Australia Must change

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The more I read about Australia, the more the entire continent appears to be in sadder and sadder a state. In Australia what you witness before you is rampant environmental degradation, loss of habit, an inhumane refugee policy and a corporatized media that stifles any meaningful attempt at reform.

In response to the rampant bushfires you have former deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce blame Green Councillors for the devastation alleging they "Prevented" backburning. This argument is BS on the face of it. And you have even had the NSW fire commissioner, Greg Mullins explain to the press that what prevented backburnings from taking place were the increasingly dangerous conditions coming from hotter conditions. To blame a few powerless Councillors with no decision making power is therefore ludicrous. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... -reduction

Then you have the issue of how Australia has responded to the climate crisis. Last election the issue came up again with the construction of the Adani coal mine in Queensland. The mine was estimated to generate from its emissions alone 0.5% of the total carbon budget contributing to temperatures reaching 2 degrees of warming by 2050. The economic benefits were estimated to be tiny, only 3000 jobs were estimated to be created for the coal mine. In addition, corporate heads in Adani actively boasted about the amount of jobs being automated. So in total the economic costs for lives and the planet were estimated to be enormous and benefits tiny. http://envlaw.com.au/wp-content/uploads ... hael14.pdf

But that did not matter. Supporting Adani became popular in Queensland. People in unemployed areas of Queensland felt they would receive an economic benefit. And the media portrayed that to be the case. As a result the Liberal party won out in the 2019 Australian election.

Then you have issue of refugees. Just days after it was announced the Liberal party had won the 2019 election, you had refugees detained on Nauru actively attempt self-harm and suicide. The reason being that they and many other hoped that in the event of a Labor party win they would be able to seek residence in our country, New Zealand. However due to the decision of the Australian government. In turn cases of abuse akin to torture have been rampant. With former guards describing these Islands as close to concentration camps. As of November 2019 multiple suicides have taken place. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... id-my-best

This inhumane treatment of refugees has a long history in Australia. The Liberal government has shown an overwhelming willingness to disregard the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world at every point. With the Tampa Crisis back 2001, John Howard willingly let a makeshift refugee vessel carrying hundreds of people travel through perilous waters without any support, even as Australian aircraft scouted it and could have conducted a rescue operation at any moment. Since then the Australian refugee policy has been one to conduct towbacks of Asylum seekers attempting to reach the country. Now think about it for a second what will Australia then do when thousands of climate refugees need a new place of residence. How many may die at sea and be brutalized on account of that country's policy.

It is heartbreaking none of this gets covered more at least not until now. With no doubt a large reason being that it has been estimated that Rupert Murdoch has 66% control over Australian print media.

Australia's lazy PM making the decision to go on a vacation and forcibly shaking the hands of distraught locals is just the tip of the iceberg. The liberal party in Australia is god forsaken awful. And the bastards must be voted out. Australia is a great country but it without a doubt has one of the poorest governments in the developed world, with its inhumanity only matched by its ineptitude. Don't stand for those f*****s any more.

I wonder what will happen to Australia, and the rest of the British Dominions, once Great Britain falls?

As an Australian, I agree with all this. It is unfortunate that most of our news media is actually uninterested in talking about any of this, the one exception the ABC, the public broadcasting company, that does not rely on advertisers and people with money whispering in their ear, but are excused as just left biased. I could talk on extensive paragraphs about the problems, but the 2019 elections did totally leave me feeling defeated that the majority of my own country is uninterested in actually being informed and caring about people like refugees.

In 2015, we were reminded by a former CSIRO scientist, David Packham, of the recommendations of the Royal Commission Black Saturday report into the devastating bushfires of 2009 which killed 173 people:

Forest fuel levels have worsened over the past 30 years because of “misguided green ideology”, vested interests, political failure and mismanagement, creating a massive bushfire threat, a former CSIRO bushfire scientist has warned.

