COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Proof Committee Hansard SENATE
SELECT COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES
Reference: Bushfires in Australia
THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010
PERTH
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SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010
Members: Senator Heffernan (Chair), Senator O’Brien (Deputy Chair), Senators Fisher, Nash and Sterle Participating members: Senators Abetz, Adams, Back, Barnett, Bernardi, Bilyk, Birmingham, Mark Bishop, Boswell, Boyce, Brandis, Carol Brown, Bushby, Cameron, Cash, Colbeck, Jacinta Collins, Coonan, Cor- mann, Crossin, Eggleston, Feeney, Ferguson, Fielding, Fierravanti-Wells, Fifield, Forshaw, Furner, Humphries, Hurley, Hutchins, Johnston, Joyce, Kroger, Lundy, Ian Macdonald, McEwen, McGauran, McLu- cas, Marshall, Mason, Milne, Minchin, Moore, Parry, Payne, Polley, Pratt, Ronaldson, Ryan, Scullion, Siewert, Stephens, Troeth, Trood, Williams, Wortley and Xenophon
Senators in attendance: Senators Colbeck, Back, Heffernan and O’Brien Terms of reference for the inquiry: To inquire into and report on: The incidence and severity of bushfires across Australia, including: (a) the impact of bushfires on human and animal life, agricultural land, the environment, public and private assets and local communities; (b) factors contributing to the causes and risks of bushfires across Australia, including natural resource management policies, hazard reduction and agricultural land maintenance; (c) the extent and effectiveness of bushfire mitigation strategies and practices, including application of resources for agricultural land, national parks, state forests, other Crown land, open space areas adjacent to development and private property and the impact of hazard reduction strategies; (d) the identification of measures that can be undertaken by government, industry and the community and the effectiveness of these measures in protecting agricultural industries, service industries, small business, tourism and water catchments; (e) any alternative or developmental bushfire prevention and mitigation approaches which can be implemented; (f) the appropriateness of planning and building codes with respect to land use in the bushfire prone regions; (g the adequacy and funding of fire-fighting resources both paid and voluntary and the usefulness of and impact on on-farm labour; (h) the role of volunteers; (i) the impact of climate change; (j) fire – its causes (accidental, natural and deliberate) and remedies; (k) the impact of bushfires on biodiversity and measures to protect biodiversity; and (l) insurance against bushfires.
WITNESSES CAMPBELL, Mr Francis John, Member, The Bushfire Front Inc...... 17 CAMPBELL, Mr Michael, Vice-President Meat Section, Western Australian Farmers Federation...... 44 CAPORN, Mr David, Executive Director, Community Development Portfolio, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia ...... 64 CARTER, Mr Murray Douglas, Manager, Fire Management Services Branch, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation...... 1 DATODI, Mr Raymond Francis, Director, Engineering, Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd ...... 56 ENRIGHT, Professor Neal, Professor in Plant Ecology, School of Environmental Science, Murdoch University...... 78 GROOMBRIDGE, Mr Sean, Director and Chief Executive Officer, Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd...... 56 HAMENCE, Mr Brian Victor, Member of State Management Committee, Association of Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades of Western Australia; Fire Control Officer, Shire of Bridgetown- Greenbushes ...... 38 HARRISON-WARD, Ms Josephine Charlotte, Chief Executive Officer, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia ...... 64 HYNES, Mr Craig Anthony, Chief Operations Officer, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia...... 64 McCAW, Dr William Lachlan, Principal Research Scientist, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation...... 1 McKINNELL, Dr Frank, Member, The Bushfire Front Inc...... 17 McNAMARA, Mr Keiran James, Director-General, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation...... 1 PARK, Mr Dale, Senior Vice-President, Western Australian Farmers Federation ...... 44 ROOCKE, Mr Paul Andrew, Development Engineer, Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd...... 56 SCHULTZ, Dr Beth, Forests and Fire Campaigner, Conservation Council of Western Australia ...... 25 SNEEUWJAGT, Mr Richard John, Principal Fire Projects Officer, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation...... 1 SOUSA, Mr Christopher, Member, Association of Volunteer Bushfire Brigades of Western Australia...... 38 UNDERWOOD, Mr Roger, Chairman, The Bushfire Front Inc...... 17 VERSTEGEN, Mr Piers, Director, Conservation Council of Western Australia...... 25
Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 1
Committee met at 8.27 am
CARTER, Mr Murray Douglas, Manager, Fire Management Services Branch, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation
McCAW, Dr William Lachlan, Principal Research Scientist, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation
McNAMARA, Mr Keiran James, Director-General, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation
SNEEUWJAGT, Mr Richard John, Principal Fire Projects Officer, Western Australian Department of Environment and Conservation
CHAIR (Senator Heffernan)—I declare open this public hearing of the Select Committee on Agricultural and Related Industries. The committee is hearing evidence on the committee’s inquiry into the incidence and severity of bushfires across Australia. Thank you for coming.
This is a public hearing. Before the committee starts taking evidence I remind all witnesses that in giving evidence to the committee they are protected by parliamentary privilege. It is unlawful for anyone to threaten or disadvantage a witness on account of evidence given to a committee, and such action may be treated by the Senate as a contempt. It is also a contempt to give false or misleading evidence to a committee. The committee prefers for all evidence to be given in public, but under the Senate’s resolutions witnesses have the right to request to be heard in private session. It is important that witnesses give the committee notice if they intend to give evidence in camera. If a witness objects to answering a question, the witness should state the ground upon which the objection is taken, and the committee will determine whether it will insist on an answer, having regard to the ground which is claimed. If the committee determines to insist on an answer, a witness may request that the answer be given in camera. Such a request may, of course, be made at any other time.
On behalf of the committee, I thank all of those who have made submissions and sent representatives here today for their cooperation with this inquiry. Welcome. Would you like to make an opening statement?
Mr McNamara—I would. I do not wish to make any changes to the submission that we have lodged with the committee. I thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. We have made a written submission. I would like to make some very brief remarks by way of introduction. The Department of Environment and Conservation has a range of conservation and environmental protection responsibilities, but in the context of this inquiry the key ones that we have are the management of more than 25 million hectares of public lands, including the state’s national parks, state forests and nature reserves—that is an area bigger than Victoria—and fire preparedness responsibility on a further 89 million hectares of unallocated Crown land and unmanaged reserves outside of the metropolitan area and town sites. To continue to boast about the size of Western Australia, that is an area bigger than New South Wales.
CHAIR—Don’t rub it in!
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Mr McNamara—I am a New South Welshman. Fire management is an integral part of land management in terms of protecting not only land values and biodiversity values, which are two of our functions, but also the community, life and property. The Department of Environment and Conservation has bushfire preparedness mitigation and response or suppression roles. They are roles we take seriously and invest considerable resources in. Our submission does not seek to address all the committee’s terms of reference exhaustively; rather, we focus particularly on our approach to prescribed burning in our submission. Prescribed burning is regarded as an essential component of our approach in this state. It is based on considerable scientific and operation experience.
We have a target for our prescribed burning performance in the forested south-west of the state, where we manage about 2.4 million hectares of public lands. I know that is currently a contentious issue in the Victorian royal commission. It is being debated there. The target for prescribed burning on an annual basis that we have set in that area is around 200,000 hectares. Some people want more; some people want less. I support the notion of a target. I know the very notion of a target is also a contentious issue. So far this financial year—we are still actively burning as we speak—we have burnt about 153,000 hectares in the south-west of the state in 125 burns. We have also burnt another 500,000 or more hectares in the remainder of the state so far this financial year.
The key part of the message that we want to leave with the committee today is that fire and fire management are fundamental components of land management; that public land management agencies have a critical role in fire preparedness, mitigation and suppression; and that any effort to divorce public land management from fire roles would be a recipe for disaster. Thank you.
CHAIR—Thank you very much. We are grateful for your evidence. It is a curiosity to me—I am a farmer—that fires seem to be getting bigger as the gears are getting better. Something is going wrong. Do you think that, if your cold-burn strategy, which you have just addressed, were implemented more fundamentally in other states, we would be in a better position with the size and severity of fires?
Mr McNamara—I always treat that question with some degree of caution. Each state has to be looked at in its own circumstances. We have the benefit of a flatter topography by and large. Forest types and circumstances differ around the country. We set ourselves a target in the south- west that equates to around six to eight per cent of the public lands that we manage. By the south-west I mean an area roughly from Moore River to Denmark on the south coast and areas south-west of that line, give or take a little bit. We believe strongly in the approach that we take and the benefits that that has yielded for this state. I might ask Mr Sneeuwjagt to repeat some of the statistics that bear that out and that have also recently been aired in the Victorian royal commission. We believe that the situation in other states is variable. We know that there are colleagues in other states who welcome and support the sort of approach that we take in this state.
The approach I take is to explain what we do here. We do explain that at the national level and to our interstate colleagues. It is really then a matter for them as to what they do in their own circumstances. As a more direct answer to your question, we believe, notwithstanding
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 3 differences between jurisdictions and differences in circumstances, that there would be scope for more active prescribed burning in other parts of this country.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—I think it is important to note that fire has been part of our environment for a long, long time—millions of years—and trying to exclude fire is something that has been tried interstate in fighting some of the disastrous fires in the 19th century. The forest department, which was formed to try and manage fires and manage logging that was uncontrolled, brought together a program of attempted fire exclusion from about the 1920s to the 1960s, though there was some burning associated with that. The exclusion worked for a little while, but fuels did accumulate, which resulted in wild fires under even moderate conditions. That culminated in the massive fires of 1961 that are well-known as the Dwellingup fires, but there were many other fires in the south-west. Dwellingup was virtually destroyed and so were two or three other settlements. That led to a royal commission which encouraged the then forest department to extend its prescribed burning program. That initiated a lot of research and initiated the use of aerial ignition, which was pioneered in Western Australia for the benefit of the rest of the world.
Since 1961, a program of broadscale, comprehensive prescribed burning was undertaken. That has been gradually reduced, but our target today is about eight per cent of our landscape. Eight per cent represents, on average, burning once in 13 years. So it is not frequent, but it has resulted in some significant benefits in that no lives have been lost in forest fires. The biggest fires we have had have been less than 30,000 hectares. We have had very few large property losses, though there have been some. So the benefits have been significant.
It is not as though we do not have severe fire weather; we do. We have probably the most extreme Mediterranean weather experienced in Australia. We have very hot, long, dry summers and moist, cool winters. The opportunity for fire from lightning and human causes is there. Our record has been good, though we are never totally satisfied. But given the circumstances of the large amounts of fuels that accumulate, dry weather, lightning and people in our forests and parks, we have had a reasonably good record. It is largely to do with prescribed burning, but it is also important to make the point that it is associated with a comprehensive program of management that includes preparedness, prevention and comprehensive detection systems, and a well-trained, well-resourced suppression force that is able to deal with fires rapidly while they are still small.
CHAIR—Thank you. I accept the acknowledgement that every patch has its own differences.
Senator BACK—The question of protecting communities, particularly in fire prone areas, is obviously current. Are there any situations in which prescribed burning has been demonstrated to protect communities during a summer fire incident?
Mr McNamara—There is absolutely no doubt in our long experience that that is the case. Our submission pays particular attention to the Mount Cooke fire and perhaps, more pointedly, in terms of your question, to the Mundaring-Karragullen fire in January 2005. We have some enlarged maps that we will leave with the committee that are enlargements of the map that is in our submission. There is absolutely no doubt that the patterns of prescribed burning that were employed in that area assisted enormously with the tactics during the fighting of that fire.
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There has been a subsequent analysis by Mr Phil Cheney, a former CSIRO principal research scientist, which sought to predict what the spread and the impact of that fire might have been in the absence of those prescribed burnt areas. My understanding is that it is quite clear that his predictions were that that fire would have worked its way well into some suburban areas on the fringes of Perth. Once again, my colleagues can elaborate on that.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—Before I do, I might turn to Dr Lachlan McCaw, who actually did an analysis of another fire that had threatened Dwellingup in 2007. He can speak on that because he did the analysis on that.
Dr McCaw—Yes, the Dwellingup fire in February 2000 was under quite severe burning conditions, with temperatures in the low 40s and a strong north-westerly wind. There was a particularly clear example there where that fire was running up steep terrain through forest that had been burnt for a long time. Some of that was on private property, hence the older fuel age, but there was a clear example there of an area that had been fuel-reduced two years previously that essentially broke the run of the head fire and fragmented that into two separate fires. From my analysis of that, that probably delayed the arrival of a fire around the Dwellingup town site by a couple of hours and probably prevented it from becoming a much more severe fire. That was a very clear example.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—Further to that, there have been quite a few studies done on fires that have occurred. There was a study that was co-authored by Roger Underwood and myself where we would looked at 13 examples. We showed the importance of prescribed burning meant that those fires were able to be kept fairly small. Probably the most significant of those were the Cyclone Alby fires of 4 April 1978. They were extreme conditions, as you can imagine, with over 100 kilometres per hour winds and dry weather conditions. Something like 90 fires resulted from burns that had been done in the previous week or so. Many of those fires that ran into state forests were able to be held quite rapidly, because they ran into younger fuels. I remember being at Pemberton, near Manjimup, being involved in a number of those fires and thanking the Lord afterwards that, without those fuel reduction burns, we would have some extreme impacts on communities. There have been a number of examples where we can demonstrate quite clearly that even under severe weather conditions fuel reduction burning of sufficient size across the landscape and of sufficient coverage—meaning that within the burn you need to have at least 70 per cent of the burn. With those sorts of parameters, even under bad conditions, you can actually have successful control.
Senator BACK—Can you give us some indication as to the area around a town that needs to be protected? What sort of range or area is necessary to actually give effect to that protection?
Mr Sneeuwjagt—It is are slightly loaded question in that it implies that is the only thing you do. In fact, our approach has been beyond what I call the ‘thin red line’, which seems to be promulgated by some people, that you just protect the immediate surrounds of the town. We found—and Dwellingup in 1961 showed it—that if you do not burn the landscape to a reasonable proportion, you are going to invite very large, intense fires, with the embers that might blow kilometres ahead of the head fire. Dwellingup town itself was actually burnt before the head fire got there by the ember storm that was generated by the fire burning in old fuels. So what we attempted do is, yes, focus around a town, but not to the degree that that is the only
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 5 option. We believe quite strongly that you need to burn the landscape so that you do not invite those big fires.
We look at a zone of about three to five kilometres around a town. We do block or patch burning. We do not necessarily burn the same area every five years, as some might think we should do; we feel that, as long as there is a patchwork so that there are burns nearby that have been burned recently, you do not have to burn an area every five or six years.
Mr McNamara—We will leave the committee with our prescribed burn plans—our rolling three-year and six-season burn plans—that show that spread across the landscape. Harking back, for example, to the fire that reached the suburbs of Canberra some years ago, it started quite some days earlier up in Kosciusko in the high country.
CHAIR—It should never have got to Canberra.
