Senator Andrew Bartlett
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
 
Indian Ocean tsunami
I've always been averse to the mainstream media's habit of using every tragedy as an opportunity to instantly manufacture and showcase their compassion as loudly as possible. It's all part of why car crashes, plane crashes and deaths of any sort are considered 'news' whilst issues that impact daily on people's lives are not.

However, it is not possible to overstate the enormity of the tragedy from the Indian Ocean tsunami and the more coverage that shows the size of the devastation and the massive repair job required, the better. Disasters and heartbreak on this scale make most other things appear to pale into comparison.

http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/ has lots of stories from people at a local level, which gives a more balanced picture than the Australian media with their need to find an 'Australian angle'. It's distressing that there may be as many as 20 Australians killed in this tragedy, but this link gives an idea of the scale of the tragedy for other societies.

According to a report from New Delhi, "the current loss of lives in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands currently stands at 3,000 and rising (it might well go up to 4,000). When we say 3,000 people in the A&N Islands, it amounts to around 0.9% of the islands' population. On a proportionate basis, the loss of lives in the islands must surely rank as one of the worst disasters ever in India, perhaps in the world.” To put that in an Australian perspective, a similar percentage would see casualties upwards of 200,000!

Or as another example of the scale of the disaster. In Sri Lanka, about 1.5 million people - or 7.5 per cent of the population - are reported homeless. Again, using Australia's current population of around 20 million as a guide, this would also equate to 1.5 million Australians being made homeless - or the entire population of South Australia.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Tuesday, December 28, 2004 Permalink
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