Page 3872 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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There are issues around FireLink that I am assuming will be inquired into by one committee or another. They do need to be exposed to the light of day. But there have clearly been issues of management and administration that occurred in the past, and it is very difficult to undo matters that have already occurred. Nonetheless, I take it with some faith that that is what the minister is trying to do with his changes. With respect to the relocation of the headquarters to out near the airport, instead of looking at the problem and at what we need to do, it is a matter of going to a solution straight away and ignoring all the stops along the way. If we had looked upon it as a problem and asked, “Where’s the best place to locate the emergency headquarters?” we might not have come up with Fairbairn. I still need it explained to me why that is the appropriate place.
There are a lot of issues there, and I hope that we continue to go forward on this. I hope that the shadow minister and the minister realise they have the same aims in mind. Because of their positions on opposite sides of the house it is very difficult for them to agree. It is a really important area on which we do need to agree because it is highly likely that in the future we will need to put more resources into this area than we have before. All the climate change predictions indicate that the kinds of fires that we faced in 2003 are already part of our ecological landscape and are predictable over a number of decades—the 50-year fire, the 10-year fire and so on. We have all seen those. But we will need to put more, and clever, resources into the way we prepare for fire in the territory.
I reinforce that by quoting what was said by a scientist called David Bowman, who was, serendipitously for me, interviewed by Robyn Williams last night on the Science Show. He is currently living in south Tasmania, around Hobart. He was living up north. He makes the study of fire his area of expertise. I will summarise what he said. He was asked by Robyn Williams what he would do if he was appointed as the federal minister for fire, and he said that, first of all, you would ask the professionals. He said:
The guys who are responsible for managing fire are now in a really difficult place because they have such an accumulation now of many, many dry summers. So step one is to really take this summer, and probably subsequent summers as we go into a warming world very, very seriously.
The fact that it has rained lately may be a good sign, but everyone knows that if it dries out from now on, and we have a very dry summer, what we will have is more growth and more fuel. So we have this constant attempt to reconcile matters. We cannot control the weather; we must merely study it, adapt to it and prepare for its impacts. David Bowman continued:
Step two is a medium-range issue and that is we’ve got to have a conversation … how are we using the landscape? How are we living in the landscape? Is it actually realistic to expect suburbia to be backed onto highly flammable vegetation? Some of this vegetation can’t be burnt safely any more, it’s just too dry and there’s too much fuel. So we need a conversation about where we live, how we’re going to live with possibly an increasingly flammable world.
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