Mr McNamara—If you want to wait and have protection just immediately around towns, as has just been inferred, we are once again courting danger.
CHAIR—Are you defining for us the difference between a behaviour and a precautionary burn in bush versus grass country? Is the prescribed burning you do mostly bush, tree elevation fire or grassland?
Mr McNamara—We are focusing all our answers on the south-west of the state, which is where the major forested area is—although much of our woodland in the goldfields and so on is classed as forest technically; but there is certainly heath and there are swampy areas. Much of the burning in the rest of the state is in grassland, with savannahs in the Kimberley and so on. A lot of that is for somewhat different purposes. There is community protection involved in that, but it is largely for conservation purposes that much of the burning in the rest of the state is done. In the south-west of the state we are talking largely about forest. We are talking about prescribed burning on the public lands that we are responsible for. Once again, roughly in the area of, say, Moore River to Denmark and the area south-west of there, we manage 2.4 million hectares of public lands. There is about the same area, or a bit more again, of private lands. We are talking about the program on the public lands.
Senator BACK—Can I focus on that for a few minutes. In a couple of hearings we have had to date around Australia, there have been comments made about the added responsibility of agencies like yours for taking on the control of more land without the resultant resources, either financial or human. Secondly—if you could pick up both comments at the same time—there has been concern expressed to us about the declining training and expertise of people to be involved in land management, with fire management as part of it. Can you explain the situation in Western Australia. Is that the case or do you have a different formula?
Mr McNamara—There are several parts to that. The area of land that we manage in the south-west of the state has not changed markedly. What has changed is that significant areas have gone from state forest into national park. In the rest of the state the areas of land that we manage have continued to grow steadily, and we are still short of what is generally regarded scientifically and in the conservation profession as a comprehensive, adequate and representative
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 6 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 conservation reserve system. So there is still growth going on in the lands that we are responsible for managing, but not so much in the south-west.
The change of tenure of a significant area in the south-west from state forest to national park, particularly under the previous government’s policy to protect old-growth forests, did not see a diminution of fire effort. Indeed, Mr Sneeuwjagt and I prepared some statistics that we presented to the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council in Brisbane a few years ago which in fact showed that we were having higher rates of prescribed burning in the national parks than we were in the state forest. In some ways the state forest has more limitations because of the areas of regeneration that have to be protected from burning for periods of time because of bauxite mining and the like. So we are actually doing more in the national parks than in the state forest, contrary to the belief of some, and when I presented those statistics some people were quite surprised.
I have been the CEO of the former Department of Conservation and Land Management and now of DEC, the Department of Environment and Conservation, for nine years. On a number of occasions over that period governments have increased the resourcing to the department specifically for fire management. It has certainly been, on a bipartisan basis, a responsibility that governments have taken seriously. I have never sat in front of any committee and said I have enough resources to do everything I would love to do, but fire is and has been recognised as a priority by governments.
As for training and expertise, we still have a substantial workforce of both front-line firefighters and incident control personnel, both centrally and throughout the south-west and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the state. There are challenges in staff attraction and retention these days. There are fewer people coming through in the forestry profession, but I would argue at least in part that the forestry profession is not the only one that brings this sort of capacity. I would like to believe that it is the fact that our people are based in land management that is the important factor, rather than that they have a particular training qualification before they come into that function. Once again, my colleagues might be better placed to expand on the training and expertise side.
Mr Carter—I will add to that. I am quite new in this position but have a couple of decades of history in fire management broadly, and there is no doubt that the challenges are increasing across all industries as far as attracting and retaining staff goes. Particularly, as Mr McNamara said, the majority of our staff who are directly involved in fire mitigation, fire suppression and the broadest range of fire management activities are not full time in fire. We have a number of staff who are.
I will just enhance Mr McNamara’s comment: I believe that the strength of our organisation when we talk with our peers in other parts of Australia and our abilities in fire management are strongly linked to the day jobs, if you like, of some of those part-time staff where they are involved in wide-ranging activities, from management of nature based tourism through to forest activity management, harvesting activities, the management of those and the management of feral animals and pest species. They have an affinity with the land and the landscapes within which they work, so they live there, they breathe the air and they live in the local communities. It is very important. One of our great challenges is maintaining the retention of those people.
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Also, we have a strong push within fire particularly but also within the agency more broadly to run a very heavily decentralised resourcing model, which is critical. It comes back to Mr Sneeuwjagt’s comments that it is not only about mitigation but also about rapid detection of and response to unplanned fire. To do that, you need to have a heavily regionalised rural based workforce. We will continue to push to do that, and it represents a challenge.
Senator BACK—I will defer to others and then come back when time permits.
Senator O’BRIEN—I am interested in exploring the part of your evidence that refers to critics of the policy of controlled burns that is pursued in this state. It is suggested in some of the literature that is available—for example, from the Conservation Council of Western Australia, which will be here later today—that many prescribed burns become very hot and some escape and burn larger areas than intended and that prescribed burns have even resulted in the deaths of people. Is that correct?
Mr McNamara—Let me make a couple of comments. We welcome debate about prescribed burning. My personal training and background are in nature conservation; my whole career has been in that. I often say that when you put our biodiversity and conservation responsibilities, our fire responsibilities and our community protection responsibilities on the table there are some trade-offs against the purity, if you like, of what I would like to do in biodiversity conservation. Having said that, we have a program that is based around variety in fire size, intensity, season and so on. We have studied the ecosystems—the flora and the fauna—to a very considerable degree, and we are fairly confident that our programs are not causing any undue damage to our biodiversity values. But scientific debate around that topic is ongoing and welcome. Do some prescribed burns escape? Yes, they do. Fire is inherently dangerous to deal with, and some do escape—not many, but some do. Have any prescribed burns escaped and caused death? Not to my knowledge, but once again I will turn to my colleagues, particularly on the escape issue and the very last question.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—We burn under very mild conditions, so if we do get an escape—and just about all burns have some minor escapes, whether they be a square metre or more—because our forces are there, those fires are put out rapidly. Occasionally a fire does get away, but the wildfires from prescribed burns represent less than one per cent of our wildfires and, as I said, they generally occur under mild conditions. It is a risky job. We have to do all the things we do to minimise that risk. Good training, good equipment, good science and good fire behaviour knowledge—the sort of knowledge that is available to us from the research we have undertaken—enable us to minimise that risk, without totally eliminating it. Yes, there was a fatality where a tree fell over. A passing motorist was hit by a tree where we did not pick up the smouldering. That was a fatality. It was very unfortunate, but the fact is we have hundreds of burns each year and we have very few incidents.
Senator O’BRIEN—One fatality over what period?
Mr Sneeuwjagt—One fatality since 1958, I think. There were some fatalities in 1958—my colleagues in the back here would know that—when some of our crews were burned. They were walking a burn and got caught in a fire. That was prior to my time, but that was another lesson that we learnt. That was a very unfortunate thing. Our aerial burning allows us to minimise that risk because most of our people work on the edges and do not walk in the middle of a big burn.
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Aircraft allow us to do it safely. Our risk is relatively low given the large amount of burning activity we undertake.
Mr McNamara—If I could just clarify in respect of fatalities: as I understand it, in terms of fighting a forest fire or a community in the face of a forest fire, we have not had fatalities since about 1960 or a year or two either side of that. There was the death of a motorist on, I think, the South West Highway, as Mr Sneeuwjagt said, following a tree fall after a fire which was the consequence of a prescribed burn. I am aware of another death in a vehicle accident in a national park fire in about the mid-eighties. It was not associated with active firefighting as such but was a vehicle accident. There have been other deaths in fires managed by local governments or others than us. We were in charge of the fire at Boorabbin on the Great Eastern Highway in December 2007-January 2008, when a decision to open the road resulted in the deaths of three truck drivers. That has been the subject of a coronial that was brought down late last year. That is the record and the situation on fatalities over about the last 50 years.
Senator BACK—Was the Boorabbin burn a prescribed burn?
Mr McNamara—No, it was not. It was a wildfire.
Senator O’BRIEN—There is also a suggestion that prescribed burns increase the amount of flammable material because they promote the growth of weeds and native plants that respond prolifically to fire.
Dr McCaw—There is an issue with weeds in some of our bushland areas in heavily disturbed areas. Kings Park would be a good example of that. It regularly has fires and it has a major problem with invasion by South African veldt grass. But, for the majority of our bush estate in the south-west, weeds are only a problem in fairly small areas. The fuel dynamics in the bush itself are really a matter of the accumulation of leaf litter and twig material from the trees. Weeds can be an issue in localised areas, but I would not see it as a broadscale—
CHAIR—These would be non-smoking weeds, I take it!
Dr McCaw—Some smoking weeds as well!
Mr Sneeuwjagt—There have been a lot of studies done on the accumulation of fuel after burning. Myself, Dr McCaw and his staff have done studies over 30 or 40 years, and that has resulted in prediction systems that allow us to determine exactly what sorts of fuel loads are available in each forest type after a certain number of years.
It is true to say that after a fire you have a new flush of growth, which is welcome, but that does not constitute a major problem until about age four or five when it starts accumulating significantly. For the first four, five or six years the fuels are sufficiently low to be able to undertake successful control. That has been studied in a number of ways, and recent work done by people at UWA, the University of Western Australia, has confirmed that the areas that have been burnt in the last six years have contributed significantly to the reduced incidence and extent of wildfires.
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Mr McNamara—To elaborate quickly, there are a couple of graphs in our submission that show the relationship between areas of prescribed burning and areas of wildfire, and they help to bear out the comments we are making. Another comment I make very frequently is that the laws of physics are pretty simple. The effect of a fire, the seriousness of a fire, is related to weather, topography and fuel, and people are capable of managing only one of those.
Senator O’BRIEN—That sounds fair enough to me. The other suggestion is that, because of the way prescribed burns are conducted, large areas being burnt, the impact on fauna is very dramatic, fauna being unable to escape the fires, followed by a lack of food and shelter from predators resulting from the fires.
Mr McNamara—Once again, to start with we are talking about the way fire is distributed geographically, seasonally and in intensity across landscapes and how much inside a burnt area is actually burnt in a mosaic style burn. I agree that there is concern on those grounds if, for example, you are on a Swan coastal plain or in the wheat belt, where the landscape is highly cleared and the bushland remnants are isolated and do not have connectivity with other bushland for reinvasion and repopulation and so on. But, broadly, that proposition does not stand up in the bulk of the south-west forest.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—I will probably pass on to Dr McCaw, but a lot of studies have been done on the effects of not just single fires but fire regimes such as the accumulation of different burn treatments. Those studies have been done by a large number of scientists both within the department and outside the department.
Mr McNamara—We will leave with the committee a book titled Fire in ecosystems of south- west Western Australia: impacts and management, which was the result of a symposium convened by the department five or six years ago. We will leave that with the committee as a collation of the scientific knowledge about fire in south-west Australian ecosystems.
Dr McCaw—The department has been involved in the Bushfire CRC—cooperative research centre—and our major project there has been a study that has specifically sought to address that question. We looked at areas in south-west forest landscape north of Walpole and used the fire history information that we had from maps dating back to the 1950s to develop an understanding of the number of fires that occurred across that area, so we are able to compare areas that had had perhaps two fires in 30 years versus areas that had had up to six fires in that time. We looked at the effect on plants, animals and fungi. What came out of that work was that there is a very high degree of resilience in the ecosystems and that clear patterns were not coming out that showed that, say, areas that had had more fires had a lower biodiversity value. That work has just been written up and has currently been submitted to a scientific journal, so that should be in the press fairly soon. We are confident that there is a high degree of resilience in our ecosystems to fight.
Senator O’BRIEN—How soon do you expect that to be published?
Dr McCaw—The publication submission process takes a while. The paper was submitted a month back, and it should be formally published within 12 months.
CHAIR—Can we get ahead of the game there? Is it your paper?
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Dr McCaw—It is the department’s paper.
CHAIR—Could we receive that in camera?
Dr McCaw—Yes. A report has been submitted to the Bushfire CRC that summarises the key findings of that, so we could provide that.
CHAIR—Thank you very much.
Mr McNamara—Dr McCaw is very modest, but one of the strengths, we believe, of our carriage of our fire management responsibilities is a long history, which we have sought to sustain, of maintaining a scientific research capacity within the department as well as linkages to the Bushfire CRC and other institutions. We maintain a strong in-house capacity; indeed, an in- house capacity that is attuned to the management questions that get asked and is available to us to assist in policy and management.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—Can I make one final point. Graphics are very interesting. We have developed a process whereby, using Landsat satellite imagery, we can identify the intensity of our burns even underneath canopy. This is an example, which I could leave with you, which is a block of about 3,000 hectares of karri/marri forest near Pemberton. The colours indicate the coolness and the heat of the fires. Obviously, the red areas are areas that have burnt more intensely whereas purple and blue are the very mild burns. As you can see, the majority of the area was burned very mildly—burns spreading out about 20 to 30 metres per hour with flames of half a metre. Any mobile mammal is going to be able to deal with that. The fact that they have dealt with it over millions of years makes me confident that, although you may get individuals that get compromised, as a community, that sort of fire treatment is in fact more likely to enhance than detract from its health.
Senator BACK—What time of year was that?
Mr Sneeuwjagt—It was in January. That is when karri is ready to burn. It is also when the grapes are starting to ripen. I can leave you with a couple of those examples. There are many more of those. That is a systematic way in which we identify whether or not we have achieved our aim and it just shows you the variety of treatment that happens within a block. Some of those areas have been left unburnt, and they might have been left unburnt for 30 years in the gullies, because it is quite moist, whereas the drier slopes are more likely to be burnt more regularly.
CHAIR—I have to say that the questions raised by Senator O’Brien are really the ones we have to put our finger on. I do not know whether you guys have done any cost-benefit analysis for native fauna et cetera in comparing that sort of burn with the catastrophic burns that occur occasionally. The science says that south-west Western Australia is going to get drier, hotter, more event based weather, so the catastrophic burns will be more catastrophic when they turn up.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—What is clear from both our experience and the research is that large, intense wildfires have a long-term deleterious impact. It takes a long time to recover and you do lose critical ecological and environmental factors—the soils get severely disturbed and you get soil erosion the following winter. There is ample evidence to indicate that that sort of regime of
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 11 large, intense fires is negative to the environment. Compare that with one of mostly mild, moderate burns and I think I know which way I would go.
Dr McCaw—If the committee are interested, there is some material I could provide, from the Perth Hills fire of 2005 and the 2003 Mount Cooke fire, which looks at, for the Mount Cooke fire, the effect on flora in particular and, for the Perth Hills fire of 2005, at the hydrology and catchment values.
CHAIR—That would be great.
Senator COLBECK—In the development of your prescribed burning plans do you map the fuel load build-up rates? Do you vary across the landscape the frequency of the fires? You said it was an average of one in 13 years, but obviously that would vary based on the different environments that you are working in.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—As I think was mentioned before, we have excellent records of our fire history in the south-west going back as far as the 1930s, so we are able to identify when it was burnt. More recently, we have better information about seasonality, intensity—as I just demonstrated—and so forth.
