As bushfires were raging across Victoria, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on January 11 that he “had our backs”. But this simply not true as Labor continues to approve new coal and gas — which is fuelling the climate emergency.
The fires come on the back of one of the worst heatwaves in years; they destroyed more than 500 structures, including 180 homes, and at least one person has died.
At the time of writing, multiple bushfires are still burning, although none remain at emergency level.
Labor’s assistance package included a “one-off immediate payment of $1000 per eligible adult and $400 per child,” which includes people who have been seriously injured or who have lost their homes.
While emergency assistance is necessary, we need more than that. We need a government that will stand up to the big fossil fuel corporations, that are responsible for the climate change that is turbo charging extreme weather events.
Instead, Labor has done the opposite. It has approved Woodside’s major gas expansion in northern Western Australia; enacted business friendly nature laws that ignore the climate impacts of new developments; and announced inadequate 2035 climate targets.
It is also continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel industry. Labor’s bushfire package is $19.5 million. By comparison, subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totalled $14.9 billion over 2024-2025, according to The Australia Institute (TAI).
TAI also said a record $67 billion is projected, in budget forward estimates, for fossil fuel subsidies. This is more than 14 times greater than the total $4.75 billion disaster response fund.
Last year was the second hottest year on record, surpassed only by 2024, according to Yale Environment 360. “It continues a recent trend of exceptional, unexplained warming,” the magazine said. “The last three years have been, by a wide margin, the hottest ever recorded.”
This means that “the three-year average for 2023–2025 is on track to exceed 1.5°C for the first time,” according to Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
Climate change is real and caused by capitalist driven-human activity. The evidence is incontestable. However, the recent COP30 Climate Change Summit continued the long running trend of avoiding any real commitments to climate action.
The only way governments will be forced to change course is under pressure from people-power driven movements.
Carbon Brief’s Lauri Myllyvirta reported on January 13 that “coal power generation fell in China and India last in 2025, the first simultaneous drop in half a century, after each nation added record amounts of clean energy”.
This is a “sign of things to come”, Myllyvirta said, since “both countries added a record amount of new clean-power generation last year, which was more than sufficient to meet rising demand”.
The drops are modest, in both cases, and driven by capitalist investment decisions as much as climate imperatives. However, China has driven a massive rise in renewable capacity which shows what other countries could do if they wanted to.
By contrast, United States President Donald Trump announced on January 7 that the US would withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
This decision, Markela Panegyres noted, “follows a litany of attacks on climate protections after Trump returned to office”. Panegyres outlined Trump’s climate vandalism to the January 9-11 Socialist Alliance national conference.
“The Trump administration withdrew from the Paris agreement for the second time; ramped up oil and gas production; massively cut funding to climate science; scrapped major offshore wind projects, and rolled back more than 140 environmental rules and regulations including pollution and greenhouse gas emission restrictions,” Panegyres said. This is all part of Trump’s mantra to “drill, baby, drill”.
Further, she said the Trump regime “has also successfully pressured other Global North countries to back track on existing climate targets and implement very weak climate plans”.
This includes Canada’s decision last year to boost oil and gas production, following government and industry pressure from the US. In December, the “European Council and European Parliament negotiators gave in to pressure from the fossil fuel industry, business associations, and the Trump administration” and agreed to major rollbacks of their environmental, and climate obligations.
Albanese is unlikely to join Trump and leave the Paris Agreement, but neither is he pushing for meaningful climate action here or internationally. His failure to criticise Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan sovereignty says much about Labor’s acceptance that the US will take control of Venezuela’s oil resources.
Albanese’s claim to have our backs is, therefore, a joke. As climate activists faced court on January 13 for trying to stop coal ships leaving the world’s largest coal port at the Rising Tide People’s Blockade in November, Labor approved the Stanwell’s Meandu Mine expansion, in Queensland, which shows Albanese is not even aiming to limit global heating to 1.5°C.