Australia needs to reassess the role and management of its national parks

So what measures would mitigate the risk of future mega-bushfires and reform national parks? Below is my prescription:

• First of all some sense needs to be knocked into the national parks system.
• The area designated as national park needs to be reduced (especially in NSW) to areas that get reasonable patronage from the public or are of special value. State authorities in NSW (for example) simply do not have the resources to properly manage the current 7 million hectares of national park.
• In reality much of this area is "Clayton's" national park that should be recognised for what it is (or, more pertinently, for what it is not). Most should officially be recognised as merely vacant crown land, and be primarily managed to control fire, noxious animals and weeds.
• Many former agricultural holdings (e.g. the 80,000-hectare former Yanga Station near Hay - the largest freehold farm in NSW in its previous life, the 91,000 hectare former irrigation and grazing property Toorale Station at Bourke) should never have been made national parks. Turning them into (little visited) national parks took millions out of local communities. Many of these lands should be sold and returned to agricultural production.
• Logging at sustainable levels has a role to play in both increasing the availability of native hardwoods, and in establishing defendable firebreaks in preparation for future fires. The timber industry has a much better record than national parks in using prescribed burning to protect its timber assets. Some national parks should be converted back to state forest.
• Grazing has a role to play in reducing fuel loads. Grazing leases/permits are used in many state forests to control fuel. Excluding cattle from most national parks was a retrograde step in terms of fire prevention.
• The highest priority is to ensure that prescribed burning takes place in national parks and other timbered areas every five years or so. This has not happened under the stewardship of the Andrews government in Victoria, the ("moderate") Berejiklian-led coalition in NSW or recent SA governments. Since it is not in the DNA of such governments (or national park authorities for that matter) to adhere to prescribed burning regimes, the best hope is a Commonwealth regulator of such burns, if this can be agreed. Adequate funding to pay for prescribed burning must be set aside in state budgets.

Emissions reduction aimed at reducing climate change is a total diversion, as far as bushfire prevention is concerned. CO2 emissions do not cause drought or bushfires. (If Australian energy usage was already 100% from renewable sources, would this have prevented the bushfires? I think not.) Moves to reduce net emissions across the world to zero is an exercise in futility. Such reductions will never happen outside a few "lefty" democratic countries in the west, basically because it is too expensive, and most countries never meet their modest greenhouse targets.

56 inquiries have been held through the years into bushfire causes, and key recommendations from royal commissions into the major 1939 and 2009 Black Saturday fires were never implemented. The latter royal commission was estimated to have cost $90 million. PM Morrison's proposal for yet another royal commission will cost well over $100 million but probably will recommend little that is new.

The Commonwealth government itself is not directly responsible for bushfire management. It is a state responsibility. While Morrison's initial absence on holiday perhaps was not a good look, the main blame for mega-bushfires developing resides with state governments (and the weather). Prevention efforts (especially in respect of public land) were entirely inadequate, and the NSW Minister for Emergency Services, who went on holiday during an unprecedented emergency, should have been sacked.

State environment ministers and some of their mandarins may also deserve the sack because it was on their watch that the fatal build-up of fuel was allowed on public land.