The Greens' burning problem

Soon after replacing Bob Brown as leader of the Australian Greens last April, Christine Milne promised a new era of connection with rural Australians who’ve traditionally had little time for the extreme brand of environmentalism for which the Greens and their associates are best known.

For a while Milne and her party made some in-roads towards this objective via the common ground of opposition to coal seam gas developments. However, this summer’s busy fire season has arguably reinstated the Greens as enemies of the bush based on their attitudes and actions in relation to the key bushfire mitigation tool, fuel reduction burning. 

Rural disquiet about the influence of the Greens and their acolytes in the environmental movement is nothing new when damaging bushfires are being analysed and discussed. The aftermath of Victoria’s 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires featured numerous recriminations, accusations, and denials about the role of ENGOs and ‘green’ politics in making the landscape more vulnerable to such a catastrophe.

This year is beginning to look somewhat similar. The severe bushfires which careered through parts of Tasmania in mid-January have been followed by major conflagrations in NSW and Victoria that have prompted feature articles in The Australian and in local print media, as well as on current affairs and academic weblogs such as, ABC Unleashed and The Conversation,in part examining fuel reduction burning from both supportive and more cautious or opposing viewpoints. 

In Tasmania, even while the fire-ground was still smouldering at Dunalley, south east of Hobart, angry locals were claiming that heavy-handed bureacratic hurdles created by the state’s Labor-Greens Government had prevented fuel reduction burning for several years. Their message was unambiguous – that misplaced concern for the environment promoted by the Greens and their ENGO associates was overiding sensible forest management with dangerous and damaging consequences. 

Unsurprisingly, the Tasmanian Greens disagreed. Their Leader, Nick McKimm, retorted that the Greens actually support fuel reduction burning. He went on to say that “The Greens, in all the history of our political party, have never opposed a fuel reduction burn, ever”. Furthermore, they had in fact been responsible for securing an “extra $16 million more a year for National Parks funding and much of that was for fuel reduction management”

Several days later, a carefully-worded media release from Tasmania’s Greens Senator, Peter Whish-Wilson, reiterated that the Australian Greens “have always supported the principle of selective fuel reduction burns”. He went on to acknowledge that the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service was “presently under-resourced” and called for it to be given additional Federal funding for bushfire management.

However, as is somewhat typical of the Greens, there is often more to be learnt from what they don’t say. In this case, their failure to even mention fire management in the 1.5 million hectares of Tasmanian State forests was no oversight given that they are intent on substantially relieving the managing agency, Forestry Tasmania, of most of its current responsibilities. This is integral to the Greens ‘solution’ to the broader conflict over native forest timber production that would involve a huge transfer of State forest into the national parks estate.

In a recent statement to his party’s supporters, Tasmanian Greens’ leader, McKimm, asserted that “the Greens do not believe Forestry Tasmania should have a significant role to play in fighting bushfires or managing fuel loads in the future. In their place, he advocated that the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service be expanded to manage fire within an area that would be more than three times greater than what they are currently responsible for.

Forestry Tasmania is the state’s primary public land fire management agency with its forestry personnel being responsible for two-thirds of Tasmania’s public forests and acknowledged as the experts in controlled burning and forest fire-fighting. Taking away its fire management role would have disastrous consequences for the state’s overall level of bushfire protection.

Nationally, the loss of forest fire management capability is already evident where mainland state forest policies ‘reformed’ at the behest of Greens-associated ENGO campaigns, have severely weakened native timber industries with considerable rural job losses. These have included large numbers of timber harvesting contractors whose employees and equipment was formerly integral to effective bushfire management.

In Tasmania, the damage already inflicted on bushfire management capability is stark even before the Greens’ plans for Forestry Tasmania have come to pass. Incessant Greens-inspired ENGO campaigns against forest products markets, recently exacerbated by a high Australian dollar, have combined to reduce the number of timber industry contractors by an estimated 60% since 2010. This has substantially affected Forestry Tasmania which has lost a third of its field-based personnel over the past five years, including around 60% of officers qualified to participate in incident management teams. 

Given this, it is therefore highly disengenuous of the Tasmanian Greens to be publicly supportive of fuel reduction burning when their determination to significantly reduce (and to ultimately end) the state’s native timber industry and disenfranchise its regulatory agency will significantly weaken Tasmanian bushfire management.     

This tendency for the Greens to say one thing whilst they or their ENGO associates are advocating other outcomes that will have an opposite effect, largely underpins scepticism about their supposed support for managing fuel loads and reducing bushfire impacts.