Victoria’s “failed fire management policy” is an increasing threat to human life, water supplies, property and the forest environment, David Packham said in a submission to the state’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management.

And he argued that unless the annual fuel reduction burning target, currently at a minimum of 5 per cent of public land, “is doubled or preferably tripled, a massive bushfire disaster will occur. The forest and alpine environment will decay and be damaged possibly beyond repair and homes and people [will be] incinerated.”

The Royal Commission report was fairly unequivocal in its conclusion about the need to hazard treat areas of bush by controlled burning:

The royal commission examined the role of fuel reduction burning and in its final report recommended a prescribed burning program with “an annual rolling target of a minimum of 5 per cent of public land each year, and that the state be held accountable for meeting this target“.

It also criticised what it described as the state’s “minimalist approach to prescribed burning“, and warned that the state had “allowed the forests to continue accumulating excessive fuel loads”.

The commission investigated fuel reduction burning and the Black Saturday fires. It found that the rate of spread and size of the Beechworth-Mudgeegonga fire, which killed two people, “were significantly moderated by previous prescribed burning“. And it said that in some places the rate of spread of the Kilmore East fire, which killed 119 people, was “appreciably slowed by previous prescribed burning“.

But the commission also heard that no large-scale fuel reduction burns had been conducted in areas where the two most deadly Black Saturday fires, the Kilmore East and Murrindindi bushfires, gathered force in the first hours after they ignited.

So, in the case of New South Wales, where bushfires have raged this summer, the authorities have hazard treated, on average, since 2011, less than a quarter of the total parks and reserves area recommended by the Royal Commission Black Saturday report re. the bushfires which occurred in the neighbouring state of Victoria. Their record of prescribed burns, in the 5 years previous to 2011, by their own admission, is even more piteous. Their ‘enhanced burn’ in 2018-19 was less than half of that recommended by the Royal Commission for the state of Victoria. David Packham even appeared to suggest that the 5% Royal Commission target was way too low. Is it a conspiracy then, in light of the above facts and figures, to suggest that NSW have manifestly failed in their duty to ensure the fire safety of public lands under their jurisdiction?

Lest we be lulled into thinking that the problem lies only with New South Wales, consider Victoria, the state which suffered so grievously from the 2009 bushfires, which tragedy led to the commission of the Black Saturday report itself:

The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission found that ‘prescribed burning is one of the main tools for fire management on public land,’ however, the DELWP report reveals that the amount of planned burning in bushfire-prone areas such as Cardinia has dropped from 234,614 hectares in 2014-15 to only 64,978 hectares in 2017-18, a reduction of almost 75 per cent under the Andrews Labor Government.

“The 2009 royal commission was unequivocal about the importance of prescribed burning as ‘one of the main tools for fire management on public land,” Mr Battin said.

“That’s why it’s so important for the Andrews Labor Government to be upfront with regional Victorians about the true situation with prescribed burning.

In Queensland, another state which has been devastated by wildfires this summer, we learn of a farmer who was fined nearly a million dollars for simply making his fire-breaks too wide by following the recommendations of the authorities! This is a ludicrous amount. Were the authorities out to make an example of him to others who might similarly be tempted to construct fire-breaks? It seems likely that other farmers will think twice now before clearing forest to protect property and livestock, hence wildfires will spread across the state, unimpeded – and they have. Of course, green apologists will argue that this is merely anecdotal, but there are a hell of a lot more anecdotal tales out there of Greens opposing sensible fire precaution measures.

Source: Australia Bushfires – Is Blaming Greens a Conspiracy Theory?

So I do think Green policies are partially to blame for the fires in Australia.

About 60,000 km² of forest area and farmland has been burned to a crisp so far in what are probably the most devastating wildfires in Australia’s recent history. Hundreds of thousands of farm animals have died in the blazes, dozens of people have been killed, many are missing and it’s estimated that a total of nearly half a billion wild animals have died. Entire ecosystems have been razed, even down to the microbes in the soil. It will take many, many years for the forests to recover, assuming they do.


