Christopher Pearson | February 14, 2009

Garden waste should generally end up on autumn and winter bonfires rather than be turned into mulch. A three-bedroom house needs tanks capable of holding a couple of thousand gallons of water and petrol-driven pumps to draw on them if the power is cut off. For older people, a sprinkler system on the roof is a fairly foolproof way of protecting it, extinguishing airborne embers and wetting verges.

How many of the long-term residents of the Victorian countryside devastated by last Saturday's fires took ordinary precautions is not known. Nor is it yet known what steps the various shire councils took to offer timely advice about bushfires to newly arrived tree-changers. There's also a sense in which all this hardly matters. Because what's clear is that, even if all the normal precautions had been observed, it might not have been enough to save many of the lives lost and the buildings burned down. Some of these were not normal fires but firestorms.

Philip Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit, says that if Kinglake and Marysville had had the benefit of prescribed burning to reduce the risk of fire, the fires would have been much less intense. He estimates that in both districts there were between 35 and 50 tonnes of dry fuel per hectare, although even eight tonnes per hectare is usually considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard submissions that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a thirteenfold increase in the heat generated by a fire. Intense heat, driven by high winds and vapourising eucalypts and pines in its path into volatile gases, creates firestorms.

It's obvious state and local government deserve most of the blame. The benefits of prescribed burning to lower fuel loads have been generally acknowledged for at least 40 years. The Bracks and Brumby governments stand accused of insufficient action to reduce fuel loads, especially on crown land and wildlife reserves, and not maintaining permanent firebreaks. They compromised public safety in the hope of ingratiating the Green vote.

Similarly, state and local planning authorities have long been aware of the dangers of building houses on top of hills with north-facing slopes prone to bushfire, but have done too little to discourage the practice. Shire councils have neglected fuel overloads on their own lands and encouraged dangerous tree-planting on house blocks, sometimes hounding through the courts prudent people who cleared more than a bare minimum of trees close to a dwelling.

Arson aside, the most perverse element in the situation is that state and local authorities seem to have been hell-bent on forgetting the lessons from previous disasters.

All these problems have been identified before, and the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 ought to have made last Saturday unthinkable. Instead, they remind us that corporate memory in the relevant departments doesn't even extend as far back as 25 years. By way of excuse, politicians and bureaucrats tend to invoke two new stalking horses said to make Saturday's events unique: more frequent extreme weather conditions and human-induced global warming. Conveniently, neither has yet been empirically verified. We can only hope the forthcoming royal commission finds that nothing of any consequence by way of extenuation can be said about their notional contribution to the latest bushfires.

We can, however, confidently say that along with Ash Wednesday, there have been two other directly comparable precedents in living memory on Black Tuesday, 1967, and Black Friday, 1939. There's also evidence that in southeastern Australia in the pre-contact era, on Kangaroo Island, which hadn't been inhabited by Aboriginal people for a few thousand years or burned off regularly, catastrophic firestorms were fairly regular events. They serve to remind us that there is nothing terribly mysterious about the combination of tinder-dry conditions, high fuel loads, very hot weather and high winds.

Perhaps, rather than trying half-heartedly to regulate the living arrangements of tree-changers and greenies who are determined to live surrounded by forest landscapes, society should think about striking a libertarian bargain with them. State and local government could allow enclaves of them to build and plant pretty much as they choose on their own land, on the strict understanding that they are all prepared to live with the foreseeable consequences and don't expect the same level of emergency services as people in the suburbs, let alone automatic rebuilding at public expense of local infrastructure in the event of fire.

At least it would be more honest and less infantilising than the present arrangements.

Thinking of Ash Wednesday 1983, I am struck by a significant and - to my mind, at least - unwelcome change in what might for convenience sake be called the national character. Back in those days, the people facing the fires and even quite a lot of those reporting the story were more matter-of-fact about coping with disaster. In both men and women, especially among country people, there was a kind of stoicism and stiff upper lip, which was reminiscent of the tone you often find in soldiers' war diaries. People in the frontline emergency services still seem a fairly stoic and laconic bunch, but it's far less evident in the public culture.

Television is at the heart of the problem and I suspect that the rot set in during the mass hysteria following the death of princess Diana. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people who had no idea of what she was like as a person, and were wilfully blind to the flaws in her character, were persuaded that they had lost someone they loved. The public outpourings of grief were not just unseemly and out of all proportion but downright orgiastic. And it was mostly about display: showing how keenly you felt an imaginary loss, conspicuous compassion for the commoner-turned-queen of hearts who throughout a turbulent life had done it her way. Ever since, throughout the Anglosphere, we have become a more maudlin lot, more given to tears, group-hugs and letting it all hang out.

