Bushfires: arsonist study key to snuffing out hostile acts

More than 10 per cent of bushfires in Australia have been deliberately lit by arsonists, according to conservative estimates.

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Significant research needs to be conducted into the mindset of ­arsonists to gain a greater understanding of the condition and help prevent the devastating contribution they have made to the bushfire crisis, a psychologist says.

Swinburne University associate professor Troy McEwan said governments had failed to provide sufficient funding for research into bushfire arsonists, despite a recommendation by the Black Saturday royal commission that suggested it should be a priority.

“There’s relatively little research into the efficacy of fire setters,” she said. “Preventive measures are something that needs to be explored, but we do need to give weight to identifying and catching (arsonists).”

The royal commission report found four Black Saturday in Victoria in February 2009 were “suspicious”, and former volunteer firefighter Brendan Sokaluk is serving 14 years in jail for lighting the Churchill fire on February 7, 2009, that killed 10 people.

Professor McEwan, who has been studying arson as part of her 12-year forensic psychologist ­career, said more than 10 per cent of bushfires in Australia had been lit by arsonists, according to conservative estimates, but the real number was probably ­higher.

She pointed to research by the Australian Institute of Criminology — using data from fire agencies between 1995 and 2006 — that found at least 13 per cent of bushfires were deliberately lit and another 37 per cent had “suspicious origin”.

“The vast majority of fires that are deliberately set, we don’t know who set them. If we can’t do ­research with those people, we can’t learn more about them,” she said.

Professor McEwan said Australia should follow the lead of Britain in assessing people ­arrested for arson to better understand why they did it. “There is a pattern where we have big bushfires, there’s a lot of interest and it goes away. That’s not sustainable from a research point of view.”

Melbourne University’s Janet Stanley said there was considerable difficulty in comparing data between the states and territories in terms of convictions, charges and which fires were deliberately lit — and many arson attacks simply went uninvestigated.

“The problem is there’s about five times more fires than are ­officially recorded and about 40 per cent of recorded fires aren’t investigated,” said Associate Professor Stanley, who has been ­researching human involvement in bushfires for 20 years. “Different data sets are talking about different things, It’s an area we’ve really got to get a lot better at getting this data.”

In NSW, 74 people were ­arrested for deliberately lighting bushfires in the past 12 months. Of 21 convicted of crimes relating to setting bushfires, three were sentenced to prison and the rest given community service ­orders or fined.

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research data showed police recorded 1176 incidents of bushfire arson from October 2018 to September 2019, down on the previous year’s 1537 incidents.

Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency data recorded 16 people charged for deliberately lighting bushfires last year.

Since September 1, South Australia Police reports 10 arrests for intentionally lighting bushfires. Tasmania authorities had five instances of people unlawfully setting fire to vegetation since last January; in the ACT, two were charged for deliberately lighting bushfires. As of last Friday, 109 people had been dealt with by Queensland police for recklessly and deliberately setting fires.