Australian politics has to change for ever when your own citizens cannot sleep or breathe (The Guardian)
By Cynthia Banham, The Guardian, 4 January 2020
The night of New Year’s Eve was a kind of slow torture. I spent it in Vincentia on the New South Wales south coast, lying with my seven-year-old son, unable to breathe or sleep as thick brown smoke filled the house. As I listened to my child coughing, calling out from the depths of his nightmares words that sounded like “don’t die”, I prayed for the Princes Highway to reopen.
I write this not because I believe for one minute that what I went through compares to anything people further south on Australia’s east coast experienced that night, or will this weekend, but because friends and family who live outside the region – whether in Sydney or other, unaffected parts of the country, such as Perth – asked me to.
They simply cannot believe it when I tell them what horrors are unfolding down there. There is a way to understand, I tell them – tune into ABC Illawarra local radio. Then you’ll hear about the power outages, the food, fuel and water shortages, the stories of locals bringing water to families with children and babies trapped in cars fleeing Ulladulla and its surrounds, of supermarket staff at Milton guiding shoppers around darkened stores with head torches to find dried food because the refrigerated goods have all spoiled.
But in all likelihood they won’t, so let me tell you what it was like, the final day of 2019, for my family.