It is much easier to make allowances for this sort of behaviour from the victims of natural disasters than from the media interviewing them, let alone politicians trying to milk the situation for all its worth. There was a lot of emotive gushing in federal parliament last week, but for my money the worst single performance came from the Liberals' Russell Broadbent, who described how he and wife Bronwyn had prepared to defend their Pakenham house. The fire shifted and the house was safe. Broadbent said in parliament: "To those that pray, I say pray now; don't leave it till next Sunday. All we can rely on is each other, and sadly, as the Prime Minister has described today, there are so many that cannot even do that."

Although a few of his colleagues maintained impassive, fixed facial expressions and cringed internally, most members on both sides of the chamber clapped approvingly when he finally sat down.

Wilson Tuckey, who is made of sterner stuff, issued a memorable press release. "I apologise to the people of Australia and particularly to those who have been directly affected by the Victorian wildfires, for my tolerance of the public policy that failed to maintain our forest estate as a safe environment. I didn't adequately prosecute the slogan: No Fuel, No Fire! My fault over the last five years is to fail to influence the Australian political establishment that certain public policy, driven by the pursuit of minor party preferences, was a recipe for disaster of the greatest possible magnitude for humanity and the forest itself.

"Worse, as the evidence I provided parliament on November 27, 2003 in the enclosed tabling speech ... demonstrates, I knew better."

OPINION : INFERNO STOKED BY GREEN VOTE

Greenies' global warming fire claims just despicable

Just hours after the first bodies were being recovered, Greens leader Bob Brown was already on television, lecturing us on our sins against the planet.

Rather than confess that green activists had been desperately wrong to oppose fuel reduction burns, Senator Brown was eager to boast that this catastrophe had instead proved them right. About global warming, you know.

"(The fires) are a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority the need to tackle climate change."

Well, actually, Bob, the fires were a sobering reminder of the need to help the victims first, and to fireproof our houses and towns after that. But Senator Brown was soon to be trumped by far louder crows.

Freya Matthews, a La Trobe University "ecological philosopher", wrote in The Age that there was no doubt these fires were caused by our gases: "This is climate change."

ABC presenters religiously took up this lesson of the day on radio and television and declared – falsely – that never had it been this hot. Never had fires burned so fiercely. Global warming was here.

And, sure enough, former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, another preacher with no formal training in climate science, outdid all his previous exaggerations by directly blaming our gases for these 200 deaths.

"Let's hope that Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible tragedy, and change our polluting ways before it's too late," he thundered.

Or as historian Jonathan King put it hysterically, again in The Age: "We humans started this war and now the environment is fighting back."

Really? If so, I wonder whose side of this war these preachers are on?

Preaching green sermons over the dead is vile enough, of course, especially when forest experts insist that green policies on forest management helped to kill so many in the first place.

After all, not even the scientists who believe most fiercely in the theory that man is heating the world to hell are blaming the recent heatwave or the fires that followed on global warming.

Hear that even from Melbourne University's Professor David Karoly, the State Government's chief global warming adviser, who conceded: "It is not possible to attribute any single event to climate change."

But there are two more reasons to reject this crowing of the warmists.

First, the planet actually hasn't warmed for a decade, and we've faced even worse conditions than these before – so we should have prepared for these latest bushfires much better. Shouting "global warming" is just a distraction, or even a ruse.

Second, blaming global warming doesn't only excuse the governments that should have learned from our past, but could mislead us into spending countless billions on a "solution" that will not spare us another such tragedy.

To explain . . .

What the preachers have seized on to blame the fires on man-made warming is that Melbourne suffered its hottest day on record – 46.4C – a week before the flames roared over our towns.

Global warming, right?

Wrong.

First, Melbourne did in fact have a hotter day before, four years before the Bureau of Meteorology started officially recording temperatures.

As the Argus newspaper reported at the time, the temperature on February 6, 1851, soared to 47.2C, helping to superheat the fires that then roared across 10 times more land than was burned last week.

Meanwhile the U.S. state of Maine has just recorded its coldest ever temperature, and Britain is suffering a winter so unusually severe that its National Pensioners Conference has fears one in 12 pensioners could die.

What counts is not some local freak of weather but the global trend – and what NASA's Aqua satellites have detected is that the world has not warmed for a decade.

