Australian Wildfires Toll

Product of Capitalist Greed and Neglect

Part One

The following is the first part of an article reprinted from Australasian Spartacist No. 240 (Autumn 2020), newspaper of our comrades of the Spartacist League of Australia.

MARCH 1—During the massive fires that swept across much of Australia’s coastal bushland and other areas in the last six months, at least 33 people died, including 11 firefighters, and more than 3,000 homes were destroyed. Over 12 million hectares [over 46,000 sq. miles] of land was burnt, including some 20 percent of Australia’s forests; an estimated one billion animals perished; and large swathes of unique flora were lost. Gigantic firestorms created their own localised weather systems, including lightning strikes and winds that fanned flames and carried embers kilometres away, sparking new conflagrations. For months, Sydney and Canberra were repeatedly under a pall of hazardous smoke. No one knows the long-term impact on the health of affected populations. More than once, air quality in these cities was described as the worst in the world. Subsequently, heavy rains along the east coast have led to water supplies being polluted as large amounts of ash and other debris wash into the river systems and dams.

Bushfires have been part of the Australian landscape for millenia. While climate change—raising summer temperatures and lengthening the fire season—is a factor in their growing number and intensity, it is the capitalists’ profit-driven system that greatly amplifies the risks. Indeed, the toll exacted by these recent colossal fires is directly attributable to the greed and neglect of the ruling class. Federal and state governments have slashed budgets, run down services and ignored warnings and recommendations for necessary measures in the lead-up to the fire season. This criminal neglect was only matched by their indifference and contempt towards those who fought the blazes and suffered through this crisis. From the time the fires began in September through to early January, the federal Liberal/National Coalition government—more interested in protecting its projected budget surplus than spending money on fighting fires—sat on its hands while the country burned. Thousands of unpaid and under-resourced volunteer firefighters (including retirees and many who had to use up their annual leave) were left to combat the fires, working around the clock, day in, day out. As the fires threatened coastal towns, populations largely had to fend for themselves, suffering food and fuel shortages.

When confronted in December with the desperate conditions facing volunteer firefighters, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, blithely replied that there wasn’t any more the government could do and they wouldn’t be professionalising fire services or paying volunteers. After all, he said, the volunteers “want to be out there.” Morrison instead offered his thoughts and prayers to those facing the fires before secretly jetting off for a holiday in Hawaii. Facing a storm of criticism he had to cut short the vacation, rushing back to Australia to glad-hand firefighters and desperate communities.

In the face of mounting popular anger, the federal ALP [Australian Labor Party] “Opposition” leader, Anthony Albanese, pushed national unity, intoning that this was not a time to politicise events. In the interests of the capitalist order, Albanese sought to douse working-class anger, offering a sop to the firefighters by proposing a few crumbs of compensation. Also leaping to Morrison’s defence was Victorian Labor Premier, Daniel Andrews. He even backed police threats to shut down protests in Melbourne over the fires, ludicrously arguing that this diverted police resources in a bushfire emergency. In supporting Morrison and targeting protesters, Andrews doubtless worried that people might point their finger at his government’s criminal neglect in preparing for the fires. As for the bourgeois Greens, while attacking the Morrison government, they vacuously called on the federal parliament to declare a “climate emergency” to pave the way to their version of a “clean, green” capitalism.

The refusal of both federal and state Liberal and Labor governments to act on clear warnings about the dangers of the coming fire season underscores the destructive irrationality of the capitalist system based on production for private profit and the anarchy of the market. This system is deadly dangerous for us all. Budgets are cut instead of funding things needed to protect the population; much infrastructure is aged and/or poorly maintained, resulting in horrors such as the recent fatal derailment of a Sydney to Melbourne train; and fires are considered the individual responsibility of separate state and territory governments, with no nationally coordinated response. Such irrationality, negligence and disregard for general safety are not new but are integral to the basic workings of the capitalist system. In Victoria, many of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires (in which 75 people died) and the 2009 Black Saturday fires (which killed 173 people) were ignited by old and poorly maintained power lines.

To end the neglect and irrationality of capitalist class rule and clear the way for all-round social and economic progress will take a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. Under proletarian rule, workers councils would expropriate the banks, mines, industry and agribusiness without compensation, and organise a planned, collectivised economy built to benefit all and not for the profit of a tiny class of capitalist exploiters. Reorganising society on a socialist basis will allow humankind to utilise and further develop state-of-the-art equipment and technologies, including fire early-warning systems backed by highly trained, full-time firefighters, technicians and pilots, and take measures to mitigate the dangers and vagaries of nature. With production liberated from the profit motive, humans’ creative power will be unleashed to build a society in which war, poverty, malnutrition, social inequality and oppression are things of the past. As Friedrich Engels explained in his 1883 Introduction to Dialectics of Nature, such a conscious organisation of social production “will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and particularly natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade.”

Capitalist Profit System Breeds Neglect

For decades, scientists and government agencies, including the country’s national science research agency, the CSIRO, have warned that the warming of the planet combined with poor fire prevention measures was creating cataclysmic fire conditions in the country. This fire season was widely predicted to be extreme, given the years of drought and record temperatures. The threat was amplified by the dryness of the continent’s large eucalyptus forests that generate immense amounts of ground litter and highly combustible oils. However, both federal and state governments refused to heed advice. In late 2017 the National Aerial Firefighting Centre requested increased federal government funding to deploy large air tankers. This was rejected. In April last year, 23 former emergency services and fire chiefs provided the federal government with a detailed list of urgent measures, including proposing it lease additional aerial water bombers from around the world. These recommendations were ignored. In May last year, the government’s own Bureau of Meteorology reported that well-known drivers of year-to-year climate variability, such as the Indian Ocean Dipole, indicated it was unlikely that any significant rain would reach the already drought-stricken and tinder-dry east coast in 2019. This too was ignored.

