INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
In 1904, Dorothea Mackellar wrote:
“I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.”
While Australia’s landscape, flora and fauna is the envy of the world, its tragic pitfall is its inescapable frequency of extreme weather events and climate.
We are a country of cyclones, floods, droughts and fires.
In fact, as many of us know, fire is a necessary component of regrowth in much of our native fauna.
Exploring Australia’s east coast in 1770, Captain James Cook described the land as “a continent of smoke” and said “we saw smoke by day or fires by night wherever we came”.
Unfortunately, today’s polarised political climate accompanied by a somewhat sensationalist media, Australians are being told today that this bushfire season is “unprecedented”.
Anyone with knowledge of Australia’s history and climate is fully aware of the unfortunate familiarity of these tragic fires. In fact, my grandfather was burnt to death trying to save his Darlington farm in 1944.
There was a time when Victoria understood how to manage and utilise the land and its forests;
When Indigenous people burnt vegetation to encourage regrowth and manage country;
When stock owners grazed ‘the long paddock’ on our roadsides;
When mountain cattlemen helped manage the high country;
When forests were readily accessible to bush users, recreational groups, wood collectors and loggers;
When our power infrastructure had not passed its expiration date to become a fire hazard;
And when rural Victorians were allowed to use common sense to manage the land we live on, rather than being regulated by inside the tram-tracks politicians and bureaucrats from Melbourne.
The message should be clear – fires have been and always will be a permanent part of Australia’s climate. While we can’t totally prevent them, we must introduce strategies to mitigate fire risk.
The title of this meeting is ‘Fire – Lessons Learnt’, but it is quite clear lessons have not been learnt.
Since 1927, there have been 105 inquiries into bushfires and land management.
Ninety in the last 30 years.
There have been Royal Commissions, parliamentary inquiries, state and federal parliamentary committees, Boards of Inquiry, Review Committees, Standing Committees, Coroner’s reports, Council of Australian Governments National Inquiry, Office of the Emergency Services Commissioner reports, Departmental reports and inquiries, Departmental inquiries, CFA reports, Ministerial taskforces, and numerous Auditor General Reports (on Fire Prevention and Preparedness).
… and David Packham has probably given evidence to most of them.
The 2009 Royal Commission alone held 26 community consultations, received 1700 submissions, filed 17,000 documents, heard from 434 individual witnesses, generated over 20,000 pages of transcript, produced 53 internal research papers, two interim reports, and a final report of well over 1000 pages.
Today we’re in the Terang Civic Hall – one of the relief centres for the St Patrick’s Day Fires in 2018.
We will hear how electrical elements and roadside vegetation caused destruction on a significant scale.
Today, we welcome experts in their field to prosecute the case of how we can and must do better to keep Victorians safe, animals alive, and productive assets retained.
24 January 2020