It’s devastating to see the environmental destruction we’ve once again faced. Homes lost. Burnt or swallowed. Lives changed. Wildlife and livestock decimated.
I was reading a post from a volunteer who’d been on the land for decades, talking about what’s changed and why it now feels so out of control.
Back then:
• farmers burned firebreaks
• locals cleared fuel
• volunteers mobilised
• no one waited for permission
Then the government stepped in with regulatory creep, bans, restrictions, competing environmental directives, endless “stakeholder considerations” and bureaucratic paralysis. Suddenly burning a roadside or clearing fuel loads required more paperwork than running a company. The volunteer summed it up simply: “We didn’t get stupider – we got forbidden.”
Now we’re going to spend billions trying to keep people afloat after entire communities get smashed and let me be clear, that’s not the issue. That’s an Australian value. We look after our own. We do that without hesitation and without whining. Good. Mateship.
What’s fucked is that we already know that cheque is coming every damn year… yet we refuse to spend smart money on the front end to stop the destruction in the first place. It’s insanity. It makes me fucking wild.
We know fire season is coming.
We know what burns.
We know flood season will do the opposite but end the same – homes swallowed, lives upended, communities knocked flat.
It isn’t random. It’s patterned.
The Productivity Commission has been saying it for years: we spend many times more on disaster recovery than on mitigation. Royal commissions after Black Saturday and the 2019–20 fires have said the same thing: reduce fuel loads, maintain firebreaks, invest in volunteers, update infrastructure. Governments nod, pose for photos… then quietly move on.
Meanwhile, watch parliament for five minutes and you’ll see why nothing gets done. Ask a straight question and they don’t answer it, they fucking argue about the words surrounding the question. They twist language, redefine terms, hide behind procedural bullshit and burn half the sitting day pretending that “debating” is the same as governing. It’s bureaucratic cardio: lots of movement, no progress. Maximum energy, minimum output.
This is what happens when optics replace competence.
And it’s not just fires and floods.
We have a housing crisis. We have too many people slipping through the cracks. Not a vibe crisis. Not a discourse crisis.
A structural, material, immediate crisis.
Caused by a stack of real-world policy failures:
• land banking
• overseas investment distortions
• infrastructure lag
• regulatory paralysis
• no planning alignment between federal, state and local
• and yes – immigration policy
Criticising immigration policy isn’t the same as criticising migrants. That’s the childish frame the political class pushes so adults can’t have adult conversations. The issue is scale, sequencing, velocity and carrying capacity. You cannot pour more people into a pipeline that is already bursting and call it compassion.
And if your instinct here is to pick that apart, answer me one question:
How does increasing demand on an already strangled housing stock help the people currently sleeping in cars?
Next time you’re at the shops, actually look at the cars in the car park. Blankets. Storage tubs. Clothes. People are quietly living out of vehicles at a rate nobody in Canberra wants to talk about.
Where is the energy for defending our own?
We don’t lack capacity. We put rockets in space and land them on floating platforms. We can fix this country. It’s a resource allocation problem. Every “complex” problem in Australia is just a resource allocation problem. And our resources are hijacked for political optics, not national wellbeing.
Leadership should be judged on outcomes, not vibes.
Climate obviously changes. We can argue human contribution until the cows come home, but it’s irrelevant to the immediate point, we spend all our energy on the uncontrollables and zero on the controllables. We lecture the weather while neglecting the country.
Australia doesn’t burn every year because the climate fairy got angry. It burns because the people in charge would rather manage narratives than manage the land.
And while they’re busy spinning narratives, they somehow have endless time and money to:
• police social media posts
• write new speech laws
• cry about AI-generated pictures of politicians as if the country will collapse if someone gets memed (put your best albo in a bikini meme in the comments).
All that energy for performative outrage. Almost none for clearing fuel, fixing drainage, aligning planning, or building enough houses for the people already here.
They get away with this because we, as a collective, spend all our energy on each other. Left vs right. City vs country. Native-born vs migrant. Climate vs denial. While we’re busy tearing strips off each other, the basics quietly rot.
At some point we need to hit pause and admit: there’s only so much we can do about the rest of the world right now. We need to reinvest in ourselves for a moment. Clean house. Patch the framework. Take care of our own country.
Because until we stop being domesticated spectators and start demanding competence, this pattern will repeat.
The destruction is not accidental. It is predictable.
And predictability without prevention isn’t bad luck.
It’s policy by negligence.
I appreciate you reading my thoughts.