Page 2978 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 September 2006
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government in 1994 were trying to cover up the recommendations made by Mr McBeth in relation to the need to improve our bushfire fuel management. When my erstwhile boss, Gary Humphries, became the minister for emergency services and the minister for the environment in 1995 he set out to implement many of the recommendations of the McBeth report and to establish for the first time in the ACT a bushfire fuel management plan. That was a work in progress and, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that more effort should have been put into it.
One of the things that we find is that some of the people charged with the responsibility of reducing fuel often have a bit of a conflict of interest. Often they are people who are trained as conservationists. They are trained in environmental sciences and things like that. They have a slightly different approach and their training is so sufficiently different that they do not see hazard reduction as part of their core business. We have many rangers who are highly skilled and who are well trained but they see their job as protecting biodiversity and looking after the cute furry animals and the interesting fauna and flora that we have in the ACT.
I put it to you, Mr Speaker, that one of the most important jobs that people in this territory have as land managers is to ensure that the hazard for bushfires is reduced as much as possible. If we fail to do that we will fail to protect our biodiversity; we will fail to protect our fauna and flora. We have seen this over and over again. One of the interesting things that came out in the discussions after the disastrous 2003 bushfires was the number of people from national parks associations, national parks organisations and environmental groups who said, “No, we cannot do hazard reduction burning in these places.”
We should look at what the fire experts say. For example, we kept being told that we could not do hazard reduction burning around and through mountain ashes in the Kosciusko and Namadgi parks—the alpine parks—because if you did so these trees would die. Well, that is not true. If you put a light fire through them and reduce the hazard, they do not die. And even if it were a problem, surely if you cannot reduce the hazard in them you would build a ring of defences to reduce the hazard around them. But no, we did not do any of those things and, as I have been wont to say in my more poetic phases, the mountain ashes became mountains of ash.
We have conservationists who on a regular basis say, “We can’t do hazard reduction. It is not compatible with maintaining national park places that are designed to support biodiversity.” One of the things that really gets under my skin is the number of conservation-minded people who get into a complete lather every time somebody wants to build a fire trail. One of the problems we encountered in 2003 was that the fire trails had been either let go or were in a terrible state of repair. The people charged with the responsibility of maintaining the biodiversity in our parks did not do basic maintenance. They turned fire trails over to the bush and, as a result, we could not get trucks into places where we needed them. That was a failing of successive governments.
As an adviser to a previous government, I know how much we smarted every time we attempted to build a fire trial. It was agony to build a fire trial. But I will never, ever criticise a government for planning and appropriately building fire trails to maintain the safety of our community. Mind you, when these issues arose back in 1997 and there were issues about fire trails on Black Mountain and elsewhere, the Labor Party crucified the
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