In April last year, 22 former fire and emergency chiefs from across Australia issued a statement just before a federal election, calling on Australia’s two major political parties—one of them likely to form the next government—to increase national emergency resources, such as large firefighting aircraft. According to a former fire commissioner who started fighting fires in the 1970s, Australia was only equipped to deal with the weather conditions of that era. He himself said he could no longer predict fire patterns.

By September, this group, who called themselves the Emergency Leaders for Climate Change, issued a public statement, asking why the conservative government still hadn’t set a date to meet with them. Was the inevitable burning of Australia in the driest year on record simply not a priority to them? They never got their meeting. Two months later, the losses numb the mind: fires that have burned an area larger than the Netherlands, the destruction of some of the oldest forests in the world, the deaths of nearly 500 million animals, the loss of sites that hold the history of 12,000-year-old First Nations cultures.

Climate change denialism has lingered for far too long in Australian popular culture, thanks to a conservative government that has spun the tale to its advantage and to the way information has filtered through one of the world’s most monolithic media markets. Ten years ago, I covered it as a niche issue as a rookie reporter in my home town of Sydney. Ketan Joshi, a communications consultant currently writing a book on climate change denialism in Australia, has finally seen a shift recently. “There has always been strong support for renewable energy,” he wrote to me by email, “and in the past two years, there has been a big rise in support for climate action.” Right now, he added, “Australians place it higher than ever, at the top of [their] priorities.”

As climate science proves itself too difficult to refute in its entirety, they’ve doubled down on one tactic in particular: misdirection.

But those who control the narrative—the government, the largely conservative media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch (Murdoch owns 70 percent of the country’s newspaper circulation), the executives who run the Australian economy—remain the country’s most active obstructionists on climate policy. In an effort to maintain power, they deploy classic gaslighting techniques, but on a national level, making Australians doubt themselves, their intelligence, and, chillingly, their reality. But as climate science proves itself too difficult to refute in its entirety, they’ve doubled down on one tactic in particular: misdirection.

Within these circles, the official narrative seems to be: What summer isn’t complete in Australia without the scent of bushfire in the background—like a candle lit for an extra atmospheric touch? Even now, as the smoke in Sydney reaches levels akin to smoking 37 cigarettes—my dad’s voice breaks, as does my heart, when I call home—powerful media figures spout astonishing lies and distractions. “None of these bushfires were in any way extraordinary compared to not just the last 50 years but indeed the last 150 years,” a political commentator wrote in the Murdoch-owned newspaper the Herald Sun. In the Daily Telegraph, also owned by Murdoch, the Emergency Leaders for Climate Change were dismissed as giving opinions “outside their area of expertise.” On British television, an Australian federal politician speaking to Piers Morgan publicly denied any impact of climate change on the current fire conditions.