"Far more public money is spent subsidising destruction than protection"
About this Quote
“Far more public money is spent subsidising destruction than protection” is a deliberately unglamorous indictment: it turns the abstract idea of “government support” into a moral ledger. Adam Bandt’s line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that environmental harm is just an unfortunate side-effect of the market. The state, he implies, is an active investor in the outcome.
The intent is political arithmetic with a sting. By framing fossil fuel assistance, land-clearing incentives, and infrastructure choices as “subsidising destruction,” Bandt drags them out of the technocratic realm of “industry policy” and into a blunt ethical category. “Protection,” by contrast, is left broad on purpose: it can mean climate mitigation, conservation, disaster preparedness, public health. The imbalance he points to becomes less a budget quirk than a story about priorities.
The subtext is an accusation of misdirection. Governments often market themselves as stewards - funding national parks, announcing net-zero targets, commissioning glossy resilience plans. Bandt’s sentence suggests those measures can function as reputational spending, a thin green varnish over far larger transfers to extractive and polluting sectors. It also aims at a quiet hypocrisy voters can recognize: paying, through taxes, for the very crises they’re later asked to personally offset through recycling, “responsible consumption,” or household electrification.
Context matters: as a Greens leader operating in Australia’s resource-heavy political economy, Bandt is speaking into an entrenched bipartisan habit of treating fossil exports as national destiny. The line is compact enough to travel - from Parliament soundbites to social media - while forcing a hard question: if we’re spending public money either way, why are we financing the fire and then applauding ourselves for buying a hose?
The intent is political arithmetic with a sting. By framing fossil fuel assistance, land-clearing incentives, and infrastructure choices as “subsidising destruction,” Bandt drags them out of the technocratic realm of “industry policy” and into a blunt ethical category. “Protection,” by contrast, is left broad on purpose: it can mean climate mitigation, conservation, disaster preparedness, public health. The imbalance he points to becomes less a budget quirk than a story about priorities.
The subtext is an accusation of misdirection. Governments often market themselves as stewards - funding national parks, announcing net-zero targets, commissioning glossy resilience plans. Bandt’s sentence suggests those measures can function as reputational spending, a thin green varnish over far larger transfers to extractive and polluting sectors. It also aims at a quiet hypocrisy voters can recognize: paying, through taxes, for the very crises they’re later asked to personally offset through recycling, “responsible consumption,” or household electrification.
Context matters: as a Greens leader operating in Australia’s resource-heavy political economy, Bandt is speaking into an entrenched bipartisan habit of treating fossil exports as national destiny. The line is compact enough to travel - from Parliament soundbites to social media - while forcing a hard question: if we’re spending public money either way, why are we financing the fire and then applauding ourselves for buying a hose?
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Adam
Add to List
