Lessons not yet learned: a bushfire tragedy

At stake is the protection of human lives and homes, State forests, national parks and other public lands.

This is again highlighted in the all party Parliamentary Environment & Natural Resources Committee Inquiry into the Impact of Public Land Management Practices on Bushfires in Victoria which tabled its report five years later in June 2008 in the Victorian Parliament. This inquiry was initiated after the public outcry over the disastrous Alpine Fires and Great Divide Fire, in 2003 and 2006 respectively that collectively burnt over two million hectares of public land. In three years, these two fires incinerated more biodiversity values than all bushfires for the previous 150 years. Many areas show no signs of recovery.

The inquiry report states:

On balance the Committee finds it is likely that the bushfires of 2002/03 and 2006/07 were both the result, and the most recent examples of inappropriate fire regimes. The Committee finds that an increase in prescribed burning across the landscape represents the best strategy for managing the risks that future bushfires pose to biodiversity and other natural assets …

… The Committee finds that the frequency and extent of prescribed burning has been insufficient over a number of decades, for the preservation of ecological processes and biodiversity across the public land estate. An increase in the extent and frequency of prescribed burning for the enhancement of environmental values should therefore be a priority for the Department of Sustainability and Environment and its partner agencies.

It seems we have the need to learn the same lessons over and over at the expense of lives in our rural communities and the environmental values we seek to protect.

The primary recommendation of this parliamentary inquiry, chaired by a government member and former minister, is: “That in order to enhance the protection of community and ecological assets, the Department of Sustainability and Environment increase its annual prescribed burning target from 130,000 hectares to 385,000 hectares.”

It is therefore incomprehensible that the Minister for the Environment, Gavin Jennings, should stand in the Victorian Parliament on December 4, 2008, after the mountain of evidence presented at this inquiry demonstrating the level of fuel reduction in Victorian forests was manifestly inadequate, and state that:

Hectare-based targets are not considered to be the best way of measuring effectiveness of the planned burning program. There is a need to begin to move away from hectare-based targets and start thinking about reduction of fuel loads across the board, understanding community sensitivity to planned burning and better mirroring nature through the effective use of fire as a land management tool.

Same old story. Numerous bushfire scientists, researchers, rural communities, Judge Stretton and the recent parliamentary inquiry all call for a quantum, measurable increase in prescribed burning and the department and Minister says “We know better”. There is nothing in fire management in this state in the last 20 years that would indicate they know better than the experts - only death, destruction and despair as a result of lessons not learned.

In the same address to parliament, the Environment Minister stated that funding for fire suppression had increased from $30 million to $100 million in the last ten years and - wait for it - funding for fire prevention had been lifted to $10 million. Tim Flannery this week in the media reminded us of an old saying, “He who owns the fuel, owns the fire”.

This difficulty in managing public land with some degree of environmental integrity has not deterred governments from increasing the size of the national park estate at the urging of green lobby groups. Almost without exception, new areas are gazetted as national parks only after campaigning - not by the community - but by the environmental lobby. From just 276,343 hectares in 1975 to 3,230,741 hectares in 2005, more than a ten-fold increase that corresponds to rising community dissatisfaction with the management of public land.

Communities all over the state that have suffered from wildfire in the last decade have a right to seriously question the management regime of public land when the Auditor General has stated the land managers have consistently failed to meet their own prescribed burn targets.