Poll results released on January 9 by the Australia Institute think tank show that even before the bush fire emergency peak around the week following New Year's eve, 66% of people in Australia believe the country "is facing a climate change emergency and should take emergency action".
Further, 63% of people in Australia agree that "governments should mobilise all of society to tackle climate change, like they mobilised everyone during the world wars".
Only one in five Australians (22%) disagree.
The poll was conducted in November 2019 and found that a majority of Coalition (56%), Labor (74%) and Greens voters (80%) agree that governments should mobilise all of society to tackle climate change.
Only among One Nation voters did more disagree (41%) than agree (39%).
If the same poll was conducted now, these majorities would be even bigger.
These results explain the desperate attempts by the a powerful minority in Australia to wage a dirty ideological war to try and force back public opinion on this issue and deflect blame from fossil fuel corporations and other climate criminals.
Leading this dirty war is Rupert Murdoch's media empire News Corp which is whipping up a campaign blaming "Greenies" and arsonists, instead of climate change, for the unprecedented fire crisis.
Murdoch's propaganda campaign operates alongside, and supports, a social media disinformation campaign.
Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer on social network analysis Dr Timothy Graham told the Guardian Australia website: “Australia suddenly appears to be getting swamped by mis/disinformation as a result of this environmental catastrophe, and we are suffering the consequences in terms of hyped up polarisation and an increased difficulty and inability for citizens to discern truth."
Using a Twitter bot detection tool, Dr Graham found that there is likely a “current disinformation campaign” on Twitter’s #arsonemergency hashtag due to the “suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts”.
He similarly found a large number of suspicious accounts posting on the #australiafire and #bushfireaustralia hashtags.