but there’s no actual substance behind the talk. Just look at Scott Morrison’s non-consensual hand grab of a distressed woman who didn’t want to shake hands with him, just so he could have his photo-op. Once he got want he wanted he was ready to cut and run, he had no answers for her when she asked for help. Helping wasn’t on the agenda, only on the job description under ‘Preferred Interests’.
I don’t understand why, particularly after last summer, they don’t do more to bolster our firefighting resources nationwide. I would have thought they’re sick of us screaming at them and telling them they’re useless. As the battered people of a sunburnt country screaming and sending Tweets that express how pissed off we are in 280 characters is all we’ve got left. Our only hope is that they will grow weary of our unending yelling and give us what we want. Instead, it seems the politicians have gone deaf and the people have grown wearier and are in danger of breaking.
Surely at this point even the politicians are exhausted. Perhaps this is what many of them have dreamt of, the chance to have a captive audience, waiting for and rabidly consuming their every word as I did waiting for Scott Morrison to make an announcement about commercial leases back in April when COVID was really giving us a first almighty whack. I was listening to ScoMo – and normally I don’t listen to him at all.
I don’t think I’m clinically depressed but this is certainly the longest time I have ever hovered near the invisible border that divides someone who is depressed from someone who is not – and I’ve had cancer, so that’s really saying something. I’ve only met one person this year who said they’ve had a great year and I was so confused by this concept I asked them to explain themselves. Most people I’ve been meeting are constantly muttering something about 2020.
2020 has become an explanation for almost anything because we’re all so tired and broken from the last 12 months and yet here we stand on the precipice of another fire season in a climate that’s had little to no help from the powers that be.
I worry that our firefighters never really got a break. Many lost income or jobs fighting the fires that ravaged us last year. A few short weeks after the rain that ended it COVID hit. What happened to those firefighters? Did they receive the financial support the government promised? What happens if the fires are bad again this year and they’re all exhausted from the 2020 effect? If the government hasn’t added to the aerial firefighting fleet like the Royal Commission recommended then we may well be walking into the perfect storm and grand finale of 2020.
How much more can we be expected to take? Mental health is so bad this year that doctors are struggling to find practitioners or services that they are able to refer their desperate patients to for help. The government wants us to feel reassured that they’re pumping money into mental health – whatever that means – and that will fix the problem – again, whatever that means. You can’t just click your fingers and have a huge number of qualified, registered mental health professionals spontaneously become available for consultations just because you shook the money tree. Who did you give the money to? What are they actually doing with it?
I’m confused about how increasing funding to an overstretched service that has reached its limit is going to help beyond paying our healthcare providers more for the vital work they do which, let’s face it, is not what the government is doing with the money. Practitioners only have so many hours they can work before they burn-out and walk away entirely. Burn-out is HIGH in the healthcare community right now and we haven’t even been subjected to what so many other countries have. Yet we continue burning out in more ways that one faster than anyone seems inclined to, or able to save us.
I’m reminded of a sign I saw at the first protest I ever walked in almost a year ago. “At the beginning of every disaster movie is a scientist being ignored.”
How many more scientists are we going to ignore this year?
How many scientists are we going to ignore?