[a former member of the Sierra Club]

Last edited by jimmy m on 06 Jan 2020, 2:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It is irrational for Australia
- to sustain devastating brushfires in 2009 [The Black Saturday bushfires were a series of bushfires that ignited or were burning across the Australian state of Victoria on and around Saturday, 7 February 2009 and were among Australia's all-time worst bushfire disasters.]
- trip off a royal commission [Royal Commission Black Saturday Report]
- and then for the government at many levels to ignore the Commission Findings.

2009 Victoria Brushfires Royal Commission

Recommendations 41, 56, 60

Nothing, since they're all independent countries. The Commonwealth of Nations is (in theory) a partnership of equals, not just the Empire with a new name.

Even if the UK or a hypothetical independent England were to declare themselves a republic it wouldn't inherently impact anything for Canada or Australia, they'd still be entitled to recognize Lizzie Windsor as their monarch and head of state.

Christine Finlay has been sounding the alarm on bushfires in Australia for more than a decade after tracking the relationship ­between reduced cool burning and the frequency of firestorms. And the Queensland-based fire ­researcher, who charted a century of archival bushfire records for her PhD, has long been screaming danger.

Finlay’s thesis examined problem bushfires between 1881 and 1981. What she found after plotting the historical data on a graph was that there was a marked increase in the size and frequency of fires after 1919.

This was when bushfire-reduction operations increasingly moved away from traditional indigenous practices such as low-­intensity cool burning.

Finlay says this ­detailed correlation between the accumulation of catastrophic fuel loads and the frequency of extreme bushfires made it possible to forecast the dramatic increase in firestorms we have seen in the 21st century.

“For years, I energetically sent this predictive model to government agencies, in particular bushfire services, the media, coronial and parliamentary inquiries and so on,” she says. “Horribly ­ignored, it proved horribly accurate.”

Finlay has the support of forester Vic Jurskis, who has written a book on fire stick ecology and how indigenous Australians managed the landscape with fire.

In an open letter to the Prime Minister, premiers, chief ministers and opposition leaders in November, Jurskis said this season’s ­bushfire situation was neither ­unprecedented nor unexpected.

“This latest holocaust is a direct consequence of unprecedented accumulation of 3D continuous fuels as a result of green influence on politics,” Jurskis says. “It’s all about fuel, not climate.”

Half a century ago, Athol Hodgson, who later became chief fire officer of Victoria, explained the simple physics: doubling the available fuel usually doubles the rate of spread of the fire and ­increases its intensity fourfold.

Jurskis says control burning over large areas cheaply and effectively reduces the incidence of high-intensity wildfires and minimises damage.

When this year’s fire season ­finally ends, Finlay’s research and Jurskis’s theories no doubt will be offered to a federal government review already proposed by Scott Morrison. All sides will have a big stake in any investigation: fire command, volunteer services, state government agencies and anyone who lives near the bush.

Green groups are ready to battle demands that national parks be opened up to logging to reduce fuel loads. Politically, the Greens insist their environment policies adopted in November 2017 do not prohibit cool burns.

Their policy puts climate change front and centre but says “scientifically based, ecologically appropriate use of fire is an ­important means to protect bio­diversity and manage habitat ­effectively”. The policy calls for “an effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management that will protect biodiversity and moderate the effects of wildfire for the protection of people and assets, developed in consultation with experts, custodians and land managers”.

The Greens have called on the Prime Minister to immediately ­declare a royal commission into the bushfire crisis.

Australia’s Firestorms Follow Move Away From Cool Burning

So it seems like the Green objectives is opposed to fuel reduction strategies.

About 60,000 km² of forest area and farmland has been burned to a crisp so far in what are probably the most devastating wildfires in Australia’s recent history. Hundreds of thousands of farm animals have died in the blazes, dozens of people have been killed, many are missing and it’s estimated that a total of nearly half a billion wild animals have died. Entire ecosystems have been razed, even down to the microbes in the soil. It will take many, many years for the forests to recover, assuming they do.