There are probably three major considerations that are part of our development of a prescribed burning plan. They are the risk analysis, or the wildfire threat analysis as we call it. This identifies the values at risk, the potential for fires to start, the fuel load or the fire behaviour, and our ability to control fires while small. That analysis is done not just on our tenure but now more broadly across private lands. That allows us to identify where the vulnerable values are, like towns and plantations and so forth.
The second major component, and in our case the most important one, is the biodiversity requirements. We have very good information about what regimes work for certain animals. For example, the mainland quokka prefers relatively dense understorey cover in the riparian zones— that is, the creek lines. However, once those start collapsing, after about 25 years, then, again, you need to regenerate them. So our burn program is there to encourage the maintenance of healthy habitats. That may require an intense burn once in a while, followed up with a couple of mild burns in subsequent years. That is part of our program.
The third requirement is the must-do burns, which are usually the post-harvesting regeneration burns, those burns which are necessary to regenerate following mining or harvesting. Those three components are incorporated in our master burn plan process, which looks at burning for the next 20 or 30 years. From that we come up with a six-season or three-year program, which we put out to the public. We allow them to engage with us on modifying that—and that often happens—and from that we have what is called an annual burn program for the following season. So it is a rather large program that is brought down to something digestible for the community in the six-season and one-year programs.
Senator COLBECK—So it is not necessarily a national parks plan or just a plan to deal with the specific areas under your control. It is integrated with all the other land users in the region. In the working forests and state forests, for example, the requirements for those areas are
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 12 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 incorporated into your overall planning program and the cycles in which all those things work together.
Mr McNamara—I will just jump in first to answer that. It is a seamless plan in the sense that we manage both the state forests and the national parks. We do not have two separate agencies, like you might have in some jurisdictions. We take account, in what we do, of the statutory purposes of those lands, but it is seamless in the sense that we manage across those tenures. The burn plan is for our lands and on our lands. We do not control and we do not drive prescribed burning on lands that are not managed by us, but it takes account of the values both on our lands and adjacent to and near our lands. So, while it is a plan for the lands we manage, it certainly takes account of assets, communities, water catchments, farms, pipelines—all those things that are next to us.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—A problem that does exist is the management of fuels on private lands. That is very problematic.
Senator COLBECK—That was my next question.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—It is a fact of life that, over the 40 years that I have been involved with fire, there has been a diminution of burning by local volunteer bushfire brigades and by landholders. Many of the farms that used have the capacity to burn on their land are not subdivisions. The equipment has gone, so there has been a diminution of active fire management on private lands. We are trying to address that, working with our colleagues from FESA to see how we might be able to come up with a more coordinated program. But it is still going to be difficult to see how that can be done if the individual does not want to get involved and has not got the capacity to do it.
Mr McNamara—Following the Victorian fires of last, year the Premier, as one would expect, immediately asked for advice and a report on the preparedness in our state for bushfires. The Department of the Premier and Cabinet convened a process, using the State Emergency Management Committee primarily, that produced a report that the Premier released in about October last year that covers these things.
There is recognition that the whole of landscapes is what has to be dealt with—not just our lands or somebody else’s lands. We have an active program for our lands and we, as Mr Sneeuwjagt has said, particularly through the efforts that Mr Carter is currently involved in, are working a lot with the Fire and Emergency Services Authority—and I know you are hearing from them later in the day—and with local governments to improve the overall approach and with planning authorities with rules for subdivisions, housing design and all those sorts of things. We know that there is a lot more than just our part of the picture. We are working with those other agencies on those other things, but we do not have the lead on those other matters.
Senator COLBECK—You said earlier that you manage about 2.4 million hectares of public land.
Mr McNamara—In the south-west of the state.
Senator COLBECK—That would include state forest and national park area?
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 13
Mr McNamara—That is right.
Senator COLBECK—And there is a similar area of private land.
Mr McNamara—More or less similar. There is a slightly larger area of private land in the area I am talking about. There is about 2.7 million hectares of private land and 2.4 million hectares of DEC managed land in that area roughly from Moore River to Denmark and south- west of that.
Senator COLBECK—What proportion of that private land would have similar vegetation types to what you are managing?
Mr McNamara—It ranges from cleared farmland and urban settlements through to bushland. I do not have figures on that.
Mr Sneeuwjagt—I would say that the vast majority is cleared or partially cleared. There is very little that is largely intact forest that is private. There is some, but I think the majority is commercial land for farming and rural settlements.
CHAIR—Do you think there has been an erosion by the wider community of the volunteer ethic in being keen to put the fires out? Do the pubic leave it to someone else and think it is somebody else’s problem?
Mr Sneeuwjagt—There are signs that that is happening. There are still a lot of volunteers, and we admire their efforts in a changing world. With litigation and all of those sorts of issues people do not want to be involved sometimes.
CHAIR—In the east we cannot get money for a pump, a hose or a tank.
Senator BACK—Part of the brief of this committee is to examine the role that the Commonwealth should have in fire management, mitigation et cetera without wanting in any way to be involved in the constitutional rights of the states and the territories in land management. From a Western Australian perspective, what role do you believe the Commonwealth could play or should be playing on behalf of the wider community?
Mr McNamara—I will admit that I have not turned my mind greatly to that question in thinking about today. Fire management certainly at the level and within the scope of my department’s responsibility and activities is very much about land management, which is constitutionally the responsibility of the states. It is about applying the resources to do that properly for multiple outcomes, including the protection of life and property. The Commonwealth in a lot of ways does not have a direct role to play in that field, but it does have some role in assistance and so on.
There is the support for the cooperative research centre for bushfires. This has obviously been a welcome initiative and program. CRCs are institutions that have a life of about seven years and then perhaps a second seven years. I prefer security in investment in research. I regard seven years as short term for the things we are talking about. People like Dr McCaw, Dr Burrows, who is the head of our science division, and Rick Sneeuwjagt, who started in the science area in the
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 14 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 department, rely on decades of scientific research and experience in this field, not short-term research. So research is one area.
I am aware that the Commonwealth did play an instrumental role in the support for and development of aerial firefighting capacity in this country and cooperative arrangements across the country. Mr Sneeuwjagt can elaborate on that.
There has been a program over recent years of assistance—and I stand to be corrected here— through the Attorney-General’s Department in bushfire mitigation works, which is very onground work such as bridges, roads, water points and preparedness. The amount of money is quite modest—$500,000 or $1 million a year—but when coupled with existing capacity, existing equipment, good planning and so on it achieves very tangible onground outcomes. Those sorts of programs do assist. Once again I am very much a fan of security in those programs rather than the short-termism that can characterise a lot of funding programs.
There are other elements which are not really ones for DEC to comment on too much. I know FESA has them in mind and may well raise them with you. They are things like the Commonwealth’s role in recovery, assistance with recovery, where there have been major impacts on communities, property and the like. Fire campaigns can go for extended periods. While volunteers are volunteers, I know there is debate—and there has been for a long time— around some support for volunteers with tax laws and the like. That is not really our business to pursue, but there are issues amongst that which I think are probably more appropriate for FESA to talk to you about. Once again, my colleagues may have something to add.
Mr McCaw—A key one would be the role of the Bureau of Meteorology in providing a range of services from day-to-day weather forecasting services through to climate change predictions and modelling. They are involved in the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, CAWCR. That is a joint venture with CSIRO that brings together some climate modellers and people from the Division of Atmospheric Research. I think the weather area is a key one for us, particularly with Western Australia being a very large state. We have some major issues in terms of the adequacy of the observation network and our ability to forecast for remoter parts of the state. I think there was a Senate committee looking at the role of the Bureau of Meteorology last year some time, to which we contributed.
Senator BACK—The alternative approaches of prevention and suppression have been put to us. It was also put to us that the expenditure, for example, by the Commonwealth after the fires in Victoria could be seen almost as rewarding failure in the sense that, had the circumstances not been thus, the issue would not have been as great and, therefore, the expenditure by the Commonwealth and others might not have been as great. Would you care to comment from the department’s point of view as to where you sit in that spectrum?
Mr McNamara—I do not sit here with any definitive economic study, but I have absolutely no doubt, nor do any of my colleagues, that investment in prevention and preparedness is a lot cheaper than relying only on suppression and acting after the event. I have no doubt whatsoever.
Senator BACK—I want to come specifically to WA and the concept of a lead agency. Obviously in the past we have had CALM, the Bushfires Board, fire and rescue and now FESA joining those two. From your perspective here in Western Australia, in terms of the allocation of
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 15 resources to protect the community what would be the most effective expenditure of taxpayers’ money? Where should it go?
Mr McNamara—That is a simple question that has a complex answer, some of which goes to matters of policy that I do not care to enlarge on too greatly. Suffice it to say that a parliamentary committee here reported a couple of years ago now on this subject and recommended a number of changes that the government has adopted and enacted through the parliament late last year. There were changes made to the legislation so that FESA has the ability to take control of major fires, including fires that are under our control and on our land.
Having said that, the policy position and the position that is reflected in the bushfire preparedness report that was prepared following the Victorian fires and at the Premier’s request last year, while I cannot recite it accurately off the top of my head, certainly has a very clear understanding and a very clear expectation that the role is a partnership one between FESA, DEC and local government authorities. Land management and prescribed burning and fire response by land managers is an absolutely crucial part of that. The government expects, as it obviously is entitled to do, that there will be full collaboration, close co-operation and, if you like, seamless operation between us, FESA and local government authorities and, indeed, within the state emergency management arena are more broadly. That legislative change was made fairly late last year, before the last season. There was not a circumstance during the summer just gone where a fire that we were in control of was subjected to that ability for FESA to take control of it, as I understand, but that legal ability is now there is a consequence of a parliamentary committee’s report and the decision the government made.
Mr Carter—Just to add to that, Mr McNamara’s comment is correct—FESA did not exercise that new legislative ability over a DEC managed fire. It certainly did over several local government managed fires.
Mr McNamara—We still expect a strong partnership approach that respects our capacities and functions and mutually respects FESA’s and local governments’. I should add that the coronial report on the tragic deaths of the three truck drivers at Boorabbin was critical of us. That is very public. The coroner recommended that there be a review of our capability to manage bushfires. Euan Ferguson, the Chief Fire Officer and CEO of the South Australian Country Fire Authority, has been appointed to conduct that review. That has been announced by the government, and Mr Ferguson has commenced his information gathering for that purpose and will report this year. So, following the coronial report, he is examining our capability to manage major bushfires, and we welcome that. We wait to see what his report brings later this year.
Senator BACK—A point was made earlier about protection of water resources. I wonder if you could give us the benefit of any discussions you may have had or action you are taking in terms of the role that your department plays in assisting the water board with the management of our water storage areas and the impact of wildfire or prescribed burning.
Mr McNamara—I am conscious, as are my colleagues, of examples like Canberra where severe wildfires have stripped hillsides and had severe impacts on water quality and water supply. The Perth Hills fire, the Mundaring-Karragullen one we talk about in our submission, had some of those impacts in a water catchment area. We do not believe that our prescribed- burning program has adverse impacts in that way at all. In fact, by reducing the risk of major
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 16 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 catastrophic fire it mitigates the risk of that sort of siltation and so on of our water supplies. The Water Corporation in fact does fund us to do some prescribed burning in particular places to assist with inflows to their dams. There is a significant trial being carried on in the Wungong catchment in the Perth Hills currently, looking at both burning and thinning to see what the science tells us about water yield via those sorts of treatments. We will have to wait and see what that brings. As I am sure you are aware, the long-term rainfall records for the south-west of Western Australia show a marked decline in rainfall.
CHAIR—A 50 per cent decrease in run-off since 1975.
Mr McNamara—Yes, and hence desalination plants 1 and 2, and a realisation that we need a variety of water sources rather than just the dams at the base of our forests.
Senator BACK—Thanks.
Mr McNamara—There is one comment that has not been made in all our answers and it is about smoke management. Smoke management is something we take into account in our daily decision making on our prescribed burning program in our morning conference calls—hence the Bureau of Meteorology advice and so on is important in that. We put out haze alerts when we are going to put smoke over Perth. If you had been here a little earlier than today, over the last week or so, there were several of those. In the Perth area, we have been consistently below over a number of years the national environment protection measure thresholds for particulates and so on. We are very conscious of those things, but the government has taken the position that the community’s tolerance to some smoke has to be there because the prescribed burning program is so important, and the government has been quite strong in making those statements over the last year or so.
We are also very conscious of the smoke impact on other values. The Supreme Court made a decision late last year, again, in a case against us, by wine grape growers alleging damage to their grapes. That is a difficult juxtaposition of our burning opportunities or windows in the southern forests beside the times when grapes are ripening and pre-harvest. It is a difficult balancing act for us and one that we do take seriously. We went through a Supreme Court case on that last year.
CHAIR—All human endeavour has some failure, but the rest of Australia has a fair bit to learn from Western Australia and Tasmania from the evidence we have received. If you want to really see the argument about conservation, drive from Cooma to Tumut. As a result of a catastrophic mountain fire, that area has what we call death valleys where everything in some valleys is dead, but where there was a smaller fuel load things are blooming. Thanks very much.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 17
[9.33 am]
CAMPBELL, Mr Francis John, Member, The Bushfire Front Inc.
McKINNELL, Dr Frank, Member, The Bushfire Front Inc.
UNDERWOOD, Mr Roger, Chairman, The Bushfire Front Inc.
CHAIR—Welcome. I invite you to make an opening statement. If you want to alter anything you have already presented to the committee, now is the time to do it.
Mr Underwood—Thank you for the opportunity to meet with you and to make our presentation. We welcome the inquiry. We are aware that bushfire management in Australia is basically a matter for the states and territories, but we believe there is a role for the federal government—a role that they can and must play. We have prepared a paper which I will table with the committee later today which sets out our views on the various points that we think the Commonwealth government can play in bushfire management. The inquiry has a copy of our submission to which we wish to make no amendments. But we remind the committee that we drew attention in our submission to the two principal inadequacies in bushfire management in Australia: firstly, the policy vacuum and, secondly, the lack of effective fuels management throughout the country.
We made seven recommendations, which are set out in the submission, regarding the need for a national bushfire policy, the importance of defining best practice, a new approach to bushfire funding by the federal government, updated research priorities, the need for a national bushfire training institution, community education and the need for consistent bushfire terminology. We are happy to answer questions on any of those issues, following these introductory remarks.
The Bushfire Front comprises a small group of former forestry officers who devoted their lives and careers to bushfire operations, bushfire science and bushfire administration for a period of over 50 years. All of us held responsible positions. We knew that we had to get a job done and that we were accountable for the outcomes. We have hard-won practical experience and an understanding of bushfire science, so we are not coming at this from the point of view of amateurs or theorists. We formed into a group for a reason—that is, our conviction that bushfire management in Australia, including in Western Australia, ran off the rails during the 1990s and in the early 2000s. We could see massive deficiencies right across the country and we could visualise terrible results, and we were proven correct. Just as we foretold, Australia has been plagued by serious bushfires over the last decade, and even in WA there have been fires of a magnitude not seen since the 1960s.
