Jeremy Clarkson sparks outrage over bushfire article
<p>Jeremy Clarkson has been slammed over a controversial article in which he claimed “Australia is God’s laboratory and people were not actually meant to live there”.</p>
<p>Clarkson’s column, published in UK newspaper <em>The Sun</em>, said that God “decided to set fire” to Australia because the country “isn’t meant for human habitation”.</p>
<p>The 59-year-old described Australia as a continent “far, far away” created by God to house “his experiments that had gone wrong”, such as the saltwater crocodile.</p>
<p>“For millions of years, this big, sandy cupboard under the stairs went unnoticed. But then along came Captain Cook and now the world knows all about Oz and its stupid, dangerous creatures,” the former <em>Top Gear</em> host wrote.</p>
<p>“It’s been argued the fires raging across the country were caused by global warming or out-of-control barbies. But when you look at the footage, you know something biblical is going on. Those things are huge.”</p>
<p>At the end of the article, Clarkson encouraged Australians to ‘return’ to the UK. “So if you’re reading this down there, please come home [to the UK]. You’ll like it. It never stops raining. And we are better at sport.”</p>
<p>The opinion piece comes as Australia faces a bushfire crisis, with over 1,300 properties destroyed and more than 450 million animals estimated to have been killed since the start of the fire season.</p>
<p>Readers have criticised Clarkson’s article as “tone deaf” and insensitive to the plights of the affected communities.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr">Hope Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t intend to visit Australia or NZ anytime soon ... this isn’t funny and how tone deaf is he??? <a href="https://t.co/ktKMFAxxNK">https://t.co/ktKMFAxxNK</a></p>
— Lee (@lee_asher) <a href="https://twitter.com/lee_asher/status/1213561752622788609?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr">What an unscrupulous and grubby attempt at relevancy by an utterly out of touch tosser. Appalling by Jeremy Clarkson and <a href="https://twitter.com/TheSun?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheSun</a> <br /><br />Australia is God’s laboratory and people were not actually meant to live there – The Sun <a href="https://t.co/czviUAJt5J">https://t.co/czviUAJt5J</a></p>
— Shane Anderson (@Globalgallop) <a href="https://twitter.com/Globalgallop/status/1213467501910200321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr">When people are losing homes and loved ones, wildlife is dying in droves, heroic efforts being made to fight the fires, and all that goes with that is NOT a time to make jokes about a country and its plight. It's not sensitivity to humour, it's INsensitivity to suffering.</p>
— Simon Foley (@simon_foley) <a href="https://twitter.com/simon_foley/status/1213552018889093126?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2020</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr">The Jeremy Clarkson piece about Australia being God’s laboratory is reprehensible in its pathetic insensitivity to the current and ongoing bushfire crisis.<br /><br />But also, it is ignorant and disgusting in its complete erasure of 60,000 years of Aboriginal history and culture.</p>
— Simon Angilley (@dufussy) <a href="https://twitter.com/dufussy/status/1213658964266631168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 5, 2020</a></blockquote>
