While travelling around Australia, I have kept a close eye on land management issues and have seen many examples of mismanagement and poor practices. Through my land management experience, I have noticed how fire management is being grossly neglected in our landscape. That is why we see enormous wildfires towards the end of drought periods when the landscape is parched and ready to explode.
When you combine politics with land use, you get bad outcomes. I have seen this in forests during my professional career as a forester. Moreover, the problems seem to amplify when governments throw taxpayer funds at academics with limited field experience.
Instead of solutions and appropriate management practices, we get incompetence and junk science promoted through cosy and inappropriate relationships between researchers and certain sections of the media. Accountability is zero, allowing poor practices and outcomes to continue unabated, all at a considerable cost.
Standard practices which were effective and successful in the past, such as fuel management across the landscape, rapid attack once fires start, and regular surveillance during the fire season, have been dismantled and thrown out the door.
We now have an emergency response system that only mobilises once large fires are out of control. People with little operational fire experience are in charge, and they rely on large, showy and expensive aeroplanes that are ineffective in putting out massive fires.
During these disasters, governments say the correct platitudes and offer hollow promises because they are seen to be doing something.
Never mind they did nothing outside the fire season to minimise the damage of these fires in the first place.
For the last 25 years, millions of dollars of public funds have been thrown at the massive emergency departments and research centres. Yet, no cost-benefit analysis exists to demonstrate that this is an effective way to spend taxpayers’ funds. We still get large and destructive fires that are conveniently blamed on climate change.
After the recent 2019-20 wildfires, commentators claimed that if Australia stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, the problem of large destructive fires would go away. If you believe that, then you believe in tooth fairies.
The fires we have experienced in eastern Australia in the last 25 years are not unprecedented. Unfortunately, we have had them in the past. Early foresters were not trained to understand Australian ecology. They made mistakes, and foresters had to change how they managed the forest. They learnt their lessons and gradually developed a sophisticated fire management system, the envy of the rest of the world.
And after each bad fire event, we had enquiries, 46 in fact. At each one, the answer and recommendations were the same in support of the forester’s pragmatic practices.
We need a sophisticated fire management system that operates outside the fire season to manage fuel loads across the landscape, not just in tiny strips adjoining houses. We also need to prepare sufficiently for each fire season with a highly trained workforce supported by maintained access tracks, on-ground machinery, and flexible work practices to take advantage of favourable conditions at night.
And we need to be able to give the volunteers a break and not rely on them exclusively to put their lives at risk standing in front of a crowning fire to try and save a house from burning down.
But it is so easy to ignore history and previous tragedies. Unfortunately, time has a habit of doing that.
Foresters saw their successful fire management practices come under threat during the 1980s through the public’s relentless environmental demands on politicians. The first signs of a fire problem came with the destructive 1994 Sydney fires.
But the public and the government ignored the forester’s pleas to maintain professional management of our forests.
By the mid-1990s, NSW and Victoria had transferred millions of hectares of working state forests into national parks under a new regime of benign neglect. An imaginary fence was built, and the locked gates’ keys were thrown away. Fire trails were deliberately closed or not maintained. Cool burning was dramatically reduced, and fuel levels were allowed to build up over a very significant part of the landscape.
Then came the late 1990s and early noughties. The Victorian and NSW high country areas were the first landscapes to experience the predictable effects of the new and ineffective paradigm shift.
Small fires that started during dry lightning storms in summer were allowed to fester uncontained for a few weeks in mild conditions until the inevitable severe fire weather fanned the fires. Then, they exploded across the landscape. Within a few short hours, there was mayhem. Australia’s capital city was overwhelmed, and a suburb was destroyed.
It should not have happened, but it did. People and governments should have been held accountable, but they weren’t.
And the same scenario was repeated in Eastern Australia over the ensuing years – 2006-07, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019-20. And if we sit back and let the politicians, bureaucrats and academics continue doing what they do poorly, big preventable fires will continue to happen without any changes.
Everyone is affected. Just because you don’t live in a fire-prone area doesn’t mean you will escape financial harm. Insurances across the board have increased after each fire disaster, no matter where you live.
I wonder how many more of these fire events I need to cover before state politicians accept the need for change. They need to listen and act on the advice of professional land managers, not carpet baggers using taxpayer funds for zero effect.
The big question they need to answer is why do they have policies that continue to support large wildfires? We need to demand they stand up and be held accountable to their constituents instead of trying to divert the blame onto the federal government and climate change. The excuses to hide their incompetence must stop.
Mega fires over thousands and thousands of hectares can be prevented and kept to much smaller outbreaks during severe fire weather conditions in summer if the landscape is appropriately managed.
Robert Onfray has worked as a professional forester in various parts of eastern Australia over 33 years. He was fortunate to spend 14 years in north-west Tasmania managing freehold land, now owned by Forico.