And IMHO because they have major influence over past & current fuel reduction strategies, they are in part responsible for the fact that entire ecosystems were razed in the current bushfires in Australia.

Their policies for “an effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management that will protect biodiversity and moderate the effects of wildfire for the protection of people and assets, developed in consultation with experts, custodians and land managers” were neither effective nor implemented sound strategies.

[a former member of the Sierra Club]

While greens blame the bushfires of Australia and California on global warming, green policies themselves are helping to fuel the fires.

Alarmists have been quick to blame climate change for the recent, horrific fires in Australia and California. Although human actions do bear a large share of the blame for the scale of this ongoing tragedy, the cause is primarily bad management policies, not dreaded climate change. Governmental decisions, made under pressure from environmental groups, have made what would normally be big fires into hellish conflagrations.

The similarities between Australian and Californian politics, vegetation, and climate have always been striking. Both places are drop-dead beautiful, far-left, and politically green. In both places, people like living around vegetation that every year dries out enough to burn sky high — with or without climate change.

This is thanks to relatively short rainy seasons surrounded by perfect beach weather. It is spectacularly green when it rains and tinder-dry brown when it stops. When rainfall is high, as it was for recent years in Australia, vegetation grows even thicker, only to provide even more fuel for wildfires.

At the same time, our culture of vegetation worship militates against purposefully burning things down. In California, these “prescribed” fires are now largely prohibited (because burning releases dreaded carbon dioxide), ensuring that disaster is always just around the corner. Ditto for Australia, where some burning is allowed but nowhere near enough.

Range managers, as well as the native inhabitants, have long known that unless we burn it on purpose before the vegetation overgrows, it will burn us, our homes, and, tragically, our towns. You can see this in the terrifying video of a family’s escape from the 2018 Camp Fire in California, where the tremendous amount of fuel lying on the ground is painfully obvious.

Australia has been ready to explode for years. David Packham, the former researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia, warned in a 2015 article in the Age that fire fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous levels in thousands of years. He noted this was the result of “misguided green ideology.”

In Australia, there was a huge fire in the province of Western Australia in 1962, which led to a decades-long campaign of intense prescribed burning. At its height, from 1963 to around 1985, very little was burned by wildfires, but as more and more pressure mounted to suppress this practice, more and more of Western Australia was burned over.

Decades of intentional policies led to the tragic Camp Fire in California and other catastrophes. These policies include drastic reductions of timber harvests in national forests (California is more than 45% federal land), the aforementioned fire suppression policies, and significant reductions of livestock grazing on federal lands. An additional similarity is that California chaparral and Australian eucalyptus forests burn extremely hot due to the aromatic hydrocarbons exuded by both.

Source: Australian wildfires were caused by humans, not climate change

After decades of poor housekeeping, Australia’s latest devastating bushfires were predictable. Politicians and serving officials want to leave post mortems until the fires are out. Their instincts are correct.

That hasn’t stopped green ­advocates and the gullible from immediately linking them to ­Australia’s “inaction on climate change”. Climate experts as far afield as Sydney Lord Mayor ­Clover Moore and Swedish truant schoolgirl Greta Thunberg agree on the connection.

For five years the Victorian Country Fire Authority didn’t mention climate change. Its ­priorities were “fairness” and “inclusion­”, which it mentions 56 times.

Victoria publishes limited data, but a planned hazard reduction of 370 hectares in East Gippsland was reduced to nine after protesters claimed it was “killing baby birds alive”. Much of East Gippsland is now a wasteland.

These days, it’s commonplace for national park entries to be blocked by boulders or chains and padlocks. Many fire trails are so overgrown that a sign identifying them is all that distinguishes them from the rest of the forest. […]

As weather patterns slowly return­ to normal and the fires are extinguished, there will be yet another­ government inquiry.

