Whenever a natural disaster strikes, our media are immediately certain of two things: it’s all because of climate change and Scott Morrison. The people on the fireground and in the mud aren’t so gullible.
Just 11 per cent of people in flood-struck Brisbane, northern NSW and western Sydney blame climate change for soaring home insurance costs, a survey shows.
This falls to 7 per cent in NSW’s devastated Northern Rivers district – where hundreds remain homeless in the city of Lismore – with insurer profits, government inaction and local government planning bungles seen as more responsible for making premiums there increasingly unaffordable.
In a let-off for Scott Morrison, only 11 per cent said Canberra carried the can for funding flood mitigation and measures to protect homes from the impact of extreme weather events.
Who knew? Ordinary Aussies mopping the mud out of their homes are smarter and more switched-on than university-educated journos soaking up massive salaries while they browse their Twitter feeds, furiously agreeing with each other about that awful Scott Morrison, and what would Greta say?
So much for modern educayshun and critical thinking.
From almost the instant the first raindrops fell, the media dusted off their well-worn scripts. The first says that climate change is making fires/droughts/floods/earthquakes/Collingwood premierships more common. The second is that Scott Morrison was “missing in action”/stuffed up the response/got “confronted by angry locals” when he went for a photo op.
Not a word of either script is true — but when did that matter to the media?
As it happens, a fair number of ordinary folk in disaster areas are well aware of what the media either don’t know or won’t tell their dwindling subscribers.
The poll of 1034 people living in affected regions provides a snapshot of what communities exposed to the floods expect from government and whether recriminations over the scale and speed of the disaster response will play into the federal election.
Some 22 per cent considered this primarily as a state responsibility; 51 per cent of respondents said both levels of government were accountable.
Give a prize to the 22%. Under Australia’s federation, disaster response is a state responsibility. The Commonwealth can only assist by deploying the ADF if the state government formally requests it. (It turns out Australia’s Founding Fathers were a bit circumspect about allowing the Federal government to deploy the armed forces domestically.) The Commonwealth also has disaster relief funding available, but that typically is only made available after much bureaucratic wrangling: it’s been this way for as long as anyone can remember, so it’s hardly Morrison’s fault.
But that doesn’t mean personal responsibility is too high on the agenda, either.
Fully 55 per cent of those surveyed online in the Northern Rivers district were not insured, followed by 41 per cent in Greater Brisbane and 51 per cent in western Sydney. The highest proportion of “don’t knows” was in western Sydney, where nearly 17 per cent were unable to say whether they had flood cover.
In an apparently shocking twist, insurers charge massively higher premiums to people building homes on flood plains. Bastards, eh?
What else comes across is that people living in disaster-prone areas seem to want everyone else to protect them from the entirely foreseeable consequences of their own decisions.
94 per cent said there should be better controls on where homes were built to not be at risk of flooding […]
Two-thirds said governments at federal, state and local levels were not spending enough to protect homes and communities from floods and natural disasters.
The Australian
They know the risks, they know that people shouldn’t be building in risky areas, but… the gummint should do sumfink.
