15 September 2020

Scott Morrison’s gas industry council has produced the expected result — a massive boondoggle for an environmentally damaging industry that even the free market no longer supports. The spurious link to the Covid recovery is a desperate fig leaf designed to deflect criticism of this terrible plan. Ketan Joshi nails it: “Let’s be blunt. In any other universe, recovering from one public health crisis by worsening another would spark immediate backlash. An ‘asbestos led recovery’ would be career-ending; as would a ‘tobacco led recovery’ or a ‘AK-47 led recovery’. But fossil fuels have locked their harm so deeply into our lives that we have become desensitised to this incredible, radical significance of proposing to hurt humans as a pathway to helping them. What is happening here is simultaneously deadly and ludicrous.”

(Meanwhile, the progressive Andrews government is hitching itself to a prison led recovery…)