ABSTRACT
The designation of the climate crisis as emergency predated the onset of Black Summer. With the advent of the megafires, as a significant climate disaster, short-lived emergency declarations enabled the executive arms of State governments to exercise considerable power. More protracted states of emergency were declared at both federal and State levels during the pandemic. This chapter examines how narratives of emergency unfolded in Australia throughout 2020, and the implications of such narratives for the rule of law and the exercise of certain human rights. It highlights commonplace understandings of emergency as an immediately apparent, short-lived phenomenon, with clear, temporal constraints; here, cognitive deficiencies in scalar framing become evident. It interrogates such understandings in the context of the chronic emergency of climate change, and in light of the fluctuations of the pandemic emergency. Finally, Indigenous narratives of emergency and the impact of the megafires on Indigenous Australians are discussed.
