0
energy
What is energy?
0 comments
More than a quarter of million people have signed a petition calling for Sydney’s New Year’s Eve fireworks to be cancelled and the money spent on fighting fires, but is this really directing people’s anger in the right way?
Every December above the Sydney harbour bridge, one of the world’s more ostentatious fireworks displays rings in the new year to the delight and congestion of thousands of revellers. The Sydney fireworks are widely televised as a defining moment in the national calendar, often beamed overseas as one of the first regional dominos to fall into the new calendar.
Some AUD $5.8m ($4m USD; £3m) was reportedly spent on the fireworks last year, with a similar amount on the bill for this year’s festivities. But some Sydneysiders don’t want it.
More than 250,000 people have signed an online petition asking for the show to be cancelled, stating that the money should be spent on supplementing firefighting efforts. The petition website says that the smoke from the fireworks ‘may traumatise some people’ who are dealing with ‘enough smoke in the air.’
Sydney’s lord mayor Clover Moore has weighed in, commenting on the petition site that whilst her ‘deepest sympathies’ are with those effected by the blazes, the majority of the fireworks budget has already been spent. She has pointed out that the infamous event generates around AUD $130m for the local economy, which many Sydneysiders and business owners rely on. ‘… we can’t cancel the fireworks and even if we could, doing so would have little practical benefit’ she concludes.
As far as calling the petition too little too late, she’s got a point. At this stage, cancelling the fireworks would save little money and would mostly serve to put thousands of people out of deposits for hotels and restaurants. By way of compensating the clearly irate petitioners, Moore has committed to ‘harnessing the enormous power of the event’ to raise more money for the Australian Red Cross Disaster Relief and Recovery Fund.
The petition is a misguided attempt to divert what is a very legitimate frustration on the part of Australian residents at the blatant mismanagement of the ecological crisis that’s so far cost eight human lives (including two volunteer firefighters), the lives of hundreds of millions native animals, and thousands of homes.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison tragically had to cut his Christmas holiday to Hawaii short this December to manage the historic heatwave that hit the country that same month, adding literal fuel to the fires that have been ravaging NSW since September. Many citizens have protested that the mistimed vacation came after a solid two months of inaction from Morrison, with Twitter users rightfully pointing out that no other world leader in recent memory has had the indecency to take a break whilst their nation was in crisis.
