Bush fires: who will burn this year?

Fire Management has four facets and only one of them is fire fighting:

• prevention;
• preparedness (to respond);
• response (firefighting); and,
• recovery (after fires for people, assets and landscapes).

Prevention is considered by many to be far more worthy of significant investment and fundamental consideration than the dramatically obvious firefighting. Firefighting is obviously necessary, essential and highly visible. It is relatively easy to obtain support for it from civil society, politicians and agencies. Prevention, which is on the whole, dull, boring, repetitive, irritates many of the interest groups, makes the washing smell of smoke and is not very photogenic, suffers from murky understanding and a mainly negative public profile.

Prescribed burning, buffer zones, development regulations and building standards are all, by degrees, contentious and poorly appreciated. The key underlying issue seems to be one of prevention “housekeeping” and the conditions essential to its effective implementation. What do we want? Who is responsible to do it? When will they do it? How will the vision of it be formed and the pressures upon it be resolved (not ignored)?

The underlying causes of bush fires would seem to include the apparent reluctance or inability for politicians, agencies, interest groups and the civil society, to develop a clear set of information upon which to develop objectives, and to work consistently on solutions of varying scales and timeframes.

My fellow Australians, that scenario begins to look a lot like the one leading to the fire problems experienced in South-East Asia.