Piers Akerman: Leftists hammer Prime Minister Scott Morrison over national bushfires
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is being lambasted for not doing enough about the raging bushfires by the usual suspects who claim they are due to climate change as they call for yet another meaningless politicians’ talkfest, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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The usual suspects have been given the ABC’s megaphone to belt Prime Minister Scott Morrison for not doing enough about the raging bushfires and make the spurious claim that they are due to climate change.
He has been urged to bring forward the March meeting of state Premiers as if another politicians’ talkfest would achieve something positive.
Bushfires are a state responsibility. The Premiers had their chance to do something about their prevention and they spectacularly failed their public because they unfailingly buckled to the pressure of minority Green groups in inner-city electorates and to varying degrees lacked the will to carry out the constantly called-for hazard reduction burns in fire-prone national parks.
Unsurprisingly, Victoria’s socialist Premier Daniel Andrews has the worst record in this regard.
Many would say that Mr Andrews inaction in neglecting and in some cases reversing the recommendations handed down by the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission in 2010 was disgraceful.
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It is a matter of record that the Royal Commission was sharply critical of the Victorian government’s lack of hazard reduction.
As a result, Victoria’s forests had been allowed to continue building up fuel loads: “Adding to the likelihood of more intense bushfires and thereby placing firefighters and communities at greater risk”.
Evidence was also given during the inquiry that forestry workers had been banned from the newly-created wilderness areas, that forest trails had been deliberately blocked to prevent access to the parklands for the so-called protection of birds and animals.
So much for all that virtue-signalling concern as the native habitat was incinerated then and incinerated again in recent days.
We don’t need another inquiry now, we just need to act on the information garnered from previous investigations into the causes of bushfires.
We certainly don’t need more idiotic input from Greens leader Richard Di Natale and his sidekick Adam Bandt or the thoughts of Greta Thunberg and other apocalyptic visionaries.
The states must bear the blame for their failure to control the amount of fuel they permitted to build up.
By triggering the National Disaster Agreement, the states have already shifted 70 per cent of all compensation costs to the Commonwealth — unfairly — and the Commonwealth has stepped up its recovery efforts with the Navy providing resources to evacuate holiday-makers and locals alike from the fire-stricken communities on the south coast of NSW.
If there is any money wasted on an inquiry, it should first look at the councils, which proscribed or made it difficult for local brigades to conduct hazard reduction exercises and reduced the fuel loads in their areas.
Green councils which prevented the necessary burn-offs should be prohibited from receiving any state or federal money for any services until they comply with the demands of their state fire services.
NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean was quickly out of the gates last month to cluelessly link climate change with the fires which had been burning in his state since November.
It doesn’t take much for this minister to demonstrate his ignorance, or that of his advisers, but it is worth noting again that Australia has experienced larger fires earlier in the season than the current blazes and all before the craze to blame mankind for global warming became fashionable with the tofu and soy milk latte crowd. This season has not been “unprecedented” as the ABC and Nine media love to claim.
At least Mr Kean proved that Premier Andrews is not the only wilfully ignorant politician in the nation.
Among the many things these ignoramuses ignore is the fact (and even that great advocate for climate hysteria Tim Flannery would agree) that the very landscape, fauna and vegetation of our continent owes almost everything to millions of years of wildfires assisted in more recent millennia by Aborigines, who brought semi-controlled burning with them as a hunting and clearing tool.
Any notional inquiry should also look at the lack of adequate fire management in national parks and the obstruction of hazard reduction attempts by concerned locals.
As a number of professionals have said there is a lack of manpower to meet the demands of the fire season there is an excellent argument for the reintroduction of a form of voluntary national service for young men and women in the year or two after they leave high school.
If national service personnel could be employed in hazard reduction operations the regular volunteers would have a lot less work to do during the fire seasons.
History tells us that we didn’t have water bombers and fire retardants to fight the early fires. We didn’t have firefighters from other nations.
We relied on backburning to create fire breaks, we had skilled foresters who kept an eye on the build-up of fuel among the stands of timber.
Above all, we didn’t have Green politicians and their hangers-on preventing sensible fire management practices.