![\"Smores](\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Smores_Bushfire.jpg\")
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It\u2019s devastating to see the environmental destruction we\u2019ve once again faced. Homes lost. Burnt or swallowed. Lives changed. Wildlife and livestock decimated.<\/p>\n
I was reading a post from a volunteer who\u2019d been on the land for decades, talking about what\u2019s changed and why it now feels so out of control.<\/p>\n
Back then:<\/p>\n
\u2022 farmers burned firebreaks<\/p>\n
\u2022 locals cleared fuel<\/p>\n
\u2022 volunteers mobilised<\/p>\n
\u2022 no one waited for permission<\/p>\n
Then the government stepped in with regulatory creep, bans, restrictions, competing environmental directives, endless \u201cstakeholder considerations\u201d and bureaucratic paralysis. Suddenly burning a roadside or clearing fuel loads required more paperwork than running a company. The volunteer summed it up simply: \u201cWe didn\u2019t get stupider \u2013 we got forbidden.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now we\u2019re going to spend billions trying to keep people afloat after entire communities get smashed and let me be clear, that\u2019s not the issue. That\u2019s an Australian value. We look after our own. We do that without hesitation and without whining. Good. Mateship.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s fucked is that we already know that cheque is coming every damn year\u2026 yet we refuse to spend smart money on the front end to stop the destruction in the first place. It\u2019s insanity. It makes me fucking wild.<\/p>\n
We know fire season is coming.<\/p>\n
We know what burns.<\/p>\n
We know flood season will do the opposite but end the same \u2013 homes swallowed, lives upended, communities knocked flat.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t random. It\u2019s patterned.<\/p>\n
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\u201320 fires have said the same thing: reduce fuel loads, maintain firebreaks, invest in volunteers, update infrastructure. Governments nod, pose for photos\u2026 then quietly move on.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, watch parliament for five minutes and you\u2019ll see why nothing gets done. Ask a straight question and they don\u2019t 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 \u201cdebating\u201d is the same as governing. It\u2019s bureaucratic cardio: lots of movement, no progress. Maximum energy, minimum output.<\/p>\n
This is what happens when optics replace competence.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not just fires and floods.<\/p>\n
We have a housing crisis. We have too many people slipping through the cracks. Not a vibe crisis. Not a discourse crisis.<\/p>\n
A structural, material, immediate crisis.<\/p>\n
Caused by a stack of real-world policy failures:<\/p>\n
\u2022 land banking<\/p>\n
\u2022 overseas investment distortions<\/p>\n
\u2022 infrastructure lag<\/p>\n
\u2022 regulatory paralysis<\/p>\n
\u2022 no planning alignment between federal, state and local<\/p>\n
\u2022 and yes \u2013 immigration policy<\/p>\n
Criticising immigration policy isn\u2019t the same as criticising migrants. That\u2019s the childish frame the political class pushes so adults can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
And if your instinct here is to pick that apart, answer me one question:<\/p>\n
How does increasing demand on an already strangled housing stock help the people currently sleeping in cars?<\/p>\n
Next time you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Where is the energy for defending our own?<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t lack capacity. We put rockets in space and land them on floating platforms. We can fix this country. It\u2019s a resource allocation problem. Every \u201ccomplex\u201d problem in Australia is just a resource allocation problem. And our resources are hijacked for political optics, not national wellbeing.<\/p>\n
Leadership should be judged on outcomes, not vibes.<\/p>\n
Climate obviously changes. We can argue human contribution until the cows come home, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Australia doesn\u2019t burn every year because the climate fairy got angry. It burns because the people in charge would rather manage narratives than manage the land.<\/p>\n
And while they\u2019re busy spinning narratives, they somehow have endless time and money to:<\/p>\n
\u2022 police social media posts<\/p>\n
\u2022 write new speech laws<\/p>\n
\u2022 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).<\/p>\n
All that energy for performative outrage. Almost none for clearing fuel, fixing drainage, aligning planning, or building enough houses for the people already here.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re busy tearing strips off each other, the basics quietly rot.<\/p>\n
At some point we need to hit pause and admit: there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Because until we stop being domesticated spectators and start demanding competence, this pattern will repeat.<\/p>\n
The destruction is not accidental. It is predictable.<\/p>\n
And predictability without prevention isn\u2019t bad luck.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s policy by negligence.<\/p>\n
I appreciate you reading my thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s devastating to see the environmental destruction we\u2019ve once again faced. Homes lost. Burnt or swallowed. Lives changed. Wildlife and livestock decimated. I was reading a post from a volunteer who\u2019d been on the land for decades, talking about what\u2019s changed and why it now feels so out of control. Back then: \u2022 farmers burned … <\/p>\n