There are a number of factors at work and many explanations for this lamentable situation but, in our view, there is no question that the root problems are political and institutional. Politicians and agencies forgot their fundamental responsibilities and began to look for an easy way out. They wanted a silver bullet that would tackle the bushfire threat without raising the ire of the environmentalists, and that silver bullet was the so-called American approach—in other words, a
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 18 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 focus on suppression, fighting fires after they start and a wilting away of investment in preparedness and damage mitigation.
In Western Australia, as in Victoria and New South Wales, the most serious weaknesses in bushfire management developed during the years when our governments relied upon Green preferences from urban voters to keep them in office. This coincided with a running down of the professional departments that had for decades been responsible for bushfire management. The situation in WA has not been as bad as in Victoria or New South Wales. We still have an agency here that has a commitment to fuel reduction burning, as you have just heard, but this was often done without sufficient political support. As a result, the fuel reduction program did not cease in WA but was simply wound back. It was wound back to the point where, we believe, it was almost ineffectual. For example, although the annual burning program target is 200,000 hectares a year, over many years in the late 1990s and early 2000s annual burning amounted to only about 100,000 hectares. The net effect was that the government was failing to execute its own policy, and serious bushfires were becoming an annual event.
At the same time that fuel reduction burning was being wound back on crown lands it virtually disappeared on private lands in south-west WA. We observe that the current level of bushfire fuel and the consequent bushfire threat on private land in WA is the worst it has been for 40 years. This is a direct consequence of a failure of the authorities, giving priority to fire suppression and failing to drive effective programs in prevention and damage mitigation.
For the last eight years, we have been running a campaign for the last eight years to try to get the WA government and governments elsewhere in Australia to increase their annual burning programs in terms of both the annual target and the annual work done and to shift the focus on private land more towards prevention. Until the terrible fires in Victoria last year, our stance was unpopular. Wherever we went, we were confronted by opposition from people who believe that fire is not a natural part of the Australian ecosystem and who oppose fuel reduction burning. We basically came up against three claims. The first claim was that fuel reduction does not prevent bushfires. Of course it does not, and no-one ever said that it did. The purpose of fuel reduction is to make firefighting easier and safer; it will not prevent fires occurring.
The second claim that was continually made was that fuel reduction is destroying the environment—the flora and the fauna. The environmentalists shot themselves in the foot on this issue, because whenever they started to object to logging in forests on the grounds that the forests were a delicate and fragile ecosystem full of rare flora and fauna they ignored the fact these very same forests had been subjected to fuel reduction burning for the last 50 years.
The third statement that was made was that fuel reduction burning is useless anyway and has no impact on fire behaviour under serious bushfire conditions. This statement flies in the face of the experience of every experienced firefighter across the nation, and it is not supported by the evidence given to the Victorian royal commission.
In conclusion, we urge you to take away three messages from these hearings: first, there is a need for a comprehensive national bushfire policy that will guide priorities, funding and research; second, there is a need for the Commonwealth to find a way to support the states in both political and practical ways to get effective fuel reduction in bushland; and, third, we need assistance to seek to overcome the myths and poor science put out by those who are opposed to
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 19 fuel reduction burning. In our view, opposition to effective bushfire management is not merely irresponsible but fundamentally inhumane. We believe that, until the state governments accept the importance of bushfire management and start to provide appropriate leadership, the situation will not improve and the federal government—in particular the Senate—will have to fill the vacuum. We table these notes and a copy of our paper on the role of the federal government in bushfire management and again thank you for the opportunity to discuss the issue with you today.
CHAIR—Thank you very much.
Senator O’BRIEN—Given that land management is generally the province of the states, how would you expect that the Commonwealth would impose its will on the states?
Mr Underwood—The Commonwealth can play a number of roles. Firstly, it can broker the development of the national bushfire policy, which I have already discussed. Secondly, it can provide funds for bushfire preparedness and damage mitigation, which I believe is, as Senator Back said earlier, a far more economic way of providing money than coming in after a fire and helping to repair the damage. So it is practical money and funding for proper programs. The third way is through research. We know that the federal government already provides funds for bushfire related research in Australia through the CRC. We are not satisfied with the way the CRC is operated, nor are we satisfied with the way a lot of fire research is done in academic institutions around Australia. We want to see a situation where research is taken out of the universities, decentralised back to the states and placed in the hands of practical scientists who are trying to improve the standard of bushfire management, as opposed to a lot of the research that is being done, which seems to us to hinder good management and work against it.
Education and training is another massive area. We believe there is a need for a national bushfire training institution of some sort which will bring together people from all the states, will be funded by the Commonwealth and will provide a standard form of training and education to bushfire managers across the country. No such thing exists at the moment.
Finally, probably the most important thing is that the Commonwealth can provide a system of auditing and public reporting on actual performance in terms of bushfire management. The situation at the moment is that state agencies around Australia who are responsible for bushfires audit and report on themselves, or else they are not audited and reported upon by people that know anything about it. The Commonwealth could set up a system that says, ‘This is an ideal bushfire management system; this is best practice; this is the way the states are performing against it.’ It could provide an independent audit and make it public. That has never been done yet, and until it is done people will be able to get away with doing anything.
In summary, although we do not want to talk about federal intervention, which is always unpopular in the states, we believe we are looking for what I prefer to call ‘federal leadership’, which is looking at the issues right across the board and taking away some of those important points that I mentioned.
Senator O’BRIEN—They are interesting ideas, but the problem is that you can only really lead volunteers. The idea of conscripting the states by some sort of carrot and stick approach is
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 20 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 one that certainly does not guarantee success. Do you think that there is a chance of swaying public opinion? How would you go about that?
Mr Underwood—I would hope that there could be improved community education about fire. One of the biggest issues that we confront in our life is that Australian people have a very poor understanding of bushfire science and bushfire management. They cannot even use the terms properly. You open the paper and see people talking about back-burning when they mean fuel reduction burning, and all sorts of things like that. To the best of my knowledge, schoolchildren are not taught about fire. My own three children went right through primary school and high school, some of it in country schools, never hearing or learning a thing about bushfire preparedness, bushfire safety measures and action to take in the event of a bushfire. These things are simply not taught in schools.
Senator O’BRIEN—I think you will find there is variability about that. I am a Tasmanian senator and I know that schoolchildren are taught about those issues in Tasmania and about the importance of home plans in the case of fire.
Mr Underwood—Yes. I know Tasmania reasonably well and I admire the system that applies in Tasmania and wish it applied more widely. Certainly here in WA, and from what I have seen of Victoria and New South Wales, understanding and knowledge about fire is very poor and it is particularly poor in the new generation of people that are moving into the rural areas and replacing farmers.
Senator COLBECK—You talked about research and research direction. Where are the key influences, in your view, coming from that are controlling the research agenda that is going on at the moment? You made some comments about the direction of the CRC and some of that current research. Could you give us a sense of where you see the controlling influences coming from and why there is marginalisation of some of the practitioners, if you like, that have long-term experience in actually managing some of these landscapes?
Mr Underwood—We see the principal influence on the bushfire CRC being the fire authorities around Australia. Generally the principal interest of the fire authorities around Australia is in fighting fires after they start, not in land management. The biggest change that needs to be made to the CRC is to redress that balance so that the agencies and the people who are experienced in and know about land management have a more telling input into the research priorities of the CRC than do the people who are just interested in fighting fires after they start.
Senator BACK—I want to go to the question of the formal education of those who will become the land management officials into the future. I am speaking about formal education, not community awareness. Can you explain to us where people are being trained now and where the programs are being undertaken now? And can you give us your advice as to the adequacy of these programs for training the people who will replace those who come after your generation?
Mr Underwood—Formal training in bushfire management in Australia is probably at an all- time low at the moment. If you go back to when I did my degree in forestry, I was taught fire by Alan McArthur, who was probably the foremost fire authority and scientist in the world at that stage. These days you go to the ANU or the University of Melbourne or some of the universities around Western Australia and you find that fire is not being taught any longer by people who
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 21 have had any experience. They have never had their fingers burnt. We have had a look at some of the curriculum given to undergraduates and, quite frankly, we are appalled at what we see. There is a terrible status in terms of formal education.
More importantly than that, the formal education probably only provides the scientific background; learning the ropes on the job is the most critical thing. Because there has been a decline in professional agencies that are involved in bushfire management in terms of their numbers and their staff, the young people coming in are not getting the mentoring that they used to get from the old hands that was so important.
Senator BACK—We heard from the professor at ANU who was saying that the practical component was more voluntary than being a requirement. Can you give us some idea of what you would regard as being a minimum for practical experience for undergraduate students? Could you put that in terms of hours or experiences that they should actually be exposed to?
Mr Underwood—I can give you the experience that Dr McKinnell and Mr Campbell and I had. We were required throughout our undergraduate years to work in a bushfire gang for the whole summer. It was a four-year course. For three of the summers in that course, we went into the field and worked in a fire gang.
CHAIR—Which would have taught you there was some danger involved.
Mr Underwood—It taught us all sorts of things. We had periods of working up in a lookout tower, we worked on burning and we worked with fighting fires. Some of us got into some pretty hairy situations and got out again. I look around and I do not see any of that done anymore.
Mr Campbell—Probably one of the things that happens is that, as a young bloke, you get imbued with the views of the older overseers, the more experienced people that have been involved in fire, and you start to realise that these guys really believe in what they are doing. It gives you a different approach to how you deal with your professional actions later on. I think it is absolutely basic, as Mr Underwood has said, to the educational process. You get the right attitude.
Senator BACK—On a different topic, your group gave advice to a Victorian parliamentary committee I think in 2008. Can you tell us what the outcome of that committee was? Did they ever table a report? Did it go anywhere? Were there actions taken as a result of it?
Mr Underwood—The committee came to Perth and I met with them for almost a whole morning. I was impressed by the committee. They were enthusiastic and interested. They went away and in the end published a report, a copy of which was sent to me, and I thought it was one of the best reports that I had seen come out of a parliamentary group for many, many years. I understand that report was submitted to the Victorian parliament and to the Victorian government and it was noted. I understand that is about all that happened to it.
CHAIR—There have been lots of those.
Mr Underwood—I think it is gathering cobwebs somewhere at the moment.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 22 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
Senator BACK—I asked a question of the earlier witnesses regarding practical evidence of the value of prescribed burning in terms of protection of communities. From your experience, can you illustrate to us evidence in Western Australia where you can demonstrate that fuel reduction or prescribed burning has actually worked in practice?
Mr Underwood—I can think of many instances when fires have threatened farmland, settlements and towns and where we were able to successfully deal with the fire only because it went into an area of light fuel and did not hit the town or the farm burning intensely out of very heavy fuels. I have published a paper in conjunction with some co-authors on this subject which I could arrange to have delivered to the committee. Frank, do you want to comment on Cyclone Alby?
Dr McKinnell—Yes. In addition to the paper that Mr Underwood referred to, there was a published incident concerning the town of Donnybrook during Cyclone Alby. Cyclone Alby provided winds of 130 kilometres an hour from the north-west in April 1978. The fire started about five kilometres north-west of Donnybrook, a town at that time of roughly 3,000 people. It headed straight for the town coming out of private property.
It came out of private property as a crown fire and then hit an area of state forest— Donnybrook block, as it used to be called. The whole block had been burnt about 18 months previously, and as a result the fire virtually stopped. It came down from the crowns, trickled around and was easily contained within a very short period of time, with minimum effort and with complete safety. If that burnt had not been done, there is no doubt whatever the town of Donnybrook would have been obliterated, because the fire had been running on the other side of the forest block into long grass and peri-urban areas, which always carry heavy fuel loads. That is a classic example in our case of the value of fuel reduction burning.
Senator BACK—I wonder whether you could give us the converse case. Put the Dwellingup fires of 1961 to one side. Can you give us instances in this state where town sites or communities were endangered and subsequently fires occurred as a result of there not having been prescribed burning or fuel reduction burning?
Mr Underwood—Most of those examples would be in Victoria rather than in Western Australia. There are also examples in Canberra and in Tasmania in 1964—or was it 1966?
Senator BACK—1966.
Mr Underwood—Yes.
Dr McKinnell—The potential for similar sorts of disasters does exist here, especially in the Perth Hills area where there is a lot of private property, carrying very heavy fuel loads. There have been restrictions on burning in the forest area to the east by DEC as a result of the smoke management consideration in particular. Mr McNamara stated that in the last year or so the government had relaxed the smoke restrictions. Before that there was an overt government policy to restrict smoke over the metropolitan area which did impact negatively on DEC’s burning program.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 23
Senator BACK—In relation to the recent Toodyay fires where power lines were implicated, can you give us the benefit of your knowledge in terms of the impact of power lines causing fires in rural Western Australian, and what can be done to minimise that risk?
Mr Underwood—Yes. There is a long history in Western Australia, as in all states, of power lines causing fires. Measures can be taken to minimise the incidences of power-line caused fires. They tend to be extremely expensive and are generally not implemented because of that reason. In Western Australia, our power distribution system is quite old now—old poles, old pole-top technology—and in many cases the power lines are running through areas with very heavy fuel underneath them or surrounding them. All of those things make a recipe for more rather than fewer power-line fires, in my opinion.
I am glad you mentioned Toodyay because I had forgotten Toodyay. Toodyay is a very good example of an area where fuel reduction burning had not taken place. There was an intense fire, which started from, we think, a power line—though there is some dispute about that. It burnt into very heavy fuel in an area of rural subdivision, and the local brigades were unable to handle it. The fire caused an enormous amount of damage.
Senator BACK—It has been put to us in hearings in Canberra and Melbourne that there has been, either deliberately or coincidentally, a reduction in reliance on local expertise in incident control and activity on the fire grounds, to the extent now that a lot of volunteers are feeling undervalued or that they cannot take actions in their brigade structures that they may have undertaken in the past. Would you care to comment on that observation and whether it is valid for Western Australia?
Mr Underwood—Only to the degree that I have heard exactly that same thing said, but I am not really in a position to comment on the real situation. I am not close enough to that.
CHAIR—Thank you very much for your evidence today. I think what Senator Back has just raised is deadset true. In New South Wales, I have been burnt out twice. We flew over the last fire that burnt my place out. We did not lose any buildings or assets, because we were sensible enough to be fire conscious around the buildings and have them cleared and all the rest of it, but you see places where the grass grows up under the clothes line—and they wonder why they get burnt out. It is pretty stupid. Canberra got burnt out. A snake handler occasionally gets bitten by the snake. They did not go into the Brindabella forest and put it out. They let it burn for four or five days because they said it was an occupational health and safety hazard. How bloody ridiculous! Thanks very much.
Senator BACK—Can I just confirm, Mr Underwood, that you are going to table your terminology document and the advice you gave to both the federal and the Western Australian governments? You did indicate you would table those.
