On the day that much of NSW, including the entire greater Sydney region, faces “catastrophic” bushfire conditions, the likes and scale of which have rarely – if ever – been seen this early into a major bushfire season, The Australian has dedicated its front page to having an extremely normal one.

Hours after the paper’s Coalition compatriots railed against media for trying to politicise the on-going and worsening bushfire crisis, The Australian released a front page doing just that: Blaming the Greens for, seemingly, the entire thing.

The whole front page is a baffling exercise in anti-Greens propaganda and flagrant buck-passing, as if the paper were laying the ground work to foist blame on anyone but the actual people in charge.

That’s an outrageous parroting of bullshit Government talking points, all of which are geared towards pushing a false narrative onto the voting public, particularly those in rural areas/National Party strongholds.

At best it’s disingenuous bullshit. At medium it is deeply irresponsible media. And at worst it’s a flat out fucking lie.

Somehow they even found this ridiculous claptrap worthy of front page space:

Finding one half-baked lunatic in the bush that agrees with your ass-first drivel is not an “exclusive,” it’s a fucking disgrace.

Somehow, it gets worse.

In the subsequent article, the NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro has the absolute gall to go at the NSW National Parks Service for failing to carry out extensive backburning operations prior to the fire, stating “We need to do more hazard ­reduction, (burning) in national parks to manage the fuel load. Everyone knows that this is a real issue and I’ve got the guts to say it.”

NSW Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall is also cited in the article, claiming “More needs to be done to clear fire trails, back burning operations and allow controlled stock grazing to keep fuel loads down. Better management would help enormously and lack of good quality local management has contributed.”

Some 4/5ths of the way through the article, comment is finally sought from someone who actually knows what the fuck they’re talking about in NSW RFS deputy commissioner Rob Rogers, but by then The Australian‘s point is well and truly made.

They want you to think, quite angrily really, that the Greens are somehow both an ineffective afterthought in Australian politics, but also a totalitarian environmentalist oligarch that has single-handedly controlled Australian agriculture policy since time immemorial. They reside only in the deepest enclaves of the inner city, and exist to dry up rural dams and turn all farmland into weaponised tinderboxes.

So here’s some facts:

The NSW Liberal Party, just this past June, released a budget that contained a $1.2billion surplus for the 2018-19 financial year.

Despite that, the NSW State Government ripped $12.9 million from Fire & Rescue NSW. A further $26.7 million was hauled away from the volunteer-run Office of NSW Rural Fire Services. That’s a total of $40.5 million in funding hauled away from vital fire services by the Liberal Party – who at this point I have to stress have been in Government in NSW for 8 years, and on a Federal level for 6.

They control everything. They have the power to do everything they’re grizzling about, and have had it for some time. And they’ve all done jack fucking shit.

The Australian is complicit in this egregious muddying. And they’re pulling this shit on a day where the real-life consequences of it all are only going to go from already very bad, to much, much worse.