When the 'green dream' becomes a bushfire nightmare

In early May in the remote East Gippsland hamlet of Goongerah, local community representatives presented Victoria's most senior fire officers with a litany of allegations of mismanagement over last summer's Goongerah – Deddick Trail bushfire, and called for an independent inquiry in a news report on ABC TV.

Goongerah is spread-out along an 8 km length of cleared land hugging the flats of a narrow valley, but is surrounded by extensive public forests that stretch virtually unbroken in some directions for over 50 km. Once a tiny farming and sawmilling community, it is now a haven for 'close-to-nature' lifestylers and has become the region's epicentre of environmental activism.

The Goongerah – Deddick Trail fire started as a series of small lightning strikes within these nearby forests, but steadily grew into a fire that eventually burnt through 166,000 hectares of forest and private land over a 53-day period. During this time it threatened life and property at Goongerah, and other small communities nearby, including Bonang and Tubbut.

The local community's concerns about the fire's management are centred on five areas which it would like to see addressed. These include changing the current culture of fire-fighting; reverting to the tactics formerly used to fight forest fires; redressing the lack of resources available for fire-fighting, as well as improving communication with local communities and having greater respect for their concerns. These relate primarily to the Department of Environment and Primary Industries (DEPI) which carries responsibility for controlling bushfires on public lands.

As part of one of the world's three most fire-prone regions, East Gippsland is no stranger to serious bushfires and from the 1970s, the Victorian government's forestry agency had developed arguably one of the world's best fire management models. To those who've worked in East Gippsland's forests in the past, the current allegations regarding the Goongerah – Deddick Trail bushfire are suggestive of a sad decline in the formerly accepted standards and culture of forest and fire management.

Understanding how and why this decline has occurred is the key to understanding the alleged mismanagement of the Goongerah – Deddick Trail fire. The answers are at least partly contained in an internal DEPI Discussion Paper prepared in June 2013, which was recently leaked to the Weekly Times. It examines the challenges of meeting the higher annual fuel reduction burning target recommended by the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. These challenges are also relevant to DEPI's summer fire-fighting effort.

According to the Discussion Paper, the loss of much of Victoria's native hardwood timber industry is particularly significant because it has substantially reduced access to the suitable machinery and bush-experienced operators and foresters who were the conerstone of the strong culture of bushfire prevention and suppression which formerly prevailed in Victoria's most fire-prone region.

With regard to East Gippsland, the Discussion Paper notes that:

"Over the past 10 years in East Gippsland, timber harvesting contractors have declined from over 80 employees working for 25 companies to around 45 employees working for the remaining 12 contractors.......... This trend is forecast to continue and the decline in the timber industry is not expected to improve in the long term."

Over the same period, VicForests, who manages commercial timber production in the region, has also lost around one-third of its workforce. The regional losses of forestry and industry personnel are actually far greater when considered over a longer timeframe stretching back to the 1980s, when Victoria's overall fire management capability was arguably at its peak.

The substantial loss of the timber industry has largely broken the traditional funding and resourcing nexus for fire-fighting, as well as critical preparatory acivities such as forest road and track maintenance. This has already been noticable for many years in the diminished condition of the forest road and track network and the greater difficulty of quickly accessing significant bushfires.

The significance of reduced access to equipment and experienced bush operators now makes it more challenging for DEPI to properly resource the fire-fighting effort, and reduces their capacity to directly attack fires to quickly control them. Accordingly, fires are now more likely to be fought indirectly by conducting large scale back-burns from major roads and tracks – a strategy that typically allows fires to burn much larger areas while often substantially increasing the time taken to control them. These are criticisms that the community raised in relation to the Goongerah-Deddick Trail fire.

With regard to 'fire-fighting culture', a substantial shift away from multiple use forest management to conservation management has dramatically reduced theinfluence of foresters who, as a professional discipline, pioneered and refined forest fire prevention and suppression techniques since the 1940s, and were their most proficient operational proponents.

