It’s exhausting. My eyes are red and sore by the end of the day. I’ve gone through a lot of Visine over the last couple of weeks.
Many of my neighbours have left, packed bags and headed for refuge with friends and family. We have dispatched suitcases filled with clothes and important documents —prescriptions for medications, passports, birth certificates, insurance policies that sit safely packed away in a relative’s garage. There are other bags containing computers and few personal effects of sentimental value gathered and ready to go.
It’s surprising how little you think you will need with the prospect of losing everything. I suspect it is a case of wisdom being delivered in hindsight. Before Christmas when the Green Valley Creek Fire ripped through Balmoral, Bargo and Buxton, I packed a bag of clothes forgetting to pack any shirts. Not a tee, not a polo, not a collar or cuff. Pants, sure. No shirts. This time, I packed a few shirts. God only knows what I have forgotten this time. Underpants, socks. It could be anything.
That said, I am a notoriously bad packer. Years ago, I headed off to the US having neglected to pack trousers. I learned to live with it. If it was good enough for Malcolm Fraser, it was good enough for me.
For the past week, I’ve been on ember watch, walking around the property, hoses at the ready, eyes skyward searching for tiny glows. Scorched leaves have fallen from the sky, dead before they hit the ground. I wet the place down. The lawns, the gardens. I stuck rags in the downpipes around the house and each morning fill them with water.
After that, I assume a vigil listening to RFS radio on a scanner app, listening to where new fire fronts are reported. Some are surveyed by air, others from the ground and quick risk assessments are made. In deep bush, they are often left to burn. Where they threaten property, homes and lives, the RFS throw all available resources at it.
I know I’d have to be unlucky to lose this place. In bookmaker’s terms it’d be long odds, probably triple figures but the creeping smoke with its pungent charred timber scent, like an aromatherapist had set about lighting incense only to set fire to the coffee table, combined with the regular blast of sirens, keeps everyone on their toes.
At the rear of my property is bushland. It is council owned, crown land under long term lease to the local golf course. If it goes up, I’ll be out the door, tyres screeching, hoping that I did really pack underwear. In that parcel of land, no more than three acres, lies a microcosm of the debate we’re having nationally about land clearing and hazard reduction.
Where it edges up to my property, I’ve taken care of it, even though I doubt I am responsible for clearing it. It’s not my land. But I’ll keep hacking away at the grasses that are now overgrown and bleached yellow with a brush cutter and rake off what I can.
Whose job is it? Well, I think the buck stops with the local council but in the way of things throughout the country, where murky lines of responsibility exist, inaction rules.
In other words, Hanlon’s Razor generally applies. Stupidity beats malice almost every time.
While there are environmental groups who campaign to restrict hazard reduction burns, in terms of political representation, there are 1273 councillors in New South Wales. Only 58 of them are Greens. There are no Greens on my local council and not one in the state government. In the Shire of Wingecaribbee, it’s a raft of independents, many National Party aligned, pock-marked with the odd property developer. It is hardly Leichhardt at 600 metres above sea level.
While I can’t speak for the rest of the country, I decided to go to the source, the local RFS, who tell me the real difficulty in hazard reduction burns is the country is so dry. Two consecutive winters with rainfall well below average make hazard reductions well, hazardous.
There was a furore in April 2018 when NSW Fire & Rescue performed a controlled burn in Hornsby which threatened homes as far south as Curl Curl and blanketed Sydney in smoke haze. Do people not remember this?
People are angry, some are bereft, others, if not frightened, are deeply anxious as another horror day looms. It is understandable that blame is being heaved all over the place.
Much of it is misplaced but there is at least one figure at state government level in New South Wales who should expect to pay a heavy price not for the fires but for an abject failure to meet any reasonable standards of public service in the face of them.
NSW Emergency Services Minister David Elliott flew out of the state when it was burning. He remained absent during the devastation in the state’s south coast on Wednesday. If reports are accurate, he will return to Sydney today, having cut his holiday short.
That he opted to jet off on a European holiday is an astonishing abrogation of his duties at a critical time for the state. If an Emergency Services Minister absents himself during a time of emergency, there seems little point in having one.
It has been reported Premier Berejiklian urged all her ministers to remain if not in Sydney than at least within the state over the holiday period. Obviously not everyone was listening. Her deputy, National Party leader, John Barilaro flew off to the Old Dart.
Before we start the tedious what-aboutery, there are no parallels with the Prime Minister, state premiers in Queensland or Victoria or the Deputy Premier in New South Wales taking their holidays. As Police and Emergency Services Minister, Elliott is an intrinsic part of the command structure and performs a specific liaison between government and emergency service operations. He is also responsible for overseeing resource allocation and relevant spending and budgeting issues as they arise in times of emergency.
For Elliott, there cannot be any coming back from it politically. How can he now he seamlessly appear up the back doing noddies while the RFS Commissioner provides a televised briefing to the people of New South Wales? How can he now in good faith be part of central command going forward? How can he now tour places like Batemans Bay or Cobargo or Bermagui or Lake Conjola and console people who have lost everything? What’s he going to do, hand out souvenirs from Paris?
It’s a hopeless situation. Elliott should resign the moment his plane hits the tarmac at Sydney Airport and if he doesn’t, he should be sacked. And if either of those things doesn’t happen, we can only conclude that Premier Berejiklian’s grasp on power is a lot shakier than even her political foes could have imagined.
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