More money will be demand­ed, along with calls for additional jet tankers, even though there are few airfields from which they can operate. Money is needed, but alone it is not the answer. Much of it goes to the deskbound. For ­example, in the four years up to 2019, the NSW Rural Fire Service received a 78 per cent boost in funding, yet it oversaw a decline in volunteers and fire trucks.

Of course for Hollywood and other propagandists, it is vital that inaction on climate change, not inaction on hazard reduction, be the focus. For them, this link is vital to their cause.

To fanatics, facts don’t matter. That there has been no drying trend in 100 years of Australian data, and that science is yet to establish­ a causal link between climate­ change and drought is irrelevan­t.

While weather, droughts and bushfires will, from time to time, continue to feature, population growth and encroachment on green spaces increase risks. Indeed­, 87 per cent of bushfires are due to humans. Only 6 per cent are naturally started. Arsonists, attracted by the ease of ignition­, perhaps start more than half. To date, 183 arsonists have been arrested. However, while those delegated to manage the envir­onment and those charged with property protection share a close ideological relationship, little­ will change.

At some point, government must take control. Communic­ation and co-operation between the different jurisdictions, departments and agencies must be ­better co-ordinated.

Priorities must be set, audited and enforced. The insurance indus­try should be given a louder voice. It’s an important financial stakeholder and risk assessor. This crisis will lead to higher premium­s, more uninsured properties and serious moral dilemma­s next time.

For now, courageous frontline firefighters are putting their lives on the line and fighting fires the scale of which owes much to green ideology and confused and fragmented leadership. It is hoped that an inquiry will establish clear priorities and directions that will be followed.

Ideology Won’t Help Anyone Get Through Bushfire Crisis

Never change, Washington Examiner.

The sky finally cracked open atop much of the fire grounds in NSW, Australia this week – the welcome deluge slashing the number of burning fires to below 100 for the first time in more than a month. But the challenge is far from over as the finger-pointing game ignites.

“There are many reasons for the fires starting,” Paul Baxter, Commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW and President and Board Chair of the Australasian Fire and Emergency Services Authorities Council (AFAC), told Fox News. “Some have been natural – lightning – and some have been caused by human, both maliciousness and carelessness.”

Baxter also pointed to Australia’s habitat as being ripe for such a disaster. “The widespread nature of bushland in Australia, the readiness of plant materials to ignite and propagate fire spread so easily and the fact that fire is a very well-known and historical factor of the Australian landscape, being a necessary factor of forest health and growth,” he said.

NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) has stated that the largest conflagrations were enkindled by dry lightning, essentially lightning storms without rain. And some victims and analysts have bemoaned calls to address climate changes as secondary to fixing what they consider to be a broken system.

“Climate change has brought bountiful rains throughout most of the past two decades, which have suppressed wildfires and allowed for more vegetation growth. That is a good thing,” said James Taylor, Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. “However, Australian government policies that discourage or prohibit prescribed burns and other proactive land management have meant that when we finally have a dry year, there is more fuel for the fires, less management of the vegetation that fuels the fires, and a greater chance of wildfires burning out of control.”

“Regardless of the reasons for climate change, we all know from the facts that the climate is changing,” he said. “We have longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons. The winters are shorter, meaning that the hazard reduction or 'prescribed burning’ is much shorter, and we have less days to get the required burning done.”

Prescribed or hazard reduction burning refers to deliberate, monitored fires conducted during off-seasons, aimed at clearing out flammable materials from precarious terrain. It is regulated and administered by agencies at a state level, such as park authorities or environmental bodies. Eucalyptus trees, an Australian bushland staple, are also known to be especially flammable.

The likes of Collen Jackson, a 46-year-old farmer in the town of Benembra, see “environmentalists” as problematic catalysts in obstructing hazard reduction.

