Political foes line up over need for another bushfires inquiry

How to pay for climate adaptation will be a key goal of any royal commission.

Josh Frydenberg, Scott Morrison and David Littleproud discuss recovery efforts this week. Picture: AAP

Never hold an inquiry unless you know what the outcome will be.

The providence of this warty little nugget of political advice is uncertain. Some cite the Sir Humphrey Appleby character in Yes Minister. Others credit the colourful Queensland minister Russ Hinze in the context of the seminal Fitzgerald inquiry, which exposed widespread political and police corruption and changed the Sunshine State forever.

But chances are this undisputed tenet of political expediency has been uttered more than once among members of the Morrison government as it grapples with finding the right policy response to the devastating bushfires that have swept Australia in recent months.

The most cynical view of royal commissions is that they are expensive lawyers’ picnics and prone to producing too many recommendations that never get implemented. The royal commission into the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, for example, cost $40m. The Victorian government found reasons to drop one of its key recommendations on hazard reduction burning just three years after the inquiry.

For all that, Scott Morrison seems keen on the idea that a royal commission, with letters patent and all the other attendant hoopla, is the way to go to discover how Australia can learn from the events of the past few months. He is set to bring the proposal to cabinet, then present it to premiers for endorsement at the upcoming Council of Australian Governments meeting .

But there lies the first hurdle. Despite the white-hot media spotlight on the federal government’s response to these bushfires, it is the states that have primary responsibility for the factors that influence how the nation copes with such disasters. The Federation of Australia properly grants the states responsibility over land management, obviously the principal means of reforming how the nation responds to the threat of bushfires.

So any inquiry into how we deal with bushfires — before, during and after the event — will need to rely on the open and honest co-operation of the states.

Morrison does not have that. Indeed, there are forces at work actively trying to ensure he never has it in relation to this disaster.

While some state firefighter unions are all for a royal commission, the national secretary of the United Firefighters Union of Australia, Peter Marshall, has been vocal in his opposition. His message to Canberra is to work with the evidence already on the table.

Marshall says there have been at least 15 bushfire-related inquiries in the past 20 years.

“In many cases, the recommendations of these expensive, time-consuming and comprehensive reviews remain yet to be implemented,” he says.

Victoria has already announced its own inquiry into the bushfires. In Queensland, the Inspector-General of Emergency Management will conduct an inquiry into that state’s fires as a matter of course.

So what will be the benefit of a federally focused royal commission? The Prime Minister has been at pains this week to say the federal government has already sprung into action to prevent a repeat of this bushfire season.

“So whether it’s hazard reduction, whether it’s building dams, whether it is taking better lessons from indigenous burning practices, all of these things actually now should be understood as they always should have been, as being a necessary response to the changing climate in which we are living and the adaptation measures (are) also a part of that important response,” he says.

“So all of these things are important and that’s why the government is doing all these things but, I would stress, particularly the ones I have just been referring to are going to have the most pronounced effect on ensuring that Australians are safer in the future in dealing with the changing climate that we have.”

He was speaking like someone who had a fair few answers about what should happen, which again raises the question of why a royal commission is needed.

One who is unconvinced a royal commission is necessary is Kevin Tolhurst, an associate professor of fire ecology and management at the University of Melbourne.

Tolhurst points out the primary reason to lift the examination of the response to this disaster beyond the normal government inquiry and into the realm of a royal commission is the need to explore evidence that might otherwise not be available.

“Some of the recommendations of the Stretton royal commission following the Black Friday fires of 1939 have still not been fully implemented,” he says in an article for The Conversation.

“Many of the recommendations of the subsequent 56 inquiries (into bushfire disasters) have not been fully implemented either, so it raises serious questions about whether another royal commission will offer anything new or compelling.”

Beautifully written and amounting to just 39 pages, the report of commissioner Leonard Edward Bishop Stretton into the fires that killed 71 people is a lesson in common sense.

“As fire is one of the necessary concomitants of living, it is suggested that it is impossible to prevent the outbreak of bushfires as long as mankind pursues his manifold interests in the bush,” the man known as the “judicial bard” wrote.

“To forbid the forests to all men would be absurd, unjust and impossible of enforcement. That such measures as were being used to prevent the outbreak of bushfires were shown in January 1939 to have failed, is insufficient of itself to lay blame upon anybody whose duty it was to devise and operate those measures. The season was exceptional. There were no means of policing a policy of prevention. Lack of men, of money and of education constituted a dead weight against which the available puny forces of prevention were powerless.”

Among his recommendations was this: “A committee of experts chosen from the several public departments would do much by their advice to reconcile the conflicting claims and duties of various departments at present interested in forest lands.

“Such a body might awaken the several departments to the necessity and assist them in projects, for example, of adjustment of forest boundaries, the encouragement, curtailment or prevention of forest settlement by isolated settlers or by forest townships, incursions upon or excisions from or additions to water catchment areas, and the Forests Commission’s areas, loss to property caused by erosion which results from bushfires, and the like.”

In other words, make sure you use the knowledge already available to you. Could this work on a national scale?

Indeed, the most recent bushfire royal commission, headed by retired judge Bernard Teague following the Black Saturday disaster in 2009, led to the creation of a national approach to bushfire management.

The National Bushfire Management Policy Statement for Forests and Rangelands was produced in 2014 and endorsed by all Australian governments, state and federal.

“Sustainable long-term solutions are needed to address the causes of increased bushfire risk. Greater investment in prevention and preparedness is essential,” it says. “This policy statement and supporting strategies have been developed by all Australian governments to guide the evolution of effective and ecologically sustainable fire regimes … It builds on experience gained across Australia and assists in developing a more co-ordinated approach.”

So what has changed in seven years? Perhaps the political will to address those “long-term solutions” the 2014 national policy statement was banging on about.

What sort of policy does the Prime Minister want to see come out of this disaster?

“I would want to have a level of comfort, and I think all Australians do, that across the country we can have confidence about our level of resilience and that means initiatives by states and the commonwealth,” Morrison says.

“We need to have a good stocktake of that and I think that’s what Australians would want to know coming out of this bushfire season, ultimately, that the resilience efforts being made at all levels are meeting the need.

“I think that’s a very reasonable question to ask and I have no doubt the states will be very co- operative and us all working together … That has always been where I’ve been seeking to go.”

Morrison sees a royal commission addressing three areas: the effectiveness of the preparation for, response to and recovery from the bushfires and how the interaction between the federal and state governments can best contribute to improving that effectiveness; the influence that a climate producing “hotter, dryer and longer” bushfire seasons has on the nation’s resilience; and last, the adaptation strategy that is needed to boost that resilience, not only to bushfires but to floods as well.

“It applies to cyclones and other forms of natural disasters and the national disaster risk framework which we initiated in the last budget and was considered and agreed at a top level by ministers in June of this year, and more details of that are now being worked out through the local governments,” Morrison says.

It’s an ambitious expectation likely to produce some difficult challenges, not least on the question of how to pay for climate adaptation, a policy area neglected during the unending political wars over what to do about climate change mitigation.

And that, really, is what has changed since the last of the 57 inquiries into what to do to manage bushfire risk in Australia. The sheer financial cost of better protecting Australians from the worst ravages of climate change has yet to be addressed.

Royal commission or no, count on this being close to cabinet’s thinking about how Australia moves on from this terrible summer. That is an outcome nobody knows.