Pictures just aired on Sky (so you’ll see them again later!) showing tearful reunions of anxious couples in the bushfire areas, people running to each other in tears having presumably spent the past few days lost in all sorts of ghastly speculations and wonderings. And then as they meet, they are surrounded by film crews. I don’t know, the media role in this is beginning to make me feel uneasy.
There are tough decisions for media people in the next couple of days, of where public interest ends and mawkish prurience begins, of just how far media can intrude and in whose service it does that. The fact that two people lost in each other and their relief are oblivious to the intrusion of the cameras does not mean the media hasn’t made an unseemly invasion.
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Unseemly invasion…or orchestration? I’ve seen some examples that look rather like the latter, which makes me just as if not more…yes, uneasy is the word.
I was going to write a letter into the paper about the bush fires, but couldn’t find enough specific information on the net. I was trying to find out whether most of the towns burnt down were new housing estates rather than established towns that had been there for a century or so. As such, most residents would’ve been new, and ill-prepared for bushfire conditions. Not much care would’ve been given to educate the local residents when selling them new houses or plots. There’s a CSIRO report criticising various aspects relating to this, and on Google maps, all you can see is a patchwork quilt of houses and deforestation with national parks looking like they’re being squashed into a corner by ever expanding housing estates, much like the west of Sydney.
I thought you might be able to shed some light on this via an expert in the field. In the highly emotionally charged mood of a disaster as presented by the corporate media, many fundamental facts and histories seem to be glossed over or conveniently unavailable until the findings of a royal commission are published. I was going to compare it to when someone gets taken by a Great White Shark in South Australia, and immediately they send out every boat available to scour the surrounding seas to kill anything large enough to take a human. It seems like all the Shock Jocks up here in Sydney are having a ‘field day’ promoting total deforestation to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
The sooner all the national parks are cut down and turned into wood chips the better. We can leave a few of the nicer introduced species (privet, jacaranda and such) standing as we will need suitable boughs to string the greenies up from.
If that is not possible then we should import full sized crucifixes made from recycled plastic to do the job.
There is noting more satisfying than burning off 20 000 hectares before breakfast,
La Prenza was insufferable during the Ash Wednesday fires. One of the locals (Gembrook) swore he grabbed the last remaining bulldozer in an effort to flatten the Channel 7 mob. He even swore he had cut all their cables. Personally, I think the story was too good to be true.
The thing which really, really worries me is how many of the stories are purchased-cash on the barrel-head. The whole thing is too slick. The public needs to get the news in order to give money to the victims. However, the public may not be so generous if they think much of it is a set-up.
Which is probably what you are implying anyway.
Cheers
PS. Did you really tell a certain gentleman who comments about things political, that he was a bore? Heheheh!
Now I’m being a bore: Royal Commissions are set up to clear the guilty. John Wren. Hasn’t John Brumby been quick to act on this advice? It is the state government which has allowed people to build sub-standard houses in amongst the most volatile timber species in the world. It is the state government who have been purchased, lock, stock and barrel by the developers in order that they be allowed to have the outer reaches of suburbia turned into the slums of tomorrow. Cul-de-sacs for Christ’s sake. Houses without eaves, trees embraced by national parks, no water, no rivers, no power, no public transport, a cruddy power-consuming (Brown coal ain’t it great?) desalination plant. These are the crooked bastards who should be crucified.
The Japanese won’t be pleased if the fires take out some of their eucalypt plantations. They use this wood for disposable chop-sticks.
Anyway, John Wren is-right at this very minute-sitting up in his grave and applauding like mad the actions of John Brumby.
Houses embraced by national parks. (line 7)