“The traditional owners of this land have used circle burn techniques for thousands of years to control the build-up of hazardous material – leaf matter, bark, fallen dead wood, low bushy trees. These circle burns allowed animals to escape the fire and, at the same time, cleaned up the forest floor to remove fuel for a wildfire,” she said. “This type of burning has been refused by the government due to environmentalist pressure.”

From Jackson’s lens, this has allowed “almost 30 years of fuel buildup on the forest floor” and thus “has made these fires uncontrollable by increasing the heat of the fires one thousandfold.”

“It’s like any fire, the less wood you add to it, the less it burns. Lightning strikes would still have ignited a fire due to dryness, but if there was no fuel on the forest floor, then the fires would not have been so ferocious,” she continued.

Others lamented hefty fines for creating unauthorized firebreaks or conducting hazard reduction without going through the permit process.

“All considered, climate change is suppressing Australian wildfires, but poor government policies, ironically supported by climate and environmental activists, are making the present wildfires worse,” Taylor conjectured.

Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce claimed on national television this year that “green caveats” hindered his team reduction burns, in essence leading to the fire crisis.

However, the Australian Greens party has subsequently come out to refute such claims, stressing in a statement that they “support hazard reduction burns and back burning when guided by the best scientific, ecological and emergency service expertise.”

“The Coalition has spent six years in office ignoring the main cause of these unprecedented bushfires – severe climate change,” said the statement. “The major cause of climate change that has led to these bushfires and extremely dry conditions around the country is the mining, burning and exporting of coal, oil, and gas.”

Australia is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of coal, which remains its most valuable export.

“Coal is the single biggest driver of climate change, contributing to nearly half of carbon emissions worldwide. Australia is currently the world’s largest coal exporter, which is troubling, particularly as we see governments across the world phasing out coal and financial institutions also starting to back away from financing coal,” said Julie Anne Miranda-Brobeck, communications manager for Global Witness, an NGO that endeavors to exposes natural resource corruption and human rights abuses worldwide. “Coal is simply not economically viable.”

Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pledged to “address issues around hazard reduction for national parks, dealing with land clearing laws, zoning laws and planning laws around people’s properties and where they can be built.”

He has also underscored that there were “many contributing factors” to the mammoth blazes, including the ongoing drought and fuel loads. The federal government has requested that the parliament’s environment and energy committee initiate an investigation pertaining to land and vegetation management.

Morrison has furthermore denied accusations that he has failed to acknowledge climate change during his tenure in office. But he also has remained steadfast in protecting the coal industry and the hundreds of thousands of families who rely on it to make ends meet.

For five months, Australia has been swathed in apocalyptic scenes of seemingly eternal fires ravishing its heartland, its animals, home, and lives. So far, the blazes have killed 28 people, destroyed 2,600 homes and scorched an area of more than 25.5 million acres, roughly the size of South Korea. The cost of the damage is expected to exceed $3 billion.

Arson, too, has played its part.

Police in New South Wales this week announced that, since the beginning of November, two dozen people have been charged with intentionally lighting fires, while 53 others have been accused of failing to comply with total fire ban regulations. A further 47 people have had legal action taken against them for dumping a burning cigarette or match on arid land.

In Queensland, law enforcement has apprehended some 101 people for igniting blazes – 69 teenagers and 32 adults – and in Victoria, some 43 have reportedly been charged.

Scientists insist that climate change has acerbated already ripe conditions for calamitous fires, while critics have contended that such devastation is nothing new to the Australian landscape.

In 2009, the infamously-named Black Fires took the lives of 173 people, and more than 2000 homes were destroyed. In 1974, some 290 million acres of land were decimated by flames across Australia’s interior. The fire season of 1966 brought with it 62 lives lost at 7000 rendered homeless as over 4000 buildings burned, and dating back to the 1800’s documentation from a single fire season highlights that 640,000 acres burned, 12 people died, and thousands of dwellings charred to the ground.

