ABSTRACT
When bushfires of an unprecedented scale ignited across Australia in November 2019, killing dozens and destroying thousands of homes in blazes larger than some European countries, Prime Minister Scott Morrison tweeted to offer his ‘thoughts and prayers’ to victims of the disaster. The PM simultaneously rejected proposals for one-off payments to the volunteer fire fighters who had battled the flames over weeks, following cuts of up to $20 million to various brigades. Morrison’s response typified the stance of successive right-wing Australian governments who have courted the coal and gas sectors, while mounting a vigorous denial of climate change – an ideological agenda that has born policies reflecting a unique brand of Australian austerity. In the light of the events of ‘Black Summer’, this chapter examines extractivism in the world’s second-highest per capita emitter of carbon-dioxide and the politics sustaining it. It discusses Australia’s economic growth, austerity, and climate denialism against the backdrop of a longer-standing settler-colonial dispossession of the land’s traditional Indigenous owners. Drawing on original fieldwork interviews with senior firefighters alongside Marxist and settler-colonial theory, it analyses the underpinnings of Australia’s approach to fiscal policy, climate change, and disaster preparedness.
