Peta Credlin: Bushfire royal commission must come with strict promise of change
If Australians really want to long-term change to how we manage bushfires we have to consider why we’ve failed so many times before and commit to righting those wrongs, writes Peta Credlin.
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After every disaster, it’s important to learn the right lessons.
There’s hardly been a bushfire crisis that hasn’t led to an inquiry – coronial, government initiated, parliamentary-led or indeed a Royal Commission; and each and every one of the subsequent reports has concluded that there must be better management of fuel loads if catastrophic fires are to be avoided.
Almost without exception you will also find that the government of day moved quickly to accept the report’s recommendations. But there’s a big difference between accepting the recommendations and then actually implementing them. This is where the rubber really hits the road as over time. Ministers get moved on, governments change and the bureaucracy moves to reassert its dominance over public policy – bugger the views of ordinary people or the actual fire-science experts.
Take the two most recent fire emergencies: the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria that killed 173 people and destroyed 2100 homes; and the 2003 Canberra fires that killed five people and destroyed 500 homes. By comparison, in the current fire season, 25 people have been killed and over 2000 homes have so far been destroyed in four states.
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The Black Saturday royal commission concluded: “the amount of prescribed burning in Victoria is inadequate. It is concerned that the State has maintained a minimalist approach to prescribed burning despite recent official or independent reports and inquiries, all of which have recommended increasing the prescribed burning programme. The State has allowed the forests to continue accumulating excessive fuel loads adding to the likelihood of more intense bushfires and thereby placing firefighters and communities at greater risk”.
And the McLeod inquiry in the ACT concluded: “controlled burning is the only broad scale practical means of reducing the build-up of fuel loads … The practice provides no guarantee that bushfires will be prevented but when they do occur their intensity will not be so fierce and they will be more amenable to early containment and extinguishment”.
Last week the Prime Minister again conceded that climate change may be contributing to these bushfires. But any idea that climate change actually causes bushfires (rather than arson, lightning strikes, carelessness or electricity malfunctions) is factually wrong.
Once ignited, the biggest determinant of a fire’s ferocity is the fuel load available to feed its flames.
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It’s maddening to watch Friday’s protesters claim that closing down coal-fired power stations will somehow stop bushfires. Climate change does not cause bushfires – but climate change hysteria is arguably making them worse because green-driven local councils and state governments are refusing to allow the hazard reduction burns that are recommended in report after report.
Despite Black Saturday’s 173 deaths and despite the royal commission’s clear recommendation that prescribed burning almost triple to 5 per cent of forests every year, Victorian fuel reduction has remained at the long-term average of just 130,000 hectares a year; meaning that despite the deaths and the recommendations, nothing changed. Indeed, official statistics confirm that in 2019, Victorian authorities carried out just half of the planned burns (and a mere third of what the Royal Commission recommended as an annual target).
It’s much the same in other states other than WA. Sure, hazard reduction burning temporarily reduces air quality, is a partial hazard to wildlife, and adds to emissions. But unless we have planned burns, we end with unplanned catastrophic ones; it’s a classic case of a “stitch in time saving nine” and the out-of-season annoyance of smoke being better than the in-season reality of fierce flames.
In criticising the failure of state authorities to burn, former CSIRO bushfire expert, Phil Cheney said this week that state governments had taken too much notice of ecological scientists with “very little practical experience of bushfires”.
And it isn’t just the scientists who are critical; the forest industry and the CFMMEU have also called for fuel loads in national parks to be aggressively managed through hazard reduction burning and selective logging.
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It’s even possible that with better technology, mechanical hazard reduction will be possible using raking and mulching machines. What’s clear though, is that under the wrong circumstances – drought, high temperatures and high winds – once ignition takes place (often human induced), if there’s fuel, it will burn. This is just an unavoidable fact regardless of climate change arguments and has long been the reality for our continent.
Indeed, to put these fires into perspective, as devastating as they have been, to date 8.4 million hectares have been burnt so far in 2019-20; in the 1974-75, over 117 million hectares were burnt in fires that raged across Queensland, NSW, SA, WA and the NT.
While the Prime Minister has rightly copped criticism at the start of this fire season, no one can credibly say that since Hawaii he hasn’t since done everything possible to meet the bushfire challenge. He’s made an unprecedented commitment of the military to a domestic disaster; he’s committed at least $2 billion to bushfire recovery regardless of concerns about the surplus; and he’s flagged a substantial post-fires inquiry. While the PM has left the door open to this inquiry being a royal commission, I still need convincing as too often, they run for years and then once we’ve all moved on, the recommendations (as we have seen in Victoria) sit on a shelf gathering dust despite all the promises. This is because, by their very nature, a royal commission is conducted under a process that can’t actually make necessary changes and getting change to practice, not theory, is what desperately needs to happen at this summer’s end.
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If he does go with a royal commission, Morrison’s choice of commissioner or commissioners is critical. As well as people with bushfire and disaster management expertise, he must include people who understand how government works and have a sense of proportion about this particular disaster.
The danger, of course, is that any inquiry could be hijacked by climate change considerations on the back of online outrage and that’s where commonsense is critical.
The reality is that Australia is already moving massively towards renewable power and already cutting our emissions faster than most of the countries that have made a cult of climate.
Regardless of the mode of inquiry, what’s clear is that the federal government needs to step in and take charge of hazard reduction burns – at least in the sense of setting clear targets and ensuring they are met. Despite the findings of repeated inquiries and the pleas of bushfire experts, the states have shown themselves incapable of getting this done and a transparent national plan is needed to reduce fuel loads. Fire, after all, doesn’t respect state boundaries and our parks management system needs to be shaken-up.
It’s time for a standing update on target attainment on the COAG agenda and publicly available data so we can all keep them honest.
There were really only two big lessons from Victoria’s Black Saturday back in 2009: one was the need for better firefighting co-ordination and a unified chain of command – and that’s largely been learnt; the other was for better land management – and that has been almost totally ignored.
In 2020, are we prepared to learn the lessons or just make more commitments that never get kept?