Because, even when the earth is scorched black and people’s homes are razed and those who have to directly deal with it all are screaming for change, everything in this fucking country still has to be a “debate,” Australian breakfast TV has gone back to their stock standard time-filling tool of trotting Pauline Hanson out to say some bullshit.
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The Today Show, a shade over a week into the Karl 2.0 era (Karl Stefanover? There’s something here, I’ll work on it) has rolled out the One Nation leader and given her unfettered airtime on national TV to publicly assert that she thinks the link between climate change and the on-going bushfire crisis is “B.S,” among other things.
In rambling, babbling, at times borderline-incoherent interview, Hanson – whose disproportionate amount of TV airtime is one of the great mysteries of the dumpster fire that is Australian breakfast television – made a series of increasingly wild assertions, not least of which was her assertion that climate predictions have to be false because “they can’t even get my weather right.”
“I think it’s a load of B.S.” Pauline Hanson has DENIED climate change has had any effect on the bushfire crisis. #9Today pic.twitter.com/oCwmOmSCRi
— The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) January 12, 2020
If you couldn’t make heads or tails of that, we don’t blame you in the slightest. Here’s out best attempt at a transcription:
“If you’re gonna have a Royal Commission into it, throw bloody Climate Change out the window, and let’s look at the pure facts of why we have had the bushfires, how they were handled, what we can do better to stop it happening again. Y’know, lowering the emissions – as they’re dead set on doing – and… if you’re gonna charge people more taxes, how on earth is that supposed to reduce the Earth’s temperatures, I’d like to know. And what we’re going to do, I’ve spoken to the local pubs, in the small towns… it’s killing them, it’s killing the communities, they can’t afford the electricity. You’ve got people moving out of the towns, these are going to become ghost towns. What are they going to do then? And as far as, y’know, predicting the Climate Change or it’s going to warm two to three degrees, they can’t even get my weather right, it tells me it’s going to rain and if it doesn’t rain they can’t get it right over the seven or ten days prediction, they’re telling me what it’s going to be like in 50 or 100 years time. I think it’s a load of BS and making a lot of people rich over this.”
Just for the record, there have been around 51 Royal Commissions into bushfires in Australia – notably and most recently, following the 2009 Black Saturday fires – and the end result has been no effective long-term change.
Also for the record, One Nation received just 3% of the total lower house vote at the last election, and 5% of the senate. And yet the amount of air time Pauline Hanson is afforded – often unfiltered and frequently unchallenged – is staggering. A statistical minority in every sense of the word, and yet Today falls over themselves to shove her onto the air so she can make fart noises with her mouth.
You love to see it.