The Victorian Andrews Labor government did not even attempt to achieve annual fuel reduction levels recommended by the 2010 royal commission into the Black Saturday bushfires. A decade later, the heavily forested foothills north-east of Melbourne have returned to pre-Black Saturday conditions. Meanwhile, the NSW [New South Wales] state Liberal/National government has cut tens of millions from NSW national parks, reducing their ability to undertake measures such as controlled burns and fuel reduction. In 2018, it slashed close to $40 million from NSW Fire and Rescue and Rural Fire Service, leaving its fire trucks dilapidated, lacking the latest sprinkler systems, heat-resistant materials, self-winding hoses, roll bars and reinforcement. In NSW and across the country, volunteer firefighters have had to make do with ineffective breathing apparatus and clothing, poor radio communications and sub-standard technological capabilities. Outrageously some were forced to crowd-fund or reach into their own pockets to get effective masks and other equipment while receiving donations of food and water.

Not only are rural areas reliant on volunteer firefighters but so are large parts of heavily populated outer metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney. In the wake of the Black Saturday fires the Victorian United Firefighters Union (UFU) fought to increase the number of professional firefighters and put volunteers under the direction of this unionised force. They were met with a long and vicious campaign by the bosses and the volunteer fire brigade association, who in their hostility to “creeping unionism” spin this as an attempt by the unions to eliminate the “Australian way” of fighting fires. Many of the firefighters who have died this fire season might well be alive today if a properly resourced professional firefighting service had existed. But the state and federal governments are more than happy to continue with thousands of unpaid and under-resourced volunteer firefighters because it saves them millions of dollars while serving as a wedge against the unionised urban fire brigades.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions

For weeks on end, working people in Sydney, including construction and waterside workers, bus drivers and garbage collectors, were choking on bushfire smoke. In early December, the Sydney branch of the maritime union (MUA) organised a work stoppage because of hazardous air quality. This powerful action cut through the sense of helplessness felt by the city’s beleaguered population. It pointed to the need for broader worksite stoppages. However, Unions NSW [Labor Council] did nothing to organise the necessary actions, leaving it up to individual workers and/or worksites to take action and risk retaliation from the bosses. When the profit-gouging DP World stevedoring company vindictively tried to strip $120,000 worth of bonuses and dock MUA workers’ pay, the union tops looked to the capitalist rulers’ Fair Work Commission for arbitration. Only a few weeks later the MUA national leadership were promoting the government’s mobilisation of the military in response to the fires.

The refusal of the Labor-loyal misleaders of the trade-union movement to engage in class struggle is rooted in their fealty to the bosses’ courts and overall support to the capitalist profit system, repeatedly campaigning for it to be administered by an ALP government. The ALP is a bourgeois workers party, organically linked to the working class through the unions but with a pro-capitalist leadership and program. When in power it governs in the interests of the capitalists, carrying out union busting, cutting health, education and welfare budgets, attacking women’s rights, and oppressing vulnerable populations including Indigenous people and refugees.

Instead of the union tops’ patriotic commitment to Australian business interests, what’s needed is a leadership committed to mobilising proletarian power, independent of the capitalist state and in the interests of the exploited and oppressed. Addressing the justified outrage at government neglect over the fires, a class-struggle leadership of the labour movement would fight to organise union-run safety committees with the power to shut down unsafe worksites, and demand a massive increase in funding for fire prevention and firefighting equipment and machinery. It would seek to unionise and professionalise firefighting services with full union pay and conditions. It would fight for a public works program with fully unionised labour to repair the roads, bridges and other infrastructure and rebuild housing in devastated communities.

Such demands will not be willingly granted by the capitalist rulers but must be wrested from them as part of the struggle for proletarian revolution. This poses the need for an internationalist revolutionary workers party. Such a party will be built in the course of class battles, by splitting the working-class base of the ALP away from the nationalist, pro-capitalist leadership. This will centrally occur through the fight to replace the social-democratic misleaders of the unions with a class-struggle leadership committed to sweeping away this brutal system and establishing workers rule.

Capitalist State Targets Workers, Oppressed

As the fires spread, thousands of working families saw their summer holiday—a few weeks of respite from the grind of wage slavery—turned into a nightmare trying to escape the fires, with long lines of cars clogging highways surrounded by acrid smoke. Capturing the mood within many communities hit by the fires, furious residents in the devastated southern NSW town of Cobargo cut short Morrison’s cynical attempt at a photo op, telling him to get the hell out and go back home to Kirribilli on Sydney’s well-heeled north shore. One woman shouted, “How come we only had four trucks to defend our town? Because our town doesn’t have a lot of money but we have hearts of gold, prime minister?” Soon after this incident, a NSW South Coast rural firefighter became a celebrity when he stopped his fire truck to engage a media crew in order to slam the prime minister’s response to the fires. This individual has become a hero for many, with locals and those further afield supplying him a $2,500 tab at the local bar. As the local publican said, “He only said what the rest of us were thinking.” Growing anger over government handling of the fires drew tens of thousands onto the streets in protest in Melbourne, Sydney and other cities on 10 January.

[TO BE CONTINUED]