The the Hello and

Hello and welcome to Behind the News, my name is Doug Henwood, the usual two for today. In moments the Australian journalist Jeff Sparrow will talk about the fires plaguing that country

and at the bottom of the hour the sociologist

Stuart Schrader will talk about the two-way relationship between counterinsurgency abroad and policing at home.

Australia is a blaze on a mind-boggling scale.

Why? How bad? And what's the political reaction been?

Here to explain is Jeff Sparrow, a writer, editor, and broadcaster based in Sydney.

He was when this show last May to discuss the rights victory and the Australian election.

I was in Sydney four or five years ago and there were what seemed then to be routine fires.

You look up in the sky, it would be orange, but everybody kind of shrugged.

It was a normal thing.

This is like a whole new level of conflagration, right?

Yeah, so there's normally a fire season, but if you live in the big cities, it doesn't impinge on your life very much now.

But I mean, these fires started in September, so it wasn't even summer.

And the intensity of them has just been insane. So it's areas that have never

burned previously are now being incinerated. Towns that people had thought would

always be safe have been, you know, turned into disaster areas. So it's longer, it's more intense.

They're all still burning and what it's only the start of January, so the traditional fire season would go to February.

How many people are displaced about what kind of scale of distress are we talking about here?

So the current death toll is 24 people, something like 2,000 homes have been destroyed.

We're talking about a vast, a vast area.

It's one of the aspects that makes it so extraordinary.

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