Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

A conference on bushfire management reform held at Creswick on October 10 served to highlight some of the complexities in fire management, and to underline the difference between Government policy and the views of conservationists.

The difference centres around whether a risk management strategy is compatible with having a fixed target for burning public land.

The conservationist [and scientific] view is: first you do an assessment of the bushfire risk, then you respond to that risk in appropriate ways: that is, by educating people about the dangers, controlling development in dangerous areas, building rapid attack firefighting capacity, developing a refuge strategy, and carefully calculating fuel reduction programs.

Muckleford Demo track, November 2011: even if risk analysis showed that the burning program wasn’t making us safer, the Government would still be committed to it.

There’s debate about how effective the Government’s effort has been on the first four of these approaches; but on fuel reduction the situation is stark.

The Government view is that you decide in advance how much land you burn, then you work on the risks: you try to burn smarter, and you do a lot of monitoring, but none of this influences the amount of burning you do.

In other words, even if the risk analysis and the monitoring program demonstrate conclusively that the burning program is not making people safer, but is doing a lot of environmental damage, you keep on with it.

A fixed burning target is clearly not compatible with serious risk management: this point has been made clear by the Royal Commission Implementation Monitor and many others. The government, however, is sticking grimly to the policy. The Labor Party appears to be doing the same, perhaps not grimly, but gormlessly.

The above depressing theme tended to overshadow an otherwise informative conference. DEPI went to a lot of trouble to assemble numerous experts to explain and explore ideas on risk modelling, ecological monitoring, and ecological resilience.

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The Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Bushfire Response, Kim Wells, has today issued a press release on the State Government’s achievements in planned burning. The release is mainly concerned with publicising increased cooperation between DEPI and the CFA; it includes an obligatory electioneering flavour in the form of comparisons between the CFA budget under Labor and the budget under the Coalition—naturally in the latter’s favour.

All of this can be taken on its merits. What is of interest to us, however, is the tremendous satisfaction the Minister expresses in the burning program: “The Coalition Government’s planned burning achievements last year reached a 30 year high and over four years has carried out planned burns more than 700,000 hectares of public land.’

Although this sentence is spectacularly ungrammatical, we get the gist: area burned is what the Government is proud of.

Representatives of FOBIF and numerous other enviro groups are gearing up to attend a DEPI ‘Strategic Bushfire Management Reform & Environment Workshop’ in Creswick on October 10. The agenda for this workshop includes sessions on planning, risk management and ecological monitoring.

At the moment, all of these worthy activities are subject the five per cent target promoted in the press release. This policy effectively decrees that no matter what your research finds, you’ll still burn the same area of land around the state. Until the Government [and the Opposition] get off this runaway horse, all the research and monitoring in the world will end up where it has often gone in the past: into a dusty cupboard, never to be seen again.

We’ve written the letter below to the Minister asking for him clarify how the target sits with risk management. Our letter was forwarded to the Environment Minister, suggesting that the two ministers aren’t actually coordinating their activities. We’ll publish the reply when it comes:

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