Page 44 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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The expertise of Messrs Cheney, Roche and Ellis was relevant, but if the coroner was going to make recommendations such as 32 to 34, she should have had a broader range of experts. Recommendation 32 calls for:
regular and strategic burning in all areas of the ACT—including the catchment areas … and excluding only small areas of particular ecological … significance.
Recommendation 34 calls for alterations to the Namadgi management plan to allow for a fuel reduction burning regime equivalent to that used in the corridors designated as the landscape division zone in rotation to achieve an appropriately varying fire age spectrum across the entire landscape. If she was going to venture into such areas, the coroner should have sought the advice of fire ecologists and other relevant scientists. A number have indicated to me that they would have liked to have been consulted, and they have expressed concern about the lack of scientific basis to those particular recommendations.
The coroner makes no bones about her preference for the evidence of Cheney and Roche. In response to Peter Lucas-Smith’s criticism of their evidence, she says:
In contrast, I found the evidence of Mr Cheney and Mr Roche to be both credible and helpful. Their evidence is referred to throughout the report.
There is another issue of concern for me in the coroner’s report. Recommendations 32 to 34 are not backed up by any discussion in the coroner’s report itself. That discussion appears to be in the transcripts, but with such a limited number of expert witnesses it would be difficult to conclude that the coroner had access to the full range of evidence in making that recommendation. She seems to have accepted Mr Cheney’s obviously partisan word that people like Ian Fraser, Geoff Butler, Bill Packard, Doug Tinney, Clive Hurlstone and Professor Peter Cullen, some of whose work I know and others that I first came across in Mr Cheney’s evidence, “have little experience in land management issues but rather are likely to present a rather narrow view of the effect of fire on specific communities. It may be interesting to put their evidence under cross-examination and see how they justify the events of last year because it is the influence of these people that has made it difficult for successive managers to undertake practical broad-scale management”.
We know that the coroner did not call these people as witnesses, and we will not know whether they might have presented a more nuanced view than she and her chief witness supposed they would. I might add here that none of these people are members of the ACT Greens, putting the lie to Mr Mulcahy’s and Mr Abetz’s accusation that the Greens were responsible for the 2003 fires. I take this opportunity to condemn this monstrous accusation that the Greens were responsible. It is a terrible accusation to make about anyone who is not an arsonist.
I am pleased that the government has agreed with recommendations 32 to 34 only in part, but I remain concerned that it lacks the work force to carry out scientifically based fuel reduction burns, especially with the loss of experienced park rangers following the cuts inflicted in the last budget. Fuel reduction burning should reduce the fine litter fuel loads, which means a cool burn is desirable, and this can only be achieved with adequate oversight from people experienced with the process.
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