Editorial
The underwater bushfire

From the beach, you can see the flames burning on the oil and gas rigs that ring the northern part of Ningaloo Reef. Tim Winton calls them “sinister flares”. Like the bulk carriers shipping coal through the Great Barrier Reef, their foreboding is almost too crude, a clumsy symbolism for an outcome that is already obvious. “They are visible to the naked eye. Their emissions are not,” Winton wrote for The Monthly in 2018. “But they are real and present. And they can’t be ignored.”

This week, experts from the Western Australian Coral Bleaching Group reported mass bleaching at Ningaloo, as well as at Rowley Shoals and on reefs off the northern Kimberley. The marine heatwave that caused this bleaching was the longest, largest and most intense on record in the state. Some described it as being like an underwater bushfire.

Until now, Ningaloo has been spared the bleaching that has killed parts of the Great Barrier Reef. Today, as much as two thirds of it is white. Scientists say it could take a decade or more for the corals to recover. The fear is further heating before then.

“We need to be careful in terms of what we set and what we can achieve,” WA’s environment minister, Matthew Swinbourn, said after being confronted with the extent of the bleaching, reaffirming his government’s refusal to set midterm climate targets.

“What you want to do is you want to make achievable targets. It’s all well and good to send a virtual-signalling type of target, which is often advocated by the Greens, but actually these things don’t happen in a vacuum. They affect other areas of our economy, other areas of our lives and so there’s always a balance with these sorts of things.”

Swinbourn looks like the combined cast of the telemovie Cliffy. He visited the bleached reef before he made these statements. He says what he saw was “not the normal state of the reef”. His response is “the normal state of politics in WA”.

The world is at a tipping point where the impacts of climate change are being experienced at the very same time as they are being facilitated. There is nothing abstract about this. The sinister flares burning off the reef are also boiling it, as they are boiling the planet.

Labor continues to approve coal and gas projects. It does so because it believes there are votes in it. Australia is the only country in the world to have implemented a carbon price and then dismantled it, because there were votes in it.

The great cowardice of Australian politics is in its refusal to confront climate change. Federal policy is still set by the quarry-headed west. There are corals that have put up more fight than the cabinet. Ministers such as Swinbourn continue to pretend to understand the catastrophic urgency but then say there’s nothing they can do. “All that we could do in WA is likely to be meaningless if we don’t have global action on climate change.”

This is a risible argument. It is a waste of the limited time the world has left to deal with climate change. In the meantime, great expanses of reef are bleached. Rig flares burn. Sea levels rise. The planet succumbs to the irreversible indifference of a few dozen men who believe life is measured out not in millennia but in election cycles.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 16, 2025 as "The underwater bushfire".

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