Don't just take my word for it. Ask the high priests of warming at The Age, which on Monday ran this attempt to disguise the fact that global warming theory is in trouble: "Last year was the coldest year around the world since 2000 – yet it was still the 10th hottest since records began in 1850 . . ."

Booga booga.

But then there was this other news report last week, under the doom-mongering headline: "Climate change `worse than expected' ": "Fresh data has shown that greenhouse gas emissions have grown by an average of 3.5 per cent a year from 2000 to 2007 . . . more than three times the 0.9 growth rate in the 1960s . . ."

Sorry for all these figures, but think about those two stories for a second. We're told we're now pumping out triple the greenhouse gases that cause global warming . . . yet the world has stopped warming.

Sure, it may start warming again soon. Or not. But global warming theory for now isn't quite working out as we were told.

But I don't just write all this to go nyah-nyah. Normally that's fun, I admit, but too many people are dead for such crowing of my own.

Far more important is that the global warming prophets who now claim that the fires of Armageddon are here, thanks to our polluting ways, are also trying to make you spend more money than we have on a "solution" that won't actually save us from the next big fire.

Bob Brown, for instance, thinks we should protect ourselves by slashing almost all our emissions – a near-impossible task that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, yet still not change world temperatures by a flicker, not least because our emissions are minuscule compared to, say, China's.

And Flannery insists we should "cease burning coal conventionally by around 2030" – something our coal-fired generators say is impossible without driving them out of business and our cities out of power.

All this, so Australia sets an example to shame the big emitters into cutting their greater gases.

Gases which might not actually cause the warming that might already have stopped anyway. And which didn't cause these fires. Wow.

Do you think those colossal green plans would leave you any safer the next time a fire screams out from the bush?

Think we'll then be safer from the fires that have regularly ravaged this land since Aboriginal settlement?

Let me see if I can sell you a far smaller plan that would cost no more than, say, $4 billion.

For that money I'd build a fire-proof sanctuary in every school in Australia's fire-prone areas, not just to protect the children but to give each community a place of refuge.

I'd find the $20 million we need for a warning system to reach every land line and mobile phone in an area threatened by disaster.

I'd subsidise a bunker for every bush home. And I'd finally spend what it takes to make bush roads safer in fires, and to do the fuel reduction burns that every inquiry into every big fire has warned we needed to protect our towns.

Which plan would leave you safer, do you think: my $4 billion one or the greens' $100 billion and more to "stop " global warming?

ONE NATION (NSW DIVISION) MEDIA RELEASE

GREEN POLITICS AND INADEQUATE BUILDING STANDARDS  KILLED 200 VICTORIANS IN THE BUSHFIRES

The death and destruction of the Victorian bushfires would have been greatly reduced  if the "green" ideology that permeates  Government had not prevented  hazard reduction in the forests  and  around the victims' homes.

There is no  hope  for the inhabitants of fire-prone areas while trees are valued  more highly than  people and every bushfire is blamed on non-existent global warming .

MPs who voted to seal off national parks, councillors who stopped   hazard reduction of fuel loads and  greenies who  blocked fire trails now share collective guilt for the loss  of life  and destruction.

It's about time tree-huggers who want to protect the environment realized that we are the environment.

But there needs also to be a total revision of the building codes that let houses of unsuitable design   be constructed in bushfire zones

One Nation suggests that in high bushfire risk areas:

(1) No timber or other  flammable material should be used  in construction -  buildings  should only be  of  brick, concrete, steel and aluminum.

(2) All windows should be covered with steel mesh so that no flying embers or larger burning objects can get through.   Outside this mesh there should  be metal shutters that can be closed to keep out burning gases out if a bushfire actually hits.

(3) Roofs and eaves should be sealed with steel mesh to stop  embers entering.

(4) Roofs should slope at a steep enough angle so that  burning objects will  slide  off.

(5) Any trees that can hit buildings or block roads if they burn and fall should be cut down.

(6) Wooden bridges and wooden power poles should be replaced with steel or concrete  ones.

After 220 years of white settlement Australians have yet to understand  that their  bush is a hostile  place  where the key to  survival is  "learn or perish".

The bush regenerates itself by burning, we are told,  but that doesn't mean we  have to burn with it.

Statement issued February 19th, 2009 on behalf of One Nation (NSW Division) by Bob Vinnicombe Publicity Officer

For more information contact Bob Vinnicombe 0407949963 / (02) 96454910

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