The Black Saturday dragon

The tragedy is the state government has not given public land managers the resources or funding, let alone the political commitment, to enable fire management to become the cornerstone of public land management, as recommended by the Stretton royal commission seven decades ago.

Again, the 2009 budget papers show an 11 per cent decline in the fire prevention budget from two years ago. Project firefighters employed by the government, after the worst natural disaster in the nation's history, have risen from 668 to 703. Thirty-five extra firefighters over five departmental fire regions, not enough to man two extra tankers per region. This is unlikely to have a significant effect on fire suppression or pre-season fire prevention works for which they are employed.

The government has stated, in reply to correspondence pleading for adoption of the parliamentary inquiry recommendations, that it will wait until the final report of the royal commission before deciding on changes to prescribed burning. This in effect means no increased action on accumulation of fuel loads on seven million hectares of public land until autumn 2011, two years after the inferno that cost us 173 of our neighbours, 450,000ha of incinerated environment and $1 billion in Victorian taxpayer funds for suppression and recovery.

It is estimated that trebling our prescribed burning, as recommended, would cost $31 million a year.

The focus for the past decade, where we have suffered three mega-fires that have incinerated three million hectares of mostly public land, has been suppression and recovery.

We need to consider the two choices available to us if we are to intelligently face the reality of bushfire in the Victorian landscape. One is to protect people and the environment through a return to a realistic program of bushfire fuel reduction via benign prescribed burning, as practised in the early 1980s, the other is to wait for the next inferno to repeat the lessons we should have learned in 2003, 2007 and 2009.

The weather and the forest fuel will not wait long for the government to make up its mind on whether it makes fire management, in the words of Leonard Stretton, "the paramount concern of the forest manager" or we continue along the environmentally destructive and societally traumatic path of the last decade.