“This is not Australia’s hottest year. Nor is it Australia’s driest year. Bushfires are a common occurrence there, going back a long time,” argued Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com. “The 1939 bushfires, for example, were much worse. The most important reason for the bushfires is poor land management practices. We know that because the Aborigines have cut their fires by 50 percent because of controlled burns, as even the New York Times has reported.”

But for those most impacted by the combustion – some described shooting their animals, their faces awash with tears – skepticism remains that it will never really be over.

“The fires are still burning and will be for months. I am sitting right in the middle of the impact zone. I know my farm will be burned, I just don’t know when,” Jackson said. “The government won’t be here, and they told us that three weeks ago – we are on our own. Yet if they had spent a small amount and control-burned their land, which borders mine, the fire would not have fuel to rush at me so fast. Unfortunately, our government is controlled by the majority of voters in the city who know nothing of country life.”

Source: Climate change or poor policy? As Australia’s wildfires see some relief, blame game ascends

With the eastern seaboard currently ravaged by bushfires, what sort of an idiot would actually cheer when one worked its way down the peninsular where he lived? I did, and there were a lot of others who did the same.

To understand why, we must go back over more than a year when a winter bushfire got going to the west of the town. It did for us what the volunteer firies couldn’t: it got rid of the ground fuel with minimal canopy scorch. No lives or property were lost. Had this ‘good’ bushfire not happened, the peninsular would have been obliterated this summer when a firestorm with winds gusting to 100kph came our way.

No fire fuel meant that it burned and went out. Simple as that. Today, as thousands of Australians confront the bushfire threat, we on the Tilligerry peninsular are safe. With only one year of fuel build-up we have little to worry about.

When bushfire management passed from local control to government bureaucracies, the political influence of the green movement virtually stopped the off-season burnoffs. This traditional practice dated back to the black man and his firestick management of the landscape. The European settlers adopted it, as did farmers and local grassroots volunteer firefighters.

In researching my bushfire book White Overall Days, I found that our local brigade averaged some 15 burnoffs per year in the decade of the 1970s; nine in the ’80s, a mere two or three in the ’90s and similar numbers ever since.

The reason for this dramatic fall-off in burnoffs was the complex web of rules and procedures dumped on the local captains to comply with before they could do anything. They simply gave up. It was all too hard.

It was NSW Premier Bob Carr who proclaimed vast areas of the state of NSW as national parks. The problem was that they were not fire-managed and have now been devastated by uncontrollable firestorms. Lives and property have been lost as they roared out of the forests into adjoining farmland and rural communities.

Several things have emerged from the current crisis. Green zealots are blaming coal mining and climate change for the fires. They refuse to concede that the green-leaning management policies caused the fires in the first place by ensuring catastrophic fuel build-up. On the other hand, the vast number of ordinary, sensible people now realize that cool burning delivers a far better environmental outcome than raging wildfires. From what I hear, even some of the self-serving bureaucrats are starting to talk mitigation rather than reactive suppression.

To continue down the current pathway of reactive firefighting means more of the same. There will always be bushfires. They are an integral part of the Australian environment. We either manage them by controlled burning or suffer the consequences.

Source: I Cheered When the Bushfire Came

I have to give you props, as an American I have seen so many snide comments by Canadians on here about the US but your attack on Australia from the point of view of an N-Zedder outdoes any of those.

At least you don't share a land border!

It's November again and once again half of NSW and Queensland is battling bushfires.

It pains me to see rural and regional communities go through the trauma of out of control bushfires consuming land, forests, native fauna, homes, livelihoods and lives.

My family and my community went through the exact same process last year. It appears little has changed.

Some may say this is not the time to be playing politics around bushfires while people are battling to save their homes and businesses. However, it appears to me that the only time people and politicians will listen is when the flames are coming over the horizon or communities are left in ash.

As predictable as always, conservationists and opportunistic politicians are blaming these fires on climate change.

Before I get attacked for being a climate change denier - I am not. But I am also a climate change realist.

