It was tragic news at the end of a tragic week, and I keep thinking about that phrase, about the torment of powerlessness, because it seems to be everywhere at the moment. Loading It’s there in the voices of the coalition of 23 fire and emergency leaders from across the federation, the Emergency Leaders for Climate Change, who say climate change is the key reason that fires are harder to control and why the fire season is lengthening. They have tried to relay this message to the Prime Minister but he can’t find time to meet them, so this week they went public. Others are taking back power by marching in the streets in frustration, and some are doing it by spending their money consciously, or pressuring companies through the secondary boycotts the Prime Minister has said he wants to outlaw.

The Prime Minister loves to talk about the "Canberra bubble" and its irrelevance to the lives of everyday Australians. I wonder if he’s noticed the bubble is spreading, and enveloping more aspects of our lives, so that little is sacred any more from being politicised in the vilest way. And the people doing the politicising – stop press – are not ordinary folk. They’re politicians, idiot foghorns like Barnaby Joyce, who this week referred to two of the people killed in the bushfires as "Greens voters", followed by an assurance that he was not going to attack them. A close second was Greens senator Jordon Steele-John who used his Senate platform to call Liberal and Labor politicians "arsonists" over their support for the "big stick" energy legislation – a long bow even for the politically desperate.

Politicians like to talk sentimentally about how much Australians pull together in a crisis, putting aside differences to help out their neighbours. And of course they have during these bushfires. We always do, when it comes to natural disasters. It was the politicians who failed to. And they keep failing. Loading Increasingly it feels the government, so keen to invoke its "quiet Australians", is using the phrase as a gag on debate. "Quiet Australians" is a genius political term – mystical and impossible to disprove. If you self-nominate as one, you ain’t one. Strangely the quiet Australians’ biggest boosters in the media tend to be the loudest, un-drown-outable voices. Elsewhere, the quiet is spreading and it’s starting to feel eerie: talk about climate change during the bushfires was treated as a ghastly breach of an invisible etiquette code, with politicians behaving like characters from a Harry Potter book who fear naming the saga’s arch villain.

On Tuesday Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gave a landmark speech about the great economic challenges of our times, but didn’t mention the C-words. I didn’t want to write about bushfires and climate change this week because surely everything has been said. But it is impossible to escape the conclusion that it is the story of our times, permeating everything. Illustration: Reg Lynch Credit: Take Thursday’s paper: pages of bushfire coverage, more pages of political reaction to the fires, a story about how NSW public servants were specifically told not to answer questions about climate change at a media briefing on the fires, a story about an exhibition of works by the artist Banksy closing early because humidity threatens to damage the works, a report on research published in The Lancet by 120 experts from 35 institutions, which says climate change poses an unprecedented health risk to children. Ah, to the world pages, I thought, for some light relief in the form of impeachment proceedings, or unrest in Chile. Nope. The main story was floods in Venice: 80 per cent of the Unesco world heritage site was under water. The mayor of Venice blamed climate change.

Soon it will be Christmas, and then January, which used to be a lazy month and is now edged with fear. Stand by for a tedious culture war around Australia Day, and on the "un-Australian" attacks on our national day by those of us who support the Change the Date campaign. This movement is yet another example of ordinary Australians circumventing their inadequate political leadership and voting with their feet. Loading The extraordinary intervention of the federal government, forcing councils to conduct citizenship ceremonies on January 26, is yet another example of it quashing a form of political speech. And yet again, civil society finds another work-around – this week the Inner West Council announced it will drop its Australia Day celebrations altogether. Every Australian can and should make their own mind up on the issue, but to increasing numbers of non-Indigenous Australians, it feels off-key to celebrate our nationhood on a day that represents tragedy to First Australians. That’s not a denial of our history, it’s a true reckoning with it. It’s a small recognition of the torment of powerlessness, and a small effort to ameliorate it. The government needn’t get involved.