Tim Minchin Perfectly Sums Up Who’s Responsible For the Bushfire Crisis In This Video

A new video is going viral for the way it perfectly skewers successive governments for basically throwing the entire country under the bus in exchange for a few years of cheaper electricity.

The video expertly picks apart Australia’s political inaction to look at who is to blame for our current bushfire crisis, and if you’ve got a spare 12 minutes you can check it out below.

A bit soul-crushing? Yes. Worth the watch? Absolutely.

Shots of climate protests, expert warnings, and apocalyptic bushfires are jarring — especially when interlaced with clips of numerous politicians (special shoutout to Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison) going full denier on us.

https://youtu.be/aEOBu0r47YY/media_embed]

The video, by A Rational Fear and voiced by Tim Minchin, does a deep dive into the history of Australia’s political inaction when it comes to climate change policy, starting way back in the 90s with the Keating government’s “no regrets” policy.

That policy meant Australia wouldn’t cut emissions if it hurt the economy, unless a country with a bigger carbon footprint did it first. It’s a legacy that has cursed us ever since. The video also singles out the Morrison government for providing US$29 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industries while funding was stripped from science and relief organisations.

The idea for the project came about after writer and producer Kara Schlegl wrote a Twitter thread about the Morrison government’s culpability for the bushfire crisis, which went viral.

“I was staying at my family home on the outskirts of Sydney, with a bag packed in case the fires came. One of my dearest friends was trapped on the South Coast in a kind of purgatory, the bushfires surrounding him on all sides, and here was this politician trying to convince the Australian people that there was nothing he could’ve done to help prevent this from happening. It simply isn’t true,” she said.

“There was so much he could’ve done, and so much other government could’ve done. But they didn’t. In stead they worked to systematically rip apart every effort to reduce emissions, and every service that is fundamental to keeping us safe when disaster strikes.”

“So yeah, I was really fucking angry. I just wanted to make something that would cut through Morrison’s bullshit. So, I hope that’s what it does,” Kara said.

Honestly, sifting through the horror of Government inaction on Climate Change almost shattered my hope and heart, but seeing the extraordinary amount of global activism supporting Australians right now kept me going. I’m so overwhelmed by it, and grateful.

— Kara Schlegl (@karaschlegl) January 22, 2020

I bet ScoMo is really starting to regret those floral crown photo ops he took during the Pacific Islands Forum.