What on earth can be said about unfolding policy crises that the Morrison government has just been given a thumping mandate to ignore? We can be confident that the government could not care less about the burst of self-harm right now on Manus Island, or about the dire state of the Great Barrier Reef. As the prime minister told his first Coalition party room meeting in Canberra today, last Saturday’s victory was for the “quiet Australians” who “just want to work hard and get ahead”. Quiet Australians, presumably, don’t care about asylum seekers or climate change. For noisy Australians, the temptation is to focus on what’s happening in the Opposition, which does care about these things. But with newly elected Opposition leader Anthony Albanese recognising that there is “conflict fatigue” in the air, it is doubtful whether Labor has much fight left in it either. What are our nation’s leaders going to talk about for the next three years, the footy?

According to Crikey [$], international media outlets, including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and CNN, have reported on the shocking rise in suicide attempts among detainees on Manus Island following the election, while metro mastheads at News Corp and Nine have all but ignored the enveloping crisis. That’s despite the resignation [$] of Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and the legal action [$] by 250 detainees in the country’s National Court, suing for enforcement of their human rights. Iranian journalist and detainee Behrooz Boochani tweeted yesterday afternoon, “The local hospital in Manus is not capable of admitting suicidal and self-harmed cases anymore. There is no medical facilities in the island for providing refugees with treatment. The situation is an extreme emergency.” Author Benjamin Law retweeted: “Multiple suicide attempts since the election. This situation is not tenable. It really feels as if newsrooms have given up from fatigue confronting a story that doesn’t seem to change, an audience that doesn’t care, and government that feels it has a mandate to perpetuate this.”

Meanwhile, Liberal member for the Queensland seat of Leichhardt, Warren Entsch – a straight shooter who has just been appointed special envoy for the Great Barrier Reef – has given an interview to Guardian Australia in which he accuses the “anti-fossil fuel brigade of throwing around a distorted and dishonest picture” of the reef’s health. He also suggests that coral bleaching is primarily caused by warm currents from the northern hemisphere, which Australia “can’t stop from coming down”, and which we need to find “innovative ways to counter”. The reef doesn’t need saving, according to Entsch, who plans a crusade against single-use plastics. Reef scientist Terry Hughes was aghast, tweeting that “A war on plastic is a smokescreen by a government that refuses to act on global heating, or acknowledge the decline of the #GreatBarrierReef”. Eliza O’Brien tweeted an image of two headlines over adjacent stories in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. The first: “Acidic waters ‘death blow’ for corals”. The second: “Coalition refuses to budge on climate policy”. Her comment? “Says it all really.”

Meanwhile, the fossil-fuel industry knows what a boon Morrison’s surprise victory represents. Clive Palmer wants to cash in on his big-spending election campaign and piggy-back [$] on the imminent approval of the Adani mine, which will open up the Galilee Basin. At the oil and gas industry’s annual conference today, according [$] to The Australian Financial Review, Shell’s most senior representative in Australia, Zoe Yujnovich, who is also chair of lobby group APPEA, called on the industry to take on the activists who are “‘waging a virtual war’ on the industry with religious zealotry”. She is reported to have said that the sector should “seize the opportunity presented by the ‘quiet Australians’ who returned the Morrison government in last week’s election to drive real change in the debate around resources and energy policy”.

How good is everything?

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