Opinion
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It's been a trying summer for many of us. But the combination of drought, fires, smoke, then floods, seems to have sent one poor Senator off the edge.
After a career spent testing the boundaries, it seems Wollongong's own Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has lost her judgment altogether. As many are still recovering from the summer bushfires, burying their dead, raking over the ashes of their destroyed properties, "Connie" (as her website encourages you to call her) has lashed out.
In parliament on Tuesday, she blamed the media for "setting the scene" for the unhinged to act, suggesting green activists had deliberately lit fires to try and show how terrible climate change had become.
Presumably for the purpose of trying to influence a sensible government.
The Senator quotes an article by Monash University criminologist Dr Paul Read saying 87 per cent of fires are man-made - 40 per cent arson, 47 per cent accidental.
Claiming she was "taking up Dr Reid's work", Connie said the fact so many fires started last September points not only to arson but "suggests a level of co-ordination".
That's right: the fires were deliberately lit as part of someone's plan. Who? Well, Connie has a few ideas.
"What were their motives? Are they lone actors or part of a sinister collective conducting eco-terrorism?" she insinuate-asks.
"Was there a level of co-ordination? Are any organisations with a history of lawbreaking involved, in order to further their respective narratives?"
Groups like Greenpeace, or the Extinction Rebellion. The Knitting Nannas, perhaps.
Read the speech from Hansard here.
Just to be clear: Senator Fierravanti-Wells is suggesting hard-core environmentalists deliberately lit bushfires, starting a bushfire season which by the end of it had 33 people and more than 1300 properties.
These comments are a disgrace. They're an affront to anyone who who lost homes, or loved ones, and an insult to anyone who genuinely wants to know what caused the fires, or who spent weeks fighting them.
They are based on no evidence, be it anecdotal or forensic.
One might wonder, if your extremist views render you such an outlier to public sensibility, why make them so public?
But, as the ascendancy of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have shown us, it's possible to be a laughing stock to many, while galvanising support amid your base with increasingly extreme rhetoric.
Sadly, this is another sign Australian political discourse may be headed the same way.
And it turns out Senator Fierravanti-Wells may face a preselection battle ahead of the 2022 election - one which she has been told she may lose. These comments play to the hard right within the Liberal Party.
But this is a shameless scramble to use the fires as a political weapon. It has shown such terrible judgment that it ought to disqualify this Senator from acting any longer as a decision-maker for the nation.
So if turns out that Senator Fierravanti-Wells will soon be making her way towards the standard post-politics career on corporate boards uncomfortably close her former colleagues' policy areas, let's hope she can do so with dignity, rather than letting fly with any more of these offensive slurs.
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Correction: An earlier version of this piece said Senator Fierravanti-Wells had misspelled Dr Read's name. It was actually an error of Hansard recording.