In the 18 years from 1988 to 2006, the area of nature conservation reserves in Victoria (including national parks) more than doubled from 1.83 million hectares to 3.75 million hectares. From being responsible for managing most of the state's public forests up until the early 1980's, by 2008, less than half of Victoria's public forests were still in land tenures being managed primarily by foresters.

This was further exacerbated by the Government's 2004 decision to create a new commercial forestry agency, VicForests, limited to managing only the harvesting and regeneration of allocated coupes. This took many of the most experienced foresters out of broader public land management, and although they assist in bushfire emergencies, has ultimately left DEPI with fewer field staff experienced in the operational aspects of managing fire.

This is significant given that one of the concerns raised by Ms Redwood and her community in relation to the Goongerah – Deddick Trail fire is that fire authorities must give more respect to community concerns and suggestions. However, respect is a two-way street, and it is hypocritical for a community being represented by someone who has so publicly disrespected forest and fire management authorities for many years to be now calling for them to be more respectful.

Given the decades of incessant campaigning by Ms Redwood and her cohorts to effectively tear down the cornerstones of the stronger forest and fire management culture that existed in the past, it is richly ironic that she is now an advocate for changing the 'culture of fire-fighting in East Gippsland' and returning to the fire-fighting tactics of the past.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute the decline of effective forest and fire management totally to environmental activism. Other factors are also playing a part, such as the evolution of an operational health and safety paradigm that is inhibiting effective fire-fighting by strangling it in a tangle of risk-avoidance 'red-tape'.

What can be said though, is that by continually misrepresenting forestry and timber harvesting as an eco-catastrophe for over 30-years, environmental activists have manufactured a misguided perception amongst society's most influential urban-based media and political classes that 'saving' forests is simply a 'no-brainer' with no significantly adverse consequences.

This is reflected in almost all mainstream media coverage of forestry issues in which forests are wrongly portrayed as exceedingly fragile rather than resilient, renewable and disturbance-dependent; and where any forests not already contained in National Parks are supposedly earmarked for destruction by a corrupt, greedy, and uncontrolled 'logging industry'.

We can only speculate on how this has shaped the mindset of those who've grown-up with this nonsense and are now staffing land management agencies such as DEPI, but it is probably reasonable to assume that at least some are in the job because they want to save forests rather than actively manage them. Perhaps this underlies the not uncommon instances of misguided priorities where avoiding the disturbance from fireline construction is deemed to be more important than putting out the fire.

We can be more certain about how decades of forest activism and unbalanced media have shaped political views. This was exemplified in the recent biography of former Victorian Labor Premier, Steve Bracks, who implied that closing the State's native hardwood industry is an unwritten ALP policy. No substantive reasons were given as to why – simply that no-one who votes Labor likes it and so it's a political winner.

Accordingly, under Bracks, the last Victorian Labor government committed to 'saving' the Otways forest (2002), the Wombat Forest (2002), the Goolengook and other East Gippsland forests (2006), and the Murray valley red gum forests (2006) from the 'logging industry' – all announced as promises at the height of State election campaigns.

The damage that this has caused to forest fire management probably hardly matters to a former politician like Bracks, or to major ENGOs like The Wilderness Society and its supporters, who are safely insulated from the fire threat in Melbourne's inner suburbs. But it sure matters to the small remote forest communities of East Gippsland and elsewhere, where the threat of bushfires is felt up-close and personal each summer.

While Ms Redwood and her cohorts have substantially contributed to their own predicament, this shouldn't detract from the need to seriously examine the management of the Goolengook – Deddict Trail bushfire because documented observations of their performance certainly suggest that it was blighted by confused priorities, inadequate and poorly deployed resources, and an apparent lack of urgency. Whether things can be substantially improved is another story, given the changed world in which DEPI must now exist and operate.

If nothing else, such an inquiry could at least awaken the media and political classes to the reality that aquiescing to the 'green dream' of a forested landscape fully reserved in national parks has never been free from adverse consequences, including an unfolding bushfire nightmare for both rural communities and their natural surroundings.