Yet when a natural disaster rips through a regional community, primary producers get low interest loans, secondary businesses get nothing and the workers impacted might be eligible for the dole.

If the justification to throw hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at city businesses during COVID was to save jobs and the economy, then maybe governments should apply the same economic principles when supporting the rural sector through future droughts.

A recent National Times article documents "Australia's slide into competitive authoritarianism", a term used by Levitsky and Way (2002) to describe "governments that appear to be democratic but misuse funds to swing elections and promote misinformation".

Along with the complicity of prominent media and the salting of key bodies with partisan influencers. Government that "no longer seeks to honour the democratic tradition for which our societies have been formed".

Our government gets away with this, says the Times, because news outlets such as Murdoch's NewsCorp, Seven West and Nine dominate our media landscape, drowning out a diversity of reporting and viewpoint.

Accurate, honest information is the lifeblood of any democracy, yet Murdoch's Australian has "for years published hundreds of stories disparaging climate science and opinions packed with misinformation and conspiracy theories" (The Guardian, September 13).

All this is very convenient for a Morrison government that the New York Times describes as "the world's most secretive".

The ABC is raided and intimidated for informing Australians, whistleblowers such as Bernard Collaery are silenced.

Under Peter Dutton, charities are forbidden to speak out, in a move "reminiscent of Putin's Russia".

Energy Minister Angus Taylor is busily torpedoing our rapidly diminishing opportunity to become a world leader in post fossil fuel economies. He has stacked the bodies in charge of this with fossil fuel lobbyists and executives, including in the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO.

These "best money managers", says Professor Anne Twomey, have squandered billions on rorts and more billions on subsidies to climate-wrecking, environment-destroying mining companies.

They relentlessly pursue struggling Australians through Robodebt while channeling billions through to fat cats like Harvey Norman, who did not need it and have pocketed it to add to their profits.

The Coalition tells us that they are ahead of the game on greenhouse gases reduction, which the rest of the world knows to be a lie.

The government tells us whatever they want us to hear and expects us to believe it as the truth.

READ MORE LETTERS:

HAVE YOUR SAY: Do you have something to get off your chest? Simply click here to send a letter to the editor.