If you leave your front door unlocked, you can't complain too loudly when someone steals your TV.

It's the same with bush fires.

You can't blame climate change when you've restricted access to millions of hectares of densely thickened eucalypt forests and wonder why they go up in smoke.

You can't blame climate change when you haven't back burned this millennium.

You can't blame climate change when there are no fire breaks or cool buffer zones installed around towns, houses and critical infrastructure.

Some people haven't seemed to notice that Australia is the second driest continent on earth, it gets very hot around this time of year, every year and our vegetation has evolved over the last 60,000 years to love bushfires. Big ones.

The Bureau of Meteorology have claimed that the "strong winds and high temperatures" are the reason for the catastrophic fires. No doubt wind and heat help flame the fires but they aren't the "reason" or the "cause".

The real reason is Governments - local, state and Federal - over the past 3 decades have bowed to conservationists and green groups by locking up more and more of our national estate and sacrificing them to the flame every bushfire season.

Even if the climate is changing, does that mean we should just throw our hands in the air and let our national estate and biodiversity go up in smoke every year?

I don't profess to have all the answers but here are a few less dramatic things we can do, other than trying to stop the climate changing, to prevent our national estate, our wildlife and our carbon being cooked every fire season:

* Recognise that fire has always been a part of the Australian landscape but it's the fuel loads when fires hit that is really important. A fire can't burn if there is nothing or little to burn.

* Just by locking up a piece of scrub and calling it a national park does not make it so. By expanding national parks because it "feels nice" dilutes the resources to protect the areas of our environment that truly are special and endangered and creates a massive estate which is difficult to manage and maintain.

* One of the best forms of fire fuel reduction is low intensity cattle grazing. It's low risk, low impact and puts people into areas that actually know how to manage the country and know how to fight fires.

Anyone who says cattle are bad for the environment and biodiversity should go and ask the millions of animals, birds and insects currently being incinerated in national parks and native forests.

Fires in open grass lands with lower fuel loads can be managed and contained. Those in forests are uncontrollable. We need to reintroduce low intensity silvicultural practices across our forest estate to reduce fuel loads, increase forest health, reduce noxious weeds and prevent catastrophic fires.

All fire breaks should be assessed on the type, height and fire risk of vegetation not some demarcated figure ie. 10 meters.

We also need to look at cool buffers where vegetation is retained but canopy cover and stem density reduced. These should be implemented off fire breaks, roads, access lines, around houses, subdivisions and towns. These buffers should be regularly burnt (every year) which reduces the area of forest to be maintained with more frequent larger hazard reduction burns which are risky and difficult to manage.

Native vegetation must also be back burned when the seasonal conditions suit not on prescribed fire rotations set by some university academic or government bureaucrat.


For decades government policy has been focused on kicking people out of the environment. From foresters to graziers to beekeepers - there has been increasing restriction on access to our national estate. This takes people out of the environment who are best equipped to manage it and are willing to invest their own time, resources and lives to protect it.

Stop blaming climate change. Even if the climate is changing, does that mean we should just throw our hands in the air and let our national estate and biodiversity go up smoke every year? Sitting around blaming the weather for all of our problems is juvenile and futile.

If the climate is changing, it's more important than even that we start to look at practical and affordable solutions to how best manage the impacts of fire.

My thoughts are with those families and communities currently battling these fires.

Let's hope some common sense prevails to avoid these unnecessary disasters into the future.

Source: 'Climate change doesn't cause fires'

Yearly fire season (June through May) hectares burned by major bushfires in Australia since the 1919-20 season (2019-20 season total is as of January 7, 2020).

As can be seen, by far the largest area burned occurred during 1974-75, at over 100 million hectares (close to 15% of the total area of Australia). Curiously, though, according to Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) data, the 1974-75 bushfires occurred during a year with above-average precipitation and below-average temperature. This is opposite to the narrative that major bushfires are a feature of just excessively hot and dry years.