Mr Underwood—I have not got the terminology document with me, but I can send it to the secretary.
Senator BACK—Thank you.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 24 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
Mr Underwood—I will table a copy of our paper on the role of the federal government in bushfire management.
Proceedings suspended from 10.01 am to 10.16 am
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 25
SCHULTZ, Dr Beth, Forests and Fire Campaigner, Conservation Council of Western Australia
VERSTEGEN, Mr Piers, Director, Conservation Council of Western Australia
CHAIR—Welcome. Do you have any comments to make on the capacity in which you appear?
Mr Verstegen—Dr Schultz is a voluntary campaigner with the Conservation Council and has been awarded an Order of Australia for her efforts in respect of forest issues, including fire.
CHAIR—I invite you to make an opening statement.
Mr Verstegen—I will ask Dr Schultz to speak to some of the detail of our submission but, before she does, I will just make a very brief introductory statement. The Conservation Council is Western Australia’s peak environment group. We represent over a hundred community based and volunteer conservation groups throughout the state. Our approach is really towards finding solutions to environmental issues—that is, solutions based advocacy.
The council has a strong interest in fire management in Western Australia, particularly the role of prescribed burning and its impact on the environment. The council recognises a role for targeted prescribed burning as part of a comprehensive wildfire management strategy, but we have outlined in our submission a range of prevention and mitigation measures which we need to round out an approach to bushfire management. We will also provide some evidence in respect of the impacts of prescribed burning on the environment and why in some cases we do not believe that it is the best strategy for managing our bushfire impacts and risks in Western Australia.
To step you through the basis of our submission, we are going to talk briefly about the harmful impacts of prescribed burning on biodiversity, the abundance of scientific evidence that backs up those claims and the harmful impacts of prescribed burning on human health and industries. We will talk to some extent about the effectiveness of prescribed burning and whether prescribed burning is an effective way of managing bushfire risk. We will also talk about a suite of other necessary precautions which we believe need to be taken into consideration when planning for bushfire management, which includes prescribed burning in a targeted way which is perhaps different to the way it is used at the moment. With that, I will hand over to Dr Schultz, who will to talk you through some of the detail of our submission.
Dr Schultz—I will start with a quote from the Kings Park board:
Frequent fires have a disastrous effect on many species of flora and fauna and their habitat structure.
These are reputable scientists, and they have in fact stopped prescribed burning in Kings Park because of the problem of weeds. Frequent fires for whatever reason, whether it is wildfire or prescribed burning, have a disastrous effect on many species of flora and fauna. I have a list of the forest fauna that are on WA’s endangered species list. Nine species of mammals and 11
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 26 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 species of birds that are forest dwelling or in the associated ecosystems are on WA’s endangered species list. The main human induced activities in our forests are logging and burning, and they must be having some impact on these creatures being endangered.
Fire is presented as a natural phenomenon, but the only natural fires are those started by lightning. If you drop an incendiary from a helicopter, it is not a natural fire; it is no more natural than pivot irrigation. So we have to be careful about our terminology.
CHAIR—I hope you do not think there is anything wrong with farmers—they are not natural either.
Dr Schultz—Yes, I am trying to make the connection. There are several things on which we totally agree with a Bushfire Front, and one is terminology. If firefighting and fire mitigation and management are to be Australia-wide, we need standard terminology. Mr Underwood cited of the misuse of the expression ‘back-burning’, and I think that irritates me as much as it irritates him.
We have species here that are Gondwanan relicts, like the Moggridgea spiders that the live in the bark of tingle trees. They have been around for millions and millions of years. The fact that they are very fire sensitive suggests that some areas were not subjected to burns in the past. We are told that there is a fire triangle—air, fuel and ignition—and that the only thing we can touch is the fuel. Later on I will address the fact that we must focus on forces of ignition, especially arson, which seems to be all too prevalent and increasing throughout Australia. Our south-west forests are in decline. The cumulative impacts of frequent fires, unsustainable logging, dieback and other fungal diseases and decline in rainfall are all being exacerbated or likely to be exacerbated by climate change.
On the harmful impacts of smoke on human health, it is recognised that it is the particulates in wood smoke that are a very serious health problem. Efforts are made to prevent smoke over Perth, but the smoke invades country towns and rural properties and is a health hazard to the people there as well as to Perth people. So it is not just a minor nuisance to city dwellers; it is a serious health hazard.
In our submission we noted the adverse impacts of prescribed burning on certain industries. The wine industry was mentioned, but beekeeping is also impacted. There used to be a massive flowering of karri—I think it was called a mast year—when all the karri flowered at once. There was so much flowering that the apiarists from the eastern states used to come. There has not been one of those years since 1967. It is interesting that aerial prescribed burning in the karri forest began in 1965. This burning interrupts the flowering cycle and destroys the blossoms. In places like the beekeepers reserve, some species that were very important to the beekeepers have disappeared.
Smoke impacts on tourists and recreationists. We used to go down south and see ‘aerial burn imminent’, but I noticed they have changed the signs. For a tourist or a recreationist from interstate or overseas, it was quite a frightening sight, and burned bush land is not particularly attractive. Prescribed burning in WA was begun to protect the timber resource in the northern jarrah forest. But it was found by forest department officers in the 1980s that, if fire or mechanical damage gets through the bark, then you get fungi in, then you get termites in and
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 27 then you get rot up the middle of the tree. That could be one reason why they are having great difficulty finding first and second grade jarrah sawlogs today.
Moving on to the effectiveness of prescribed burning, I do not know why the DEC people say it began in 1953; it began in 1952, and I can give you the forest department documentation to show you that. The 1961 royal commission said that the fuel age around Dwellingup was from zero to eight years, which is pretty much what they are aiming at now. So nine years of prescribed burning around Dwellingup did not really help with the Dwellingup fire. The burning increased after the Dwellingup fire, so that, in the sixties and seventies and right up into the middle of the eighties, they were burning the forests every five to seven years—and it is not just forest. There are 2.4 million hectares that DEC manages in the south-west, and about 16 per cent of that is other ecosystems, but they get burned at the same time and sometimes more frequently, like the flats in between forest stands. They get burned first in order to protect the timber resource, remembering that this is run by people whose primary interest is timber production, so timber gets a very high priority and probably a higher priority than the conservation of biodiversity.
The reason that prescribed burning may be making the environment more inflammable is that the areas where fires would have stopped, the moister areas, are now getting burnt out. I have a classic photo of the roots of a tree where a prescribed burn went through a swamp and burnt all the organic material. This had accumulated over thousands of years, but in one escape of a prescribed burn it was all gone.
We have evidence that there are many species that live in long-unburnt areas, and the routine of burning at too-frequent intervals for the species puts them at risk. There is anecdotal evidence, and there should be more research on this, that very long unburnt areas have a lower fuel load than more recently burnt areas. There are people living in the south-west who will declare that karri forest that has not been burnt for 100 years or longer may well have less of a fuel load than more recently burnt areas, and one study showed that the fire scars in virgin karri forests were up to 220 years apart, which suggests that natural fire in the original karri forests was very infrequent.
CHAIR—Would you be offended if I pulled you up now and we asked some questions. You have done very well. Thank you very much for that. One of the things that trouble me about all of this, though—and I am a farmer, and Australia’s farmers are bloody good environmentalists; it is all about survival and self-interest—is that the science is saying we are going to lose up to 40 per cent of the run-off in southern Australia, seriously affecting the south-west here, by 2050; the weather is going to be more event based; and the events are going to be more catastrophic. I rode for two days through the Snowy—funnily enough, with Malcolm Turnbull—on horseback the year after the fires up there, and we did not see a single living thing—not a bird, not a bee— other than wild horses. That was after a catastrophic fire. Yet, when we rode into places where there had been livestock that adjoined the national park, things were normal. Fuel loads surely have something to do with it.
Dr Schultz—Yes.
CHAIR—Do you try and do a cost-benefit analysis of the risk of a catastrophic event versus the order of a controlled burn? And I do not give a bugger whether you call it a back-burn or a
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 28 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 front-burn. I was a fire controller and all I know is that, when you have a fire break ahead of a fire and the fire gets away, you are a mug, but if it saves the district you are a hero, so there you go. But do you actually try and measure the benefit versus the catastrophe?
Mr Verstegen—If I can respond to that, the question may not recognise the entirety of what we are trying to put forward in our submission, which is not that prescribed burning should not be used but that a whole range of mitigation measures need to be used, and prescribed burning is one of those. But, in the application of prescribed burning, we need to be far more cognisant of the impact that that has on the environment. In this section that Beth was just talking through, we believe there is significant evidence to suggest that, in many ecosystems, prescribed burning and frequent prescribed burning, as we have seen in more recent years, can lead to an increase in the fire prone nature of those environments.
There are a range of factors that are at play in respect of that. One is that weeds can get into those environments much more easily after fire. Another one that Beth was starting to touch on is the response of some of these ecosystems to prescribed burning. For example, in the karri and tingle forests in the south-west, the response to prescribed burning—or any fire event, really—is a massive germination of a very dense thicket of understorey species. That thicket can last for 10 to 30 years, by which time those species start to die and decompose. After a longer period of time—50 years or so—you get to a situation where the fuel loads are very much reduced. Unfortunately, in Western Australia we believe there is a lack of robust science into the long- term measuring of fuel loads and the long-term effect o prescribed burning. Instead what we are seeing is this short rotational cycle of the application of prescribed burns, which regenerates that thicket and keeps, in our view, a very high fuel load.
I think that there are issues with the methodology by which fuel is measured that need to be examined, but if the premise that we are suggesting is correct—prescribed burning in many cases can lead to increased fire risk in ecosystems—we need to ask very seriously, not just from an environmental perspective but from the perspective of protecting life and property, whether continued reliance on this treatment and continued over-reliance on this prescription is actually going to be effective in reducing—
CHAIR—Do you also consider the runoff impact? You guys over here are going to have a serious runoff problem. You have one now. The controlled burn is mosaic, so things move next door and then come back later. This is versus the catastrophic everything-is-dead event, which is going to become more common if we allow it to, and the impact that the catastrophic event has on runoff with the need for the regrowth of the forest. The controlled burn does not have the regrowth, because you do not kill the primary growth. Do you consider that?
Mr Verstegen—I think the distinction that you are making is an important one but, in some cases, may be artificial. What we see with the application of prescribed burning is that it is almost impossible to achieve the type of mosaic effect that you are talking about.
CHAIR—With great respect, I must pull you up there. That is bullshit. We have taken evidence in Sydney about Kurrajong Heights. They have a mosaic burn—a dinky-di, draft board, mosaic, controlled fire burn. You do not recognise that?
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 29
Mr Verstegen—I can only speak for what we see in Western Australia, and what we do see in Western Australia is that overwhelmingly there is a policy that talks about mosaic burning but very often these prescribed burns become out of control. As a result, we do not end up with a mosaic pattern of fuel reductions.
CHAIR—So you would be happy to have mosaic if it could be proven to you that it was mosaic.
Dr Schultz—I think there would still need to be areas that are left unburnt longer. The DEC evidence suggested a three-kilometre fuel reduced zone around assets that need to be protected, but beyond that, to impose this current regime of repeated burning—Mr McNamara said that the national parks are burnt more frequently than state forests—gives rise to a situation where young karri are fire sensitive for up to 25 years. Natural regeneration in the karri conservation areas is being killed by the current prescribed burning. When the old veterans die there will not be enough to take their place. So, yes, it is an ideal, but over here I do not think it is achieved. Even fires for biodiversity management can aim at a 90 per cent burn coverage. There are instances where areas have missed out on the burning and they go in and do what they say is a ‘blackout’: they deliberately burn the bits that have missed out.
Senator BACK—I am obviously concerned, as we all are, about protection of communities and other assets. You mentioned a three-kilometre—
Dr Schultz—I think that was what DEC was recommending for fuel reduction—remembering that fuel reduction does not always have to be by means of fire. If you turn over to our precautions, we are in a situation where there are more and more assets, homes, being built in high fire-risk areas—not just in forest but in coastal heath. In Western Australia the local governments have the ability to identify fire zones, under legislation, but they do not do it. We are getting more and more subdivisions in high fire-risk areas. Again, we totally agree with Mr Underwood and his concerns about these subdivisions in coastal health with one access road. We are developing fire traps. The previous minister for planning, Ms MacTiernan, said, ‘We can’t stop people building in high fire-risk areas.’ We are inviting the problem by allowing this to happen. Remember that the COAG report—the big report in 2004—said that the first line of defence is proper land use planning. You do not allow people to build in high-fire risk areas. If they do, they need to know what they are doing with building constructions.
The next point was raised by the Planning Institute of Australia: the construction of fire shelters. That is an issue that I do not know has been addressed, but they have some very good recommendations from research into standards of fire shelters and what needs to be in fire shelters. As Senator Heffernan said, we are moving into a phase of more fires and more intense fires. Over here we have introduced compulsory evacuation. There are people who will stay with their homes, come what may, and they need to have somewhere to go when the fire comes over. It seems that there is almost no dwelling that will stand the sort of fire that went through Victoria. People are building their own fire shelters. You can buy fire shelters. They may be fire traps, because we do not have standards for them.
Mr Verstegen—I could very briefly add to that response. I draw attention to the particular nature of the issue in Western Australia. As you would be aware, there are national building codes that provide for different building standards for areas that are declared as fire prone areas.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 30 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
Those building codes are available for implementation by local councils and by authorities, but that relies on the identification of fire prone areas. In Western Australia, I think there are only two shires that have declared fire prone areas for the application of those building codes. As a result of that, you get the type of thing that Beth has just tabled, which is an advertisement for a very obviously fire prone dwelling with no indication to the potential purchaser that it is a dwelling in a fire prone area. There are some disincentives to the actual identification and listing of fire prone areas for the application of those building codes. It may be that it has an effect on property prices and it may be that it becomes more expensive to develop land in those areas for those reasons, but that absolutely needs to be looked at, as Beth said, as a first priority.
Senator BACK—It all comes back to the reason we are here, and that is to try and have an influence, or see the extent to which the Commonwealth can have an influence, on minimising the risk of fire to communities, biodiversity et cetera. Earlier this morning a point was made about the 1961 fire, where the town of Dwellingup burnt well before the head fire appeared. In other words, it was caused by embers. My recollection of the Victorian fires in early 2009 is that the fire was spotting some 16 kilometres ahead of the actual fire. I wonder about the extent to which reliance on a narrow area of fuel reduction around a town site or around a built-up area is adequate. I agree with you completely—I have had many of those arguments myself, in my previous role here, with some of the local governments—but you cannot abrogate responsibility and just say, ‘It’s up to them. We’ve done our bit as the state in alerting them to this.’ Do you agree that there has to be some sort of benchmarking, some sort of national policy, that determines best practice for different environments and some accountability for those who have to deliver it against those benchmarks for best practice?
Dr Schultz—Western Australia is, as usual, different. It is ironic that the current prescribed burning aims to be mild and just go along the forest floor. That will not remove the fuel on the trunks of the trees, and that is where you get the firebrands.
