Saturday, en route to my local post office, I noticed this plastered onto the street corner:

And so, this poster prompted me to reflect upon a few not-so-plausible details of the ongoing bushfires and responses to them.

The people in media, Extinction Rebellion and left-wing circles, say they are concerned about bushfire damage. But for the most part, they are not interested in providing real help: joining local fire-fighting brigades, volunteering to assist farmers, or doing anything else measurably useful.

Power-hungry progressives falsely claiming to have compassion for those in dire straits, is nothing new. Though, it would seem here the left-wing deception goes deeper: much calls into question the official bushfires narrative that they are the product of a late-stage, metastasized ‘climate emergency’.

Affording the left some charity, clearly, there is no smoking-gun that unequivocally ties left-wing activists to the onset of recent bushfires across Australia.

That said, based off the information and evidence that has been accorded, we should suspect that left-wing activists are at least partially responsible for the outbreak of this summer’s bushfires–through arson attacks.

A few grounds found this suspicion.

First, there is the large number of people implicated in bushfire related offences.

As of 6 January 2020, NSW police had taken legal action against 180 people for bushfire related offences since ‘late last year’. Out of this, 24 people have been charged over deliberately-lit fires (arson)–which Vox was at pains to point out only constituted a minority of the overall 180 people charged for bushfire related offences.

The number 24 itself, nevertheless, is a significant one. Not comparing with past statistics deprives us of some context; but anyone accustomed to rural Australia in the December-January period understands that 24 arson attacks carry the potential for cataclysmic damage.

Beyond those 24 New South Welshman charged with arson:

• 53 people have had legal actions for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban; and
• 47 people have had legal actions for allegedly discarding a lighted cigarette or match on land.

These strike me as extremely dangerous acts for rural people to undertake in summer. Further, their remarkably high frequency raises some pressing questions. To take just one, can we reasonably accept that in just 1 month, 100 people from rural NSW engaged in such behaviour–out of sheer recklessness alone? For anyone familiar with rural Australia, there is but one rational answer: there must have been some malicious intent among these 100 people charged for other bushfire related offences.

Secondly, the aspect of motive links progressives to causing these bushfires: they have plenty to gain.

The left wants government to take what it views as greater ‘action’ on climate change. Australians, for the most part, rejected this view by re-electing Scott Morrison as Prime Minister in the last federal election.

Given this, initiating a series of catastrophic bushfires so to blame them on changes in the climate would advance the progressive political agenda. Besides their vested interest, harm to rural Australia scarcely affects left-wing people, who mostly reside in inner city areas. We saw how progressives reacted to Scott Morrison winning the last federal election; and in this, their contempt for rural, liberal voting Australians was laid bare. With progressives seeing little redeeming about the Australian equivalent of ‘deplorables’, they would not be so troubled with inflicting destruction on rural Australia.

The third reason I suspect progressive culpability in the bushfires, has been their seamlessly coordinated response. The media has steadily focused on bushfire coverage for well over 1 month. Reinforcing this perception of a synchronised crisis, has been the left’s overt shift from bemoaning ‘climate change’, to now stirring up fears over the ‘climate emergency’. Is it not strange that at time of writing, ‘climate change’–the proscribed term until last year–feels increasingly out of touch? Words for describing phenomena do not so organically shift, without there being a deliberate effort on the part of elites to engineer the terms of debate.

In deploring the bushfires, progressives have been incredibly intertwined in promoting this new term ‘climate emergency’. It is almost as if they knew the bushfires were coming.