The Australian Climate Service this week released its National Climate Risk Assessment – a document cloaked in the authority of science but in reality, serving as a political manifesto.
Its purpose is not to inform Australians with balanced evidence, but to alarm them into accepting ever deeper government intrusion, ever harsher targets, and ever greater sacrifices.
The report declares that extreme weather is ‘generally becoming more frequent and more intense’, that health systems will be overwhelmed, and that rising seas will devastate coastal communities. Yet when you examine the evidence, these conclusions are not grounded in long-term data but in models and worst-case scenarios.
This is not science speaking with humility about uncertainty. It is advocacy dressed up as inevitability.
The reliance on computer models is perhaps the most glaring flaw. Reputable scientists, including at the US Department of Energy, are now moving away from model-based predictions, not because they deny climate change, but because decades of experience show the models have consistently overstated warming and misrepresented regional extremes. Observed data tell a more complex, less dramatic story. Yet the Australian report continues to lean heavily on the same flawed tools, presenting model outputs as if they were measurements.
Even more concerning is the deliberate way the report frames health impacts. It warns that heat-related deaths will rise in a warming world, implying a grim future. But what it does not say is that far more people die from cold than from heat, even in hot climates.
A modestly warmer climate would, on balance, save more lives than it costs. To omit this fact is not oversight, it is deliberate manipulation, designed to fuel fear rather than inform.
The same pattern runs through the treatment of sea level rise.
The report highlights planning benchmarks of nearly a metre by the end of the century, numbers that rest on implausible scenarios no longer considered ‘business as usual’ even by the United Nations. Actual tide-gauge records show steady but modest rises that began long before modern emissions.
To elevate the most extreme possibilities into official benchmarks is to deliberately mislead the public and to legitimise heavy-handed government intervention.
None of this is to deny that the climate changes, or that human activity contributes. Australians are pragmatic; we know that adaptation is sensible. But the debate has been hijacked by activists, vested interests and a gullible media who present every weather event as a sign of catastrophe, and every solution as a new government mandate.
This is not how a free society should make decisions.
What Australians are being asked to accept is not just the science of climate, but a political program: more regulation, more restrictions, more costs on families and businesses, all justified by the need to hit arbitrary targets that will make no measurable difference to the global climate. That is the great deceit of this report. It conflates genuine risk assessment with an ideological agenda of control.
The irony is that this approach undermines the very goal it claims to pursue. By exaggerating threats and overstating certainty, it erodes trust in institutions and fuels public scepticism. By ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative, such as declining climate-related mortality or the unreliability of climate models, it reduces the scope for honest debate and sensible adaptation. By presenting policy choices as dictated by ‘the science’, it shuts down democratic deliberation and hands power to bureaucrats and activists.
Australians deserve better. We deserve climate policy that respects both the facts and our freedoms. We deserve honest accounting of risks and benefits, not selective storytelling. We deserve adaptation strategies based on real evidence, not exaggerated projections. Above all, we deserve a debate free from fear-mongering, where citizens can weigh trade-offs openly rather than being told their only option is submission.
The climate is changing, and human beings are part of that story. But the greater danger today is not the weather. It is the steady erosion of our ability to make balanced decisions as free citizens.
This latest report should be read for what it is: not a neutral scientific document, but propaganda intended to frighten Australians into surrendering more of their independence.
Alarmism may suit activists and bureaucrats. It may even suit some industries that profit from mandates. But it does not suit the Australian people.
Our nation was built on resilience, pragmatism, and a healthy suspicion of those who claim to know what’s best for us. Climate change is real. Human impact is real. But so too are the dangers of government overreach. We should reject the propaganda and insist on truth, balance, and freedom as the foundation of our response.
Senator Leah Blyth Shadow Assistant Minister for Stronger Families and Stronger Communities