Senator BACK—It does remove the litter at ground level, doesn’t it?
Dr Schultz—Yes, and if there is nothing to burn you will not have a fire.
Senator BACK—If there was nothing to burn, you would not put a prescribed burn through.
Dr Schultz—That is the aim of the burn—to reduce or remove the flammable material, which is called fuel, remembering that it is also habitat for many creatures, food for many creatures and nutrients that support the ecosystems. But mild fires leave the bark intact, so there you have the firebrands. I do not think we have quite the same firebrand problem with jarrah and marri as they do with the stringy-bark species in the eastern states. Also, the mild fires do not touch the canopy, so if you do get a canopy fire then you get a huge problem like they had in Victoria. The prescribed burns which aim to be mild will not reduce the fuel load in the canopy.
Remember that we are living in Australia’s only terrestrial biodiversity hotspot. The report of the EPA said that biodiversity conservation should be given first consideration in fire planning. That is our problem with the current prescribed burning. I can envisage prescribed burning programs that we would be totally happy with, but the current prescribed burning involves repeated burning, at short intervals, of large areas when we do not know the impacts. Sure, plants come back, but the ones that do not come back we do not know about because they are not
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 31 there. I think one could raise the argument that we have already lost species in our frequently burned south-west forests and associated ecosystems.
Research shows that the time to first flowering of obligate seeders is, for almost all species, three years, which means that your minimum fire frequency should be double that. That pretty much coincides with the fire frequency, so that anything that took longer than six years to flower and seed, if it was there, has gone. I think we have to look at a fuel management system that balances life—life is of course top—and valued assets. But biodiversity is also a valued asset, especially in Australia’s only biodiversity hotspot.
CHAIR—So how do you control the fuel load?
Mr Verstegen—Perhaps I can intervene here and try and answer your question more directly, Senator, because I think it is a good question, and that is the reason why I do this. You asked two things. You asked about a national standard of best practice. You also asked about the issue of proximity of the fire front to the assets that we are talking about protecting. We have touched on the issue of planning controls, which are severely lacking in Western Australia, but we have not touched on the contribution that rapid response firefighting efforts can make. I guess what we are saying is that there needs to be a whole suite of approaches which together can reduce the risk. You cannot rely on any one particular approach. We cannot just rely on planning controls, because of the issues that you have raised; we cannot just rely on rapid response, because of a whole range of issues with that; and we cannot just rely on prescribed burning.
What we are seeing, unfortunately, in Western Australia, we would suggest, is an overreliance on prescribed burning as an easy mechanism. I think there are range of factors that lead into why we have an overreliance on this, which I can elaborate on if you like. But that is impacting on our environments, we believe, in a way which is not sustainable. It is also not delivering the best risk management for our communities or our biodiversity in the south-west.
You have asked about a national standard. I think that that would be a good idea, but it absolutely needs to take into account the whole suite of different interventions and technologies that need to be applied before, during and after a fire to manage it. So: best practice, yes; one- size-fits-all, probably not. One of the issues that we are seeing in Western Australia—and this was identified in the COAG report—is that the main indicator of success of prescribed burning is how many hectares we have burnt. Senator Heffernan has suggested that we have a focus on mosaic burning, but when the primary indicator of our prescribed burning program is a target, in X hectares per year, we have an indication that is misaligned with the actual mechanism that we are trying to achieve.
Senator BACK—What I am having difficulty coming to terms with is the impact, be it on biodiversity or assets, of prescribed burning and the impact of uncontrolled wildfires. I do not think anybody would disagree that the impact on biodiversity of an uncontrolled wildfire is catastrophic and immense. We have seen that in the recent Victorian fires, we have seen it associated with the Canberra fires and we have seen it any number of times here. That is my concern in terms of the question.
You made the observation, Dr Schultz, that Steve Hopper and his group determined at some time in the past not to put any prescribed burns through Kings Park. I can remember a couple of
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 32 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 fires, I think in 1998 and 2001, which absolutely devastated Kings Park. In fact, I flew over Kings Park the other day and the western end of Kings Park—and I cannot think how long ago that fire was—causes me to question which is the greater evil, in the sense of impact on that asset, by virtue of not putting through a cool-season, be it autumn or winter, properly prescribed and conducted burn versus the impact of arson.
You were going to mention ignition. We all know the impact of arson. Every person who has attempted to address their mind to it simply comes up incredibly frustrated. I will never forget the first time we put a water bomber up. The fellow on his way back to Perth airport actually alerted the incident controller to the fact that he could see someone in a utility lighting the fire. That, again, was one of those catastrophic days. Do you agree that in a sense it is one or the other? Fuel has to be reduced, and if fuel cannot be reduced by means including—not exclusively but including—reduction burning then the inevitable outcome is going to be wildfire uncontrolled in the heat of our summer. Is that a reasonable conclusion?
Dr Schultz—Yes. I think there would be less disquiet if it were recognised that frequent prescribed burns are not good for biodiversity; if we could say honestly, ‘We’re going to have to burn but it comes at an environmental cost.’ We are going to lose species. We probably have already lost species. If we could honestly recognise that it does environmental damage, I think there would be a lot less disquiet on our part at the pressure to burn. Yes, we are going to have to accept it and, yes, catastrophic wildfires did occur in the past, as shown by the fire scars on karri trees that would be 220 years apart. But they were very infrequent. They are becoming more frequent. Because of climate change—the heating and the drying and probably more lightning— they are going to be more frequent. It is a balancing act, but we have to honestly recognise that too frequent prescribed burning means loss of species; so be it.
Senator O’BRIEN—I guess the questions are what ‘too frequent’ means, how intense a prescribed burn is, how much of a mosaic pattern you can establish in managing the burns and whether there is a solution for the karri forests and what you describe as their susceptibility in their early stages of regeneration. The proposition put to us, not just here but in a variety of evidence that we have already had, is that in reality fuel is the only thing that we as human beings can manage.
Dr Schultz—There is the ignition—and coming down a lot harder on arson. We have massively increased the penalties. A confessed arsonist was acquitted because all he burnt was bush. Fortunately they have changed the law to include bush as property, so if you burn bush you are also an arsonist and they have massively increased the penalties.
Senator O’BRIEN—It is usually people who have some antisocial purpose or who are in some way mentally affected to the point where they derive some satisfaction from the fire or being associated with fighting fires and those sorts of things.
CHAIR—They glaze over when the fire starts.
Senator O’BRIEN—It is a bit of a fantasy to suggest that we will stamp out that sort of antisocial behaviour, isn’t it?
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Dr Schultz—FESA has done a lot of work on that. It depends on how far it is from the school—whether it is school boys—and on the skill. The Hills fire was led by a very skilled arsonist. As part of education in schools we need to educate that fire harms plants and animals as well as humans and their property. Do you ever remember hearing the ABC program called Death of a Wombat?
Senator O’BRIEN—No, I do not.
Dr Schultz—It was a fantastic program about a wombat that got caught in a fire and died. Part of the education is learning about fire but learning that it is not always good and that it can have catastrophic effects.
Senator O’BRIEN—I do not think anyone is saying that fire is good but that the alternative to a controlled fire is a fierce and uncontrolled fire from time to time which will cause more damage. That is the proposition we are being presented with.
Dr Schultz—There is a line of thought that bush needs fire, and that is questioned by reputable scientists—that our environment needs a disturbance, of which fire is only one. We have a nice experiment going on here in Kings Park, where areas were absolutely stripped by the hailstorm. They are putting in transects to see whether the recovery after the hailstorm will be similar to the recovery after fire. It is often put that our bush does need fire. The only piece of research I have seen on that was the attitude of the land managers to fire—that fire is okay— which creates an attitude in the community that is more accepting of fire. I actually heard an arsonist say, ‘The bush needs fire; I was just doing it some good.’ So there is this strange attitude.
Senator O’BRIEN—But we should not make policy on the basis of those sorts of pronouncements, should we?
Dr Schultz—No.
Mr Verstegen—I think that is right, but equally we should not make policy on the basis of oversimplistic propositions such as the one you mentioned, which is that there is a choice between wildfires and frequent prescribed burning. The evidence we are presenting suggests that that is an oversimplistic analysis of the situation and that there are a whole lot of other factors at play and that prescribed burning is not always the direct force that combats more frequent wildfires. We have given some examples of situations where, in some cases, prescribed burning may increase fuel load and may increase the fire-prone nature of the vegetation. I think we need to move away from that oversimplistic analysis which suggests that it is an either-or situation.
Senator O’BRIEN—In evidence we were presented with today I saw the predictions of assessing the intensity of burn in areas that have been the subject of fuel reduction burn versus those that had not. A colour representation of cooler versus hot fire seemed to indicate that at least the intensity of fire was being significantly affected by the fuel reduction burn. Should we ignore that?
Mr Verstegen—I think that is one piece of evidence. But I think there are other pieces of evidence that need to be factored into any consideration on this matter. If you turn to the last
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 34 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 page of the submission we tabled, you will see a picture of a fire which stopped in the middle of a pine plantation. That was cited as part of a study on wildfire behaviour which concluded that it was ignition management that was consistently more important in explaining fire behaviour. I take your point: fuel loads are probably one of the ways that we can influence fire behaviour more easily. But the point we are making is that the way in which we do that has a complex response from the environment, and that complex response from the environment is not a simple one that prescribed burning equals reduced fuel load equals reduced fire risk.
Senator O’BRIEN—I am not sure what happened here, because the pine plantations around Canberra went up like bombs.
CHAIR—You can confirm, I guess, that there was not a thunderstorm?
Dr Schultz—That is what we are saying: the fire stops because of a change in the weather. It is very interesting. When we are told that the fire stopped because it ran into a recently fuel reduced area—
CHAIR—It is meaningless.
Dr Schultz—we are not told that there was a change in the weather or that the wind changed, and we are never told when the fires go straight through recently burnt areas. The concentration is to say it stopped because it went into a fuel reduced area and not that the wind changed, which is obviously what happened here.
Senator O’BRIEN—So your evidence is suggesting that, unlike other parts of Australia, parts of the Western Australian bush are not adaptive to fire and do not respond to fire as a regenerator, as is the case in the majority of eucalypt forests in south-east Australia and perhaps in parts of Northern Australia, and certainly in my state of Tasmania?
Dr Schultz—There are some reputable scientists who query the oft stated notion that our flora and fauna are adapted to fire. They claim, and have research to show, that the species are adapted to disturbance. Fire is one disturbance, a hailstorm is another and a drought is another.
Senator O’BRIEN—But some eucalypts clearly regenerate more quickly because of fire.
Dr Schultz—Yes.
Senator O’BRIEN—I think it has been scientifically proven that that is one of the important regenerators in some species of eucalypt. It is suggested, for example, that about 450 years ago about two-thirds of Tasmania was swept by a wildfire and that the endemic species were destroyed and the eucalypt regenerated, which affected the nature of the bush in Tasmania.
Dr Schultz—Yes.
Senator COLBECK—I want to follow on from your last comments and also from Senator O’Brien. I think it is quite reasonable to expect that fire is one disturbance, but trying to discount that in favour of other disturbances is a complete distraction. I was in a coupe couple of weeks ago and one of the disturbances credited with rates of regeneration was the forestry machinery
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 35 moving along the forest floor, disturbing the forest floor and stirring up the seedbed, which was creating regeneration. So your suggestion of a hailstorm and the impacts of it I can quite understand and accept. But the reality is that fire is a legitimate disturbance, and discussion of all the others is really a distraction to try to push fire out of the way. You made the comment earlier, and it is implied in your submission—I do accept, by the way, that what you are talking about is perhaps more the management of the fuel reduction regime rather than a blanket opposition to it, which I think is an important point to note, but it is not something that comes through necessarily in the public discussion.
Mr Verstegen—That is right.
Senator COLBECK—The public discussion is that you oppose it. People believe that and people are very reluctant to question what an environmentalist says versus what anyone else in the mix says, and that is an advantage that you hold, I suppose, in that argument. But that is the reality. We are questioning you now because of the evidence that has been put before us but my experience is that a journalist is much less likely to question you than to question what we would say. That perception that you oppose prescribed burning actually takes precedence in the overall argument and creates a problem.
Dr Schultz—I think that is due to our opponents. It is the old argumentum ad hominem or argumentum ad absurdum: you take the argument to the absolute extreme to paint your opponents in the worst possible light.
Senator COLBECK—I do not think that we need to go down that track. I would suggest that the conservation side are more than capable of taking, and have more than a propensity to take, arguments to the extreme. Let us not go down that track, because I do not think it helps any of us.
Mr Verstegen—If I can just address that, very quickly again. I was going to, but I did not, print out the history of press releases that we have had in respect of wildfire issues since I have been with the Conservation Council of Western Australia. I think I should have done that. I would be happy to forward those to you because they would suggest to you that what we are on about is not anti prescribed burning per se. In fact the vast majority of the comment that we make to the media is on a whole range of other issues and other mitigation factors that we consider are absolutely necessary. We have been pushing hard in advocating for the fixing of the fire-prone area zoning issue, for example, in Western Australia; we have been advocating on that very strongly. As a previous journalist, Senator, you would know that the media is looking for points of—
Senator COLBECK—I am not a journalist. I am a carpenter, which makes me a heretic in the whole equation!
Mr Verstegen—I am sorry, Senator.
CHAIR—We are going to have to wind up.
Senator COLBECK—I just want to go to your comment about prescribed burning. Kings Park seems to come up as an iconic area—and pardon me for not understanding the intricate
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 36 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 dynamics of Western Australia, coming from Tasmania, as my colleague does. ‘Do not prescribe burn, because it promotes weed growth’: that again is a distraction. Manage the weed problem. Because it promotes weed growth is not a reason not to do prescribed burning. You have another problem that you need to manage: weed growth. Manage the weeds and therefore, as we heard in evidence earlier this morning, in areas where the weeds are not prevalent you can actually go through and do prescribed burning and for all intents and purposes manage the cycle so that the issues that you are raising get dealt with. But do not come out and say, ‘Don’t prescribe burn, because of weed growth’, because that is what casts the impression. Say, ‘Let’s deal with the weed management.’ That is the issue; it is not the prescribed burning that is the issue.
Mr Verstegen—Sure. I think you would agree that throughout the Australian landscape we have a huge problem with weeds and introduced species—
Senator COLBECK—I agree.
Mr Verstegen—and we absolutely should be doing more to manage that issue. The impacts on biodiversity are significant, as well. But I think you would also agree that if the outcome that you are seeking in prescribed burning is to reduce the fuel loads and if, through the incursion of weeds or through the natural response of the environment through regeneration, fuel loads are actually increased, then you are not achieving your outcome.
