That sounds like publicity fishing. If it weren't so painful, it would be funny.
It would not be very productive to try to argue whether a loving god would cause havoc of this maginitude, or whether, as Mark Twain would put it, he was just being his usual "irascible, vindictive, fierce, and ever fickle and changeful master".
I do not think Clarkson's god did not want Australia to be inhabited. I got to this conclusion via twain. That God was "meted to the scale of the Bible's universe" where Australia, like America, did not exist. He could not care less if he knew it did, anyway. He was too busy "superintending the minute domestic affairs of a small coterie of viscious (and truculent nomads)".