When will governments be held accountable for the increasing number of large and destructive bushfires?

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.