Senator COLBECK—I agree with that 100 per cent. Then I hear the comment—and I think I have heard it here this morning—that you have climate change, increased temperatures and all of those things, and they are going to lead to more intense fires. My primary school training and education on the fuel triangle is that you need all the elements of the triangle to make those things occur, and there is absolutely no question that the fuel load is a critical factor in that triangle and the level of fuel load is directly proportionate to the intensity of the fire. So if you have a lower fuel load you are going to have a lower intensity fire. You only need to go to Victoria and look at what were described in the green carbon report by some in the environment movement as the most carbon-rich forests in Australia. Those forests do not exist anymore because they were heavily and intensively burnt in a devastating fire last year on Black Saturday.
Mr Verstegen—If I can respond to that, if you look at the way that ecosystems respond, they do not respond to impacts in a linear sort of way. We are looking at very complex responses from ecosystems. When we talk about the impact of climate change and the fact that it is going to lead to increased fire frequency and severity, we have also got to consider the issue that increased prescribed burning has an impact on our ecosystems which reduces their resilience and dries them out, which makes them more prone to being wiped out by wildfires. So, if you have a situation where some of the wet forests, like we have in the south-west of Western Australia and you also have in Tasmania, are being frequently burned, you are reducing the level of moisture in those ecosystems. You are reducing the peat and other deposits in those ecosystems which actually mitigate against the impacts of wildfire.
CHAIR—Thank you very much. We are going have to wind up.
Senator COLBECK—That is presupposing that it is the fire alone that is responsible for that and not other climatic conditions. So it is a matter of holistic management.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 37
Mr Verstegen—It is a complex of contributing factors.
Senator COLBECK—I am not arguing with you on that point.
CHAIR—Are we going to impose some discipline? Thank you for your presentation. The only flaw that I can see in your presentation is that you did not actually tell us how you are going to get rid of the fuel load. Thank you very much.
Dr Schultz—The woylie. It is a little animal that used to turn over 4.8 tonnes of soil in a year, and it has gone from our forests.
CHAIR—Thank you very much.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 38 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
[11.06 am]
HAMENCE, Mr Brian Victor, Member of State Management Committee, Association of Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades of Western Australia; Fire Control Officer, Shire of Bridgetown-Greenbushes
SOUSA, Mr Christopher, Member, Association of Volunteer Bushfire Brigades of Western Australia
CHAIR—Welcome. Thank you very much for your attendance today. We would be grateful to know whether you need to change any details of anything you have presented to the committee thus far.
Mr Hamence—We will stick with the statement that we sent in.
CHAIR—Would you like to make an opening statement? You do not have to.
Mr Hamence—No. I think our statement is—
CHAIR—It is very good.
Mr Hamence—in the original document we sent to the committee.
Senator BACK—Gentlemen, in the opening comments of your submission, you say:
Do not compare Western Australia with Victoria. Our hazard reduction is far better ...
Did you or any of your members have any experience with the recent Victorian fires and, if so, is there anything for Western Australia to learn as a result of those fires?
Mr Hamence—Yes, I think there is a lesson to be learnt there: do not allow Western Australia to get to that stage.
Senator BACK—Can you tell us what you mean by ‘that stage’?
Mr Hamence—In Western Australia, we are looking at fuel loadings of, say, eight to 10 tonnes per hectare of available fuel. Under bad weather conditions, you have a fire that is virtually out of hand, whereas the places in Victoria that had the bad fires had fuel loadings that were probably five and six times higher. The poor devils did not have a chance. They had extreme weather conditions. We do not have the extremes here that they experienced there. We have heatwaves. But you will note that we build up to a heatwave and then it cools off. We know what is coming. We can prepare for it. We rarely get the very strong winds like the ones they had in Victoria. So it is a different situation. Did you want to add anything, Chris?
Mr Sousa—No.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 39
Mr Hamence—Does that answer the question?
Senator BACK—It does, thank you very much. Unless others have any questions, we will address the question of the brigade membership et cetera. Among the issues presented to us in other hearings around Australia was that there are fewer volunteers and they are getting older. Points were also made about volunteer brigade members at the local level feeling disenfranchised and no longer independent to make the sorts of decisions they might once have made. From your experience as a bushfire control officer, can you advise us in Western Australia of whether there has been a trend in that direction or whether it is unchanged and whether at the local level brigade members feel as though they still have that level of control?
Mr Hamence—We still do have a level of control locally, which we ensure that we retain. There have certainly been attempts made to gradually take over the control. There has been a change in legislation that allows FESA to take control of any fire. But FESA were told very strongly to handle that carefully and with a bit of wisdom, because we will not be pushed around. You will find this generally with the rural bushfire brigades.
When you talk of bushfire brigades, it is not an all-encompassing term. You have the outer- metro area type or places on the edge like Bunbury and Geraldton. As you go further out, you come to the real rural bushfire brigades. Their cultures are different. The real rural bushfire brigades are usually made up of landholders. They help each other to look after their possessions, their properties, in a bad situation. They will look after the township as well, whereas the outer-metropolitan brigades are more or less looking after an outer-urban type of situation. The brigades tend to have a social influence among them. They are good brigades—do not think I am knocking them—but their approach is quite different from ours.
Senator BACK—Bridgetown is an area of obviously high risk in terms of forested areas and rainfall. For our benefit, can you give us an understanding of the circumstances which, under the new legislation, would cause a FESA incident controller to take control of a fire that you might initially have control of?
Mr Hamence—We had such a fire last year. For the first two days, our locals tried to handle it. The conditions were fairly bad. We decided that it was a bit more than we could handle and asked the Department of Environment and Conservation, or DEC, to take control, which they did and they did it well. And we worked in together very well.
Senator BACK—That was something you initiated or whoever—
Mr Hamence—Yes, it was initiated by our chief fire control officer. My colleague here is a deputy chief.
CHAIR—So the local decision was to go to what we would call a section 47. I have been in the position of an area incident controller and having to make a judgment on when a fire was beyond the capacity of the local resources.
Mr Hamence—We have a very good understanding with DEC. We are there for the same end, and we do work very well together.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 40 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
Senator BACK—Can you explain to us the current basis of funding for the volunteer brigades in Western Australia and, from your perspective, the adequacy of funding as brigade members?
Mr Hamence—You have just hit a raw nerve. The funding now comes through FESA, the equipment comes through FESA and the fire stations come through FESA. The raw nerve is that bushfire stations were allocated up to $60,000 whereas the others, such as the fire and rescue in Bridgetown, have put up two vehicle bays with no other infrastructure—it was already there— for $400,000. So there is quite an imbalance there. If you look around, you will find that this imbalance does exist. Our association is allocated $25,000 a year for administration. When you look at it, $25,000 is spread over nearly a million square miles—that is what it used to be; I am not sure what it is now. We take all of that to contact people.
CHAIR—This is of interest to me. I used to be a shire president, out in a bushfire brigade area. The shire used to fund a third, the farmer would put in a third and the insurance industry would put in a third. That has all gone now. The farmer no longer has any say over the equipment. They used to say that was because the farmers would use the pump during the off- season—and it would probably do the pump good to cart a bit of water. Now in our area, in New South Wales, if you are in the bush you cannot get money for a pump, a hose or a tank. But you can get it for a tanker, one per brigade—$280,000. You can get it for a shed to put the tanker in off the farm somewhere. You can get it to go to a computer course. I have been using a chainsaw since I was a kid. I cannot use a chainsaw at a fire unless I go and do a fire chainsaw course. The whole thing is crazy. Now we have a whole lot of people there who, when they go to the fire, are looking for the parade after the fire instead of going home and having a cup of tea and getting back on the header. The nature of the thing is slowly being eroded, in my view. Would you agree with that?
Mr Hamence—I do. I agree with you. At the last job I had, which Senator Back can relate to, I was with the Bushfires Board of WA. Earlier in my career, in the mid-seventies, one of the things I did on the Bushfires Board was teach chainsaw operation and maintenance. Like you, I can no longer use one because I have not got a ticket. Yes, we do have these restrictions coming in. Mostly, like good country blokes, we say, ‘Bugger you! We’re still doing it.’
CHAIR—That is exactly what we are doing.
Mr Hamence—As far as the local authority goes, yes, they are a tower of strength to us and we rely on them a lot. I hope that this continues.
Senator O’BRIEN—I see that in point 4 of your submission you are suggesting that there should be some restrictive control on moneys raised to assist people who have suffered loss through fire, passing that through a filter of compliance with community obligations in relation to fire mitigation. How would that work? Who would make the decision?
Mr Hamence—That is the awkward part. I suppose it comes back to how did a camel come to be: a committee designed a horse and then we got the camel.
Senator O’BRIEN—I do not think so. I think that is a nice saying, but it is not how the camel came to be at all.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 41
Mr Hamence—We would need a committee to sort this out. We did notice last year, after our big fire, that support came in straight away. People who had lost everything all of a sudden saw more clothes and more furniture than they had ever seen before. It just needed somebody with a fair amount of wisdom to help sort that out. The recipients are still shell-shocked. The day after their house has burned down they are not thinking at their best, so they do need assistance there. Unfortunately, in any society you will find that there are those people who see an opportunity, whiz in and get what they can for nothing. We need to watch them.
Senator O’BRIEN—I guess the test for the distribution of funds is the nature of the generosity of the provider. If someone wants to put a caveat on how their funds are distributed, that might not be unreasonable. But in most cases they do not, do they?
Mr Hamence—No. It is fairly hard to. In our case there was a lady from the local shire who did a sterling job on that. She is a very human person, a very empathetic sort of person. She handled it extremely well.
Senator O’BRIEN—Would people not then argue that if you did not insure you should not be provided for? Why should the people who insured their property be disadvantaged relative to those who did not?
Mr Hamence—I think most of them were insured. But the immediate problem is that your house burns down today and the insurance is not there tomorrow. There is that point, immediately after the fire, when they do need support and assistance.
Senator O’BRIEN—On another subject, how is the membership of the Association of Volunteer Bush Fire Brigades going? Is it going up or down, or is it static? Are there enough volunteers available? Can you give us a better picture.
Mr Hamence—No, there are never enough volunteers available, but our membership is going up. We are getting a lot of support now. Our role, as you probably realise, is to support the bushfire fighter. We can cut through bureaucracy rather quickly. Where the ordinary bushfire fighter has to go through a rather long and painful process, we can get straight through, and we are achieving quite a bit that way. We are doing this by not being confrontationalist. We are working with people rather than trying to work against them. As you would know, nobody ever wins a confrontation. One side might lose worse than the other, but that is as good as you get.
Senator O’BRIEN—Are there any particular areas where there is difficulty getting volunteer bushfire brigade members?
Mr Hamence—All over the place you will find that there are some who do not really want to go that other step, but we have enough support to carry on. We are represented at all the DOAC meetings—the District Operations Advisory Committee. We are getting the message over to the fire control officers. There just are not enough of us to reach every member. It is just too big a job for a bunch of volunteers.
Senator BACK—I have two questions resulting from your discussion with Senator O’Brien. Is there concern about whether there is adequate legal protection for volunteers acting in their capacity as brigade members or fire control officers? If they put a back-burn through and it gets
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 42 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 away from them, is there concern within the volunteer group about whether or not you are adequately protected legally against possible claims?
Mr Hamence—I think we are. I will get my colleague to answer.
Mr Sousa—The Bush Fires Act has that protection for firefighters, for any actions they take while acting in good faith. We have not come up against a situation yet where those powers have been exceeded and volunteers have been in trouble with the law.
Senator BACK—It has been put to us—I think in a submission from witnesses that we are hearing from this afternoon—that there could be some consideration of recompense to volunteers, to perhaps remunerate them for fuel used or whatever. Does your association have a view on this?
Mr Hamence—This is something that has come up several times in the past years. My membership of the volunteer bushfire brigade goes back a fair long way. The volunteers have, in the past, not wanted it, because they firmly believe that if somebody is paying, somebody is calling the tune. Our volunteers prefer to work within their own hierarchical structure and make that work, rather than have an outside force saying, ‘We’re paying you so much to do this, so get to and do it.’
Senator BACK—The summary of that is there would not be a high degree of interest in or support for that concept.
Mr Hamence—I do not believe so.
Senator BACK—In the outer metropolitan areas, do you think that would hold true?
Mr Hamence—Yes. For the ones that I made, yes, I think that would.
Senator BACK—One of the points you made was to do with vehicle design for the area specifically. Am I to read into that that there is some sort of attempt to actually standardise vehicle types and build-ups across Australia? Previously, in Western Australia I thought there was an adequate process in place for the selection of vehicles and the design of build-ups.
Mr Hamence—I would say there is not some sort of attempt; it is a reality. We are driving Victorian style fire truck, and this is another argument I had. Just to fill you in a bit: my last job before I retired was with the Bushfires Board of WA and the last project I had was to buy suitable second-hand trucks, get them overhauled, refurbished, designed and oversee the building of fire units on the back of them. I have had a bit of experience in this field, apart from having been a user for a long time.
One size does not fit all. If you look at where I live, it is very hilly, fairly solid clay country, so stability is a problem. If you go further up north you get into the sand plain country and you need to look at the weight distribution and distribute the weight better to keep the trucks from bogging in the sand; this sort of thing. As it is now, I have been told: ‘We go for this design because if a truck is doing a high mileage after, say, five years, it is replaced, refurbished and goes out to a low.’ That is a good theory, but does it matter if a truck is doing a high mileage, if it is only in an
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 43 area for eight or 10 years before it is replaced, whereas another one that is not doing such a high mileage but suited to that area could do say, 20 years before it is replaced? This is what we need to look at. If you chaps where you are can legislate to have an even countryside and an even fuel loading over Australia, we have got no problems.
Senator BACK—Thank you.
Senator O’BRIEN—There is obviously no answer to that last comment.
Senator BACK—I thought it was an easy task for us actually.
CHAIR—Thank you very much. We heard from the Conservation Council of Western Australia, who took a middle-ground position, shall I say, which was nice to hear, about fuel loads and the controversy between the catastrophic burn and the controlled mosaic burn. We did not actually hear from them about how the hell you get rid of fuel loads if you do not occasionally burn them or, as I would do, put livestock on them. Have you got a view on fuel loads?
Mr Hamence—Bear in mind our shire of Bridgetown-Greenbushes is 49 per cent forest, 11 per cent plantation, so there is 49 per cent that we are probably not going to be able to put livestock on. We have not got much of an alternative but to burn; however, let’s not just say: Yeah, chuck a match in and let it go.’ Burning is a fairly scientific proposition. You have got to examine the area. You have got to examine the trees in the area. You have got to look at what sort of scorch height you want to have. If you have got a lot of young trees, you want, say, a three-metre scorch height. Through our colleagues in DEC and through a lot of the work of one of the chaps Rick Sneeuwjagt, we have got these graphs and things so that if we decide that we want to put a burn through that and we have got seven times fuel we can work out pretty well exactly the day that we want, the temperature we want, the moisture level that we want and how to put that burn through.
If you have an area of 2,000 hectares, it is not all going to be the same, but generally the burn will go through well. We do not want a bare burn, as is shown on the table here; we want a 50 or 60 per cent reduction in fuel. Let’s look at one thing: we are not against the Conservation Council, because, by virtue of what we do, we are conservationists.