The Greens’ formal policies also reflect this contradictory behaviour. Their Environmental Principle No.14 states that they “want an effective and sustainable strategy for fuel reduction management that will protect biodiversity and moderate the effects of wildfire for the protection of people and assets, developed in consultation with experts, custodians and land managers”.

While this may sound good, its achievability is highly doubtful when considered against their policies for Forests, Plantations and Wood Products, specifically No. 15, which calls for the abolition of Regional Forest Agreements; and No. 16, which calls for a “complete transition (of timber industries)from native forests to existing plantations, including retraining and other assistance for workers.....”

So, while the Greens have a policy which supports effective fuel reduction, they have other policies that show their intent to completely eliminate an activity which, by necessitating the employment of both Government and industry workforces based within forests, arguably makes the greatest contribution to ensuring that effective bushfire management strategies are achievable.

There is also a question mark over how the Greens’ fuel reduction policy should be interpreted. Just how much burning would they support and would it be sufficient for effective fuel management?

The answers lie in the actions and utterances of their associates and supporters in the ranks of the ENGOs, including some elements of academia, who overwhelmingly favour small, targetted burns either adjacent to private property or to meet narrow ecological objectives. They are either opposed to or unenthusiastic about regular fuel reduction burning more widely across the landscape despite it being acknowledged by most fire scientists and practitioners as being essential for effective bushfire mitigation.

This opposition to broadscale burning seems to be largely rooted in misplaced ecological concerns for a landscape that, apart from the wettest areas, has naturally evolved over tens of thousands of years under a regime of frequent cool fires ignited by lightning or Aboriginal activity. Prior to European settlement, such fires could have been expected to trickle around for months at a time preventing forest litter and understories from developing the unnaturally heavy fuels that are now commonplace – a difference that is reflected in the earliest descriptions of the bush by the first European settlers and explorers.

With regard to southern and eastern Australia where the fuel reduction debate is concentrated, it also seems that those opposed to broadscale fuel reduction (including some conservation biologists) harbor unrealistic expectations about the extent and frequency of burning programs which far exceed what land management agencies would consider both desirable and logistically achievable. There can be no other explanation for why those purportedly concerned about the environment would otherwise be opposing an approach that aims to broadly reduce unnatural fuel build-up which will otherwise drive hotter and infinitely more damaging bushfires.

Much of the concern regarding fuel reduction burning also seems to be underpinned by an inability to discern differences in the environmental impacts of controlled cool fires burning slowly in autumn versus those from uncontrolled mid-summer bushfires burning intensely under hot and windy conditions. This misconception is evident in skewed views such as those recently expressed by a Tasmanian environmentalist who described broadscale fuel reduction burning as ‘a 1940s solution’ that ‘would be catastrophic in itself’ because ‘destroying habitat is not the answer’.

Similar sentiments have also been expressed by ENGOs during public debate over the prospect of increasing annual fuel reduction burning rates in Victoria’s public forests. For example, the Victorian National Parks Association articulated its opposition to broadscale fuel reduction in 2007 by warning that “If current strategic fuel reduction burning is increased to broad-scale burning, there will be concomitant losses in biodiversity and environmental services, such as water quality. In the medium term, some of the forests will be made more flammable by repeated burning.”

Similar over-the-top concerns about the practice were recently implied in comments made by the Victorian ENGO, Environment East Gippsland, which referred to fuel reduced forests as ‘fried forests’. 

More recently, some critics of broadscale fuel reduction burning have tried to dismiss its worth by pointing to continuing housing and property losses during severe bushfires. This is somewhat of a ‘straw man’ argument because those who have pioneered, practiced, studied and refined fuel reduction burning have never claimed that it prevents damaging bushfires, only that it if sufficient fuel reduction is done it reduces their impacts.

This view is backed by a wealth of practical experience and observation, as well as more recent retrospective modelling of past bushfire events under various hypothetical fuel conditions. It is also a concept which is readily appreciated by rural Australians who would overwhelmingly prefer to live near fuel-reduced local forests rather than areas that haven’t burnt for decades.

Unfortunately for the Australian Greens, their motivations, intentions, and attitudes will always be judged primarily on the basis of the highly visible campaigning of their ENGO associates pursuing environmental ideologies, or on the real socio-economic impacts of environmental policies that have already been introduced at their behest. 

Accordingly, it is not hard for rural Australians to see through disenguous Greens’ claims that they support better bushfire outcomes while their ENGO associates are busily trying to discredit fuel reduction burning.  Furthermore, rural communities living with the social damage wrought by Greens-inspired ENGO campaigns against natural resource uses, are all-too-aware of how this directly and indirectly impacts on the capability to tackle bushfires. Quite simply, without rural employment it’s pretty hard to find volunteers to man local fire tankers.