Agile federalism necessary to mitigate bushfire risks

The bushfire crisis is setting in train a potentially significant rebalancing of our federation. The interstate scale of the fires and the international climate change issue have made people look to the federal government for stronger leadership. Scott Morrison has already begun to respond and the initiatives are quickly multiplying: the call-out of ADF reserves; a national bushfire recovery agency; talk of explicit legal backing for a more proactive military role in natural disasters; and a foreshadowed federal-state royal commission into the bushfires. It’s good sense to review how well our federal system is set up to make the most of opportunities within our control for preventing and adapting to bushfires, drought, floods and cyclones.

In reacting to a crisis, especially after public anger, there is a risk of overreach and unintended consequences. It’s conceivable a royal commission may recommend a new federal agency as custodian of a national bushfire policy. This may be justified, but it’s also a politically attractive headline that reassures voters something is being done. In some areas it will be the unglamorous job of doing less — eliminating counter-productive or conflicting bureaucratic rules — that leads to effective bushfire prevention.

In the same way, a better federalist framework for contending with natural disasters is unlikely to be a simple question of more responsibility in Canberra and less in state capitals. True, there is probably scope for more commonwealth co-ordination and more activity based on its unique expertise and resources such as the ADF, but the trick is enabling this while reinforcing the checks and incentives that improve the effectiveness of the states and regions as the frontline in disaster preparation. The prime responsibility of the states is not just a constitutional nicety; they run the firefighting and land management agencies closest to the conditions on the ground, which vary considerably across the nation. It would be a policy disaster if new federal arrangements created only more scope for sly competition to shift blame and costs between levels of government.

On Monday’s Commentary page Henry Ergas made a strong case for an overhaul of national disaster funding arrangements to change the dysfunctional pattern whereby too little is spent on mitigating disaster risk, resulting in massive bills for recovery and reconstruction. Sound familiar? Ergas points out the states have most of the levers to reduce risk but not the right incentives. The commonwealth has the power of the purse strings but has not applied financial penalties to states that fail to do the hard work of disaster prevention, such as Queensland, which for years skimped on flood mitigation.

Victoria’s record on prescribed burning is another case in point. It may be that after the 2009 Black Saturday fires, the royal commission’s idea of a statewide cool-burning quota was too blunt an instrument. Since 2015 the Andrews government mantra has been to burn smarter, targeting risky areas. Sounds good, but the reality is that prescribed burning faces political and bureaucratic pushback, not just difficult weather conditions. And the shift away from a quota makes the burning regime opaque and unaccountable; the government also has refused to release comprehensive fuel load maps. In February last year Victoria’s former chief fire officer Ewan Waller warned that fuel loads were back up and more burning was needed; he had no quarrel with a targeted approach. Whether the state government failed to learn the lessons of past catastrophes will be one of many questions to answer once the 2018-19 bushfire season is over.