CHAIR—There is no question about that. Thank you very much. Would you like to add anything further?
Mr Hamence—Do you want to throw anything in, Chris?
Mr Sousa—No. You have said it all, Brian.
CHAIR—We are grateful for your evidence and for the volunteer ethic that you represent. It is an important part, like the institution of family farming, of Australia’s inheritance. Thanks.
Mr Hamence—Thank you.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 44 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
[11.31 am]
CAMPBELL, Mr Michael, Vice-President Meat Section, Western Australian Farmers Federation
PARK, Mr Dale, Senior Vice-President, Western Australian Farmers Federation
CHAIR—Welcome. We are grateful for your attendance today. I would like to talk to you about the price of wheat, but we have to talk about fires. Would you like to make an opening statement? You may have alterations to submissions you have made. We will then ask you a few questions.
Mr Park—I bring apologies from our director of policy, Alan Hill. His mother had a stroke overnight, so I have allowed that as a reasonable excuse for him not attending this morning.
Mr Campbell—I farm in the Bridgetown-Greenbushes shire and I am on the FCR of the Yallingup fire brigade.
Mr Park—Our submission is as is. A couple of things pertaining to this subject have happened since our submission. One of them is that there are concerns of members from down south and also my area—I farm 200 kilometres north of Perth—with the advent of plantations for carbon sequestration. The basis under which they operate is quite different to normal plantations in that they are really not interested in fuel hazard reduction and that sort of thing. From our perspective, our real worry is that after, say, 20 years of growth with no fuel reduction a fire could get in from a neighbouring property. The farmer whose property it was that the fire came from is then liable for all the carbon that goes into the air. We can see that as being a really big liability and it is something that we are talking to the department of climate change about, trying to get them to change some of the guidelines under which these—
CHAIR—You are right on the money.
Mr Park—The way that they are done has to be changed so that farmers are protected.
I listened to the previous witnesses and your questions to them. In the last 10 years, with the advent of ESL—the Emergency Services Levy in Western Australia, which now funds quite a lot of the bushfire fighting and the FESA—I think we are detecting a slight change in the attitude of landowners in that, whereas before volunteering was their only input and they were happy to do it, some people are now saying, ‘We pay an ESL now, so it’s up to FESA and those sorts of people to look after us,’ which is in my view quite short-sighted. The other side of that is that the cheapest way to run a bushfire service is actually through volunteers—and when I say ‘volunteers’ I mean volunteers who supply their own machinery as well. I think that is about all I wanted to add, unless Michael wants to say something.
Mr Campbell—I think it was Senator Back who mentioned the types of vehicles that are allowed. A lot of the volunteers would use what we consider the ‘slip-on’, which is a tank and a fire pump and is very effective. If we have got them on our vehicles, they are usually the first to
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 45 the fire scene. There has been a bit of a push for FESA not to fund those types of vehicles. Now, these slip-ons actually go onto private vehicles, and most of us have those slip-ons as a normal farm appliance. But, if there is a bushfire and you send your appliance to the bushfire, unless you have got several of them there is nothing left on your property to protect your own place. I do not really see anything wrong with FESA or whoever giving a tick-off on the slip-ons so they can fund them, and we can use them on the second vehicle or whatever. So, when you leave your property to go to a fire—because fires change direction and other fires do start sometimes if there is a lot of grass around or whatever—your property can still be protected by whoever stays behind.
There is talk about the plantations, and Dale touched on the carbon secretion. We are in a high plantation-woodchip type set-up, and what that has done is reduced the amount of farmland as more plantations have been put in. In some periods the plantations are not a high fire risk, but they have taken volunteer firefighters out of those areas. The number of members we have available, if everyone were home on the one day, might be up, but what happens as the farm goes into plantations is that that family disappears, they get jobs somewhere else or whatever. In my particular brigade we have probably got about 60 on the books, and the Bridgetown shire encourages everybody who is a land-holder in that area to register as a fire brigade member. Of those, I have got 35-odd I can call on to go to a fire—if they are home. But, if a fire breaks out at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, there are probably three of us who would be available most of the time to go, and I am the only one under 50 of those three.
Some of the funding is good, because we have got the slip-ons that go to the fire; they are usually the first there. We have also been funded, luckily, with a 2.4, which carries a volume of water and is always full. If you have got your own farm ute, you cannot carry a slip-on full of water—
CHAIR—Is a slip-on 600 litres or something?
Mr Campbell—Most of them like to have 600 litres, but it would be good if you could get 800 litres legally on them, because the more water you can get there earlier the better. But FESA’s faster tacs only carry 450 litres, and that water disappears before you have started the pump just about. If you can get to a fire pretty early—if you get there within 15 minutes of it first igniting—and the conditions are not extreme, you can usually round it up pretty quickly. But what tends to happen is that the slip-ons run out of water and then you need to have a big vehicle come in with a volume of water while the slip-ons go get more water. You need that volume of water coming in behind. Our actual reaction time, since we have been funded by FESA for extra things in the last six years, is good. Our call-out time, I would say, to get water to a fire has decreased by probably half an hour. But the slip-on is still our main weapon out in the bush.
CHAIR—At home, with our 3,800 litre tank, which is a standard tank, it would be a bloody tight contest between the ute and the tanker, I can tell you, to get to the fire. They go pretty quickly.
Mr Campbell—Yes, they go quick. I will give you an example. It was New Year’s Day. I was weighing lambs in my yards.
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CHAIR—Everyone else was on the grog.
Mr Campbell—No-one much was around. I had my slip-on on the ute; I had had it on for several days, because we had gone through a period of extreme fire danger, and the day before I had nearly emptied it because it was not supposed to be that hot the next day. One of my neighbouring absentee owners—we have a lot of them in our area these days—decided he was going to cart some home. His truck caught fire opposite. Because I had my slip-on full of water there, within three minutes of seeing the smoke we were there, and we most probably prevented a major thing. You virtually run out of water straight away.
CHAIR—Yes, I know the feeling.
Mr Campbell—The next vehicle there was the 2.4, which saved the day. When you are using volunteers, some of the appliances that they supply us with are very complicated to use. The amount of training you need to be fully aware of how these appliances work can be quite complicated; they have quite a lot of electronics. Sometimes the fuse might kick out and you have to know which button to push to get the fuse going again. They are quite complicated, and it takes a lot of time and training. If you are working with volunteers, the simpler it is the more effective the volunteers will be and the easier it is for the volunteers to operate. Sometimes I think bureaucracy tends to—
CHAIR—It is not getting any easier for the volunteers.
Mr Campbell—No.
CHAIR—In our area, the Roads and Traffic Authority are now trying to say that with our trucks—I have a six-by-six—we have to put on the flashing blue and red lights; we cannot just have the flat rotating orange beacon. You have to have all this other bloody stuff. We already have shields. God help us; it has become a bloody nightmare.
Senator BACK—Mr Campbell, how long have plantations now been in your areas?
Mr Campbell—We must have been one of the first areas to have them. Some of them will be coming up to their second harvests now. Originally they told us that blue gum plantations do not burn that well, but in the right conditions, believe me, a crown fire is very effective on them.
Senator BACK—That is exactly the question I was getting to. Can you give us some idea of the pattern of fire behaviour in the blue gum forests in your area? You are talking about 14 to 15 years for the second harvest, or longer?
Mr Campbell—After the first harvest, they usually knock them down. One of the most dangerous times is when it has actually been harvested. They harvest in early summer, and then it is sitting there and drying over that period, and if a fire gets in there then you have all that fuel load sitting on the ground and you cannot fight it that easily because there are stumps and all that, so you basically have to wait for it to come out the other side if you cannot get gear in there. When they first plant, they mound it and they spray it out. There is very good weed control on the whole, because they want the trees to grow. Some of them let people put livestock in; you can put sheep in after a year. Some plantations do not; some do. Mostly, in the first two years,
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 47 they have good breaks around them—in our shire I think the boundary is 15 metres, and internally it is 10—so it is not too bad, but as they get on and start to drop a bit of bark and that there are problems. It is not huge—I do not know; I am not an expert on fuel loads—but, given the right conditions, a four-, five- or six-year old plantation puts out a lot of heat.
We have had experience about most of those six years. We had a fire, and it went across. It was just going on grass. There was a farm that was only partly planted in blue gum, so there had not been a lot of stock. There were stock there at the time, but they had not really got on top of the grass. There was grass that was probably six or eight inches high. It went straight across the grass, and I watched it. The firebreak did not even delay it; it went straight into a crown fire. It just went ‘whoosh’, and that was it. A big change we have had in the last few years is that we have water bombers available. We are lucky; we are close to Manjimup. There are two water bombers on the airstrip. There were four water bombers there that day, because they were coming back from another fire further south in the karri country. If there had not been four water bombers there, we would have lost Palgarup, which is a little town just out of Manjimup. The water bombers worked on the head fire, protecting houses by dropping water at the right time. You could not get into it, because there was plantation. The head fire was going through a plantation. You cannot get in front of that; you just have to mop at the edges. The water bombers do an extremely good job.
Senator BACK—What sorts of resources do the plantation managers typically have to contribute to fire suppression?
Mr Campbell—They have gear, but it is spread far and wide. Before, there would have been an appliance on every farm. Now, they do not have an appliance for every farm. Yes, they have gear and they are trained. Some of them used to be with the Department of Environment and Conservation years ago. They have gone over and they are basically professional firefighters. They are fairly highly trained. Sometimes there is a fire control officer at a fire. You sometimes wonder who they are taking directions from. A little thing that needs to be tightened up internally through us is: are they answering to the plantation or are they actually dead set under the control of the fire control officer who is in charge of that fire, if it is a volunteer? I think they would mostly tend to work in better once DEC have got control of it, because most of them have been DEC trained and they understand the procedures of fighting in bush country.
Senator BACK—Mr Park, you did not put this in your submission, but I wonder whether you could comment. Mr Norton made the observation that local knowledge and experience is being ignored by an increasingly top-heavy bureaucracy. Can you perhaps elaborate on that from your own experience or observations?
Mr Park—Yes. But, following on from the last question first, there are incredible differences. There is about six hours difference between Michael’s place and mine.
Senator BACK—Where are you?
Mr Park—At Badgingarra, on sand plain country. As far as we are concerned, what we call ‘light attacks’, which are basically slip-ons—the farmers have 600 to 900 litre tanks on—are the most effective way to fight fires. The shire usually supplies fairly big tankers of water that we resupply from, and they have got better as time has gone by. Most of the other times we just
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 48 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 have to fill out of tanks that are around. Again, our shire is 53 per cent remnant vegetation, which burns incredibly quickly. It gets to only around six to 10 feet high, but we can have fires that travel at 50 or 60 kilometres an hour at times.
Senator BACK—Where is that?
Mr Park—That is in our shire, which has been burnt probably four times in the last 30 years. This gets back to my comment about sequestration. There would not be country in the south- west land division that is remnant vegetation that has not been burnt at least once in the last 40 years, so thinking that you are going to keep out fire for 70 or 80 or 100 years is just dreaming.
What Michael was referring to in that is the hierarchy. Obviously, listening to Michael talk about firefighting in his area, there is quite a distinct difference to our area. DEC have quite a presence in our area, but nowhere near as thick as down on the south coast, because of the forestry. Most of the DEC blokes that we have are out of national parks; there are quite a lot. But the bulk of people who get to fires are farmer volunteers, and they are usually administered by FESA people in partnership with the local fire chief control officer.
We had a pretty good fire at Badgingarra just last summer. We have had a couple of post- mortems of that and we will have another one in the coming week, and what has been pointed to up there is a lack of communication. It was amplified by the fact that our bushfire radios were not working terribly well because we were working off a repeater, which is only just north of me, which is actually 50 kilometres south of the fire, and we should have been working off another repeater. What that meant was that the people controlling the fire were about 40 kilometres from one end of the fire, even though that was right on the other edge of the fire. We did not have communication.
Communication also was a problem for those of us who were fire control officers with bushfire radios. In relation to the rest of our volunteers working off UHF, we have to put our hand up a little bit in that we should have been communicating with all those people on UHF a hell of a lot better, telling them what was going on in the fire. One of the problems was that this fire did travel about 50 kilometres in four or five hours, so that has problems of its own, just trying to keep in front of it. There is always a bit of a contest between the FESA hierarchy and the local bushfire hierarchy being the fire control officer. I think that is what he is referring to there. It is getting better. Really, the only way for that to improve is more communication between the volunteer side and FESA. FESA recognise that without the volunteers they really have not got a force.
One of the other problems—I think you alluded to it a little bit when you were talking to the volunteer bushfire people—is that we are starting to get two types of volunteers. We have got farmer volunteers who are there to protect property, and that is their main aim. You have got volunteers; it is too hard to say that it is a social occasion but they are doing it almost as a community service. They are not actually as interested. When we get farmer volunteers, their aim is to get the fire out as quickly as possible and to save as much property as possible. What we have got creeping into some of the thinking from FESA is that safety is the absolute ultimate: with anything you do, if it is going to involve some sort of personal risk, you do not do it. For most of the farmer volunteers protecting their property is actually akin to personal risk because if we lose feed at the beginning of summer, for instance, for the next six or eight months, that is
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 49 actually all of our viable income gone. So there is definitely some tension between the people who are running the fire organisations on what the priority should be.
Senator BACK—That is a very good summary. One of the terms of reference of this committee is to have a look at what role, if any, the Commonwealth should play in the overall issue of fire mitigation in Australia. Does the WA Farmers Federation have a view—accepting the constitutional rights of states and territories for land management—on what role the Commonwealth may play or should play in the fire question?
Mr Park—To be truthful, the further we get away from Canberra, the less relevance we think they have on us. Once you get into Western Australia, we assume that we will take more control of how we view things than anybody else.
CHAIR—It could go back the other way—you could teach Canberra some things.
Mr Park—What has happened over the last few years is that we have had more and more trouble getting prescribed burns done on a local basis. The DEC have been very good in keeping quite a lot of their country, although they are way under-resourced and cannot do as much as we would like to see them do. They have also got a lot of other constraints. The other problem—this certainly came out in the Badgingarra fire—is that we have quite wide road reserves up there, between three- and five-chain road reserves, most of which have not been burnt for 40 and 50 years because they have got pasture on both sides and we have kept the fires down. What we found was that, where the wind was behind, we could control the fires in the paddocks; what we could not do is control the fires on the road reserves. So the fires were actually running up the road reserves and we were in a fair bit of trouble. We used to do quite a lot of burning on the road reserves until probably up to 10 years ago. One of our volunteers in the Gingin shire was killed during one of those road burn-offs. We can virtually draw a line from there. Certainly in the two shires that I am more au fait with, Gingin and Dandaragan, we have not had road burning since that time. I think that is something we have to go back and have another look at.
As to the role of the Commonwealth, I think we have got a reasonably good system. I heard you ask a question about whether volunteers should be recompensed for fuel and that sort