Miranda Devine: The Greens — not climate change — are to blame for infernos
Their aim is to scare people into buying their climate “emergency” hyperbole, but it is that same green influence on government policy that has fuelled the cataclysmic bushfires, writes Miranda Devine.
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Even a hippy in Nimbin knows that greenies are to blame for the power and intensity of NSW’s latest bout of tragic bushfires.
“The Greens have to cop it on the head — they have been obsessed with no fires and no burning,” Michael Balderstone told The Australian as bushfires engulfed the north coast.
Wiser words have never been spoken in that Northern Rivers town.
Yet Greens leader Richard Di Natale and Melbourne MP Adam Bandt still insist that the culprit is climate change.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They oppose any sensible land management that is proven to reduce the severity of routine regular summer bushfires.
And when the inevitable happens they blame climate change.
Their aim is to scare people into buying their climate “emergency” hyperbole so that government are under pressure to enact suicidal policies which drive electricity prices through the roof.
But it is not climate change which turns fires into unstoppable lethal infernos. It is green ideology which blocks removal of fuel loads in national parks and prevents landholders from clearing fire hazards around their homes.
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Every bushfire inquiry since the 1939 Stretton Royal Commission has urged the use of systematic controlled burning, or “prescribed burning”, to burn off flammable ground cover in cooler months, so it does not fuel summer bushfires.
The forecasts are for “extreme” weather and strong winds but that should not guarantee an inferno. As pre-eminent bushfire researcher Phil Cheney says, a regime of prescribed burning will reduce the intensity of any fire no matter what the weather. It slows it down and reduces the spread, giving firefighters a chance to control it.
But leaving fuel loads to build up is a sure-fire recipe for an unstoppable blaze that will incinerate every living thing.
Greenies also have infiltrated local councils where they enact laws to stop private landholders from clearing fire hazards from their own land.
Who could forget Victorian Liam Sheahan, whose hilltop house at Reedy Creek was the only one still standing in a two-kilometre radius after the 2009 fires. Five years earlier he had been fined $50,000 by Mitchell Shire Council for removing trees around his house to protect it from fire. Yet his prudent pruning saved his house.
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Remember when Transgrid was fined $500,000 in 2001 by the NSW government for “environmental vandalism” after it bulldozed a 60-metre wide firebreak under its high-voltage lines in the Snowy Mountains?
Two years later, that firebreak was the only thing that saved workers and kangaroos when a disastrous blaze swept through the mountains.
All this government intervention, combined with record spending in recent years on state of the art firefighting equipment, has reduced people who live in rural and peri-urban areas to a state of learned helplessness.
They no longer take responsibility for the protection of their property and their own safety because they are loath to make an impact on the environment in which they choose to live.
Now Di Natale and Bandt despicably are capitalising on the suffering of bushfire victims to score political points while GetUp has gone so far as to fundraise off the back of people’s pain.
They don’t see their exploitation of tragedy as immoral because they’ve justified it as being for the greater good which, in their fevered brains, means they’re heroically “saving the planet”.
They never explain how destroying the coal industry or forcing us into electric cars will prevent bushfires but logic is not a greenie strong suit.
The fact is that the Greens are Marxist ideologues who whip up irrational fear of climate change in order to achieve their real aim which is to radically transform the economy into their preferred utopian model, despite ample historic evidence of the misery that will ensue.
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Realising that the public is wise to their tricks, they now pretend they have supported hazard reduction burning all along, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
With the assistance of bushfire brigade volunteers and scientific experts, I have recorded obstructive green efforts since the cataclysmic 1994 Sydney bushfires which killed four people, and fuel loads are higher today than they were then, says Cheney.
You can look at submissions opposing prescribed burning from multiple green groups to the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the 2001-02 bushfires.
“Inappropriate fire hazard regimes can damage biodiversity leading to the loss of native species, communities and ecosystems,” said WWF Australia, for example.
In 2003, after bushfires spread to Canberra from overgrown national parks, killing four people, the NSW Nature Conservation Council condemned calls for increased prescribed burning as “futile” and a “knee-jerk reaction”.
In 2009, the NSW Greens website declared it was a “common misconception that responsible fire management always involves burning or clearing to reduce moderate and high fuel loads”.
Today most green groups are sneakier about their opposition to burning, with the Greens ostensibly supporting “effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management”.
But in practice, bushfire brigade veterans say that covert green obstruction to prescribed burning is as fierce as ever.
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This anti-burning mentality has spread to government bureaucracies where green activists are embedded.
For instance, the NSW government this year inexplicably listed prescribed burning as a “key threatening process” under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
It lumps burning under the broad category of landclearing.
It’s hard to believe greenies are just stupid. For them cataclysmic bushfires are good for business. And, of course, their business is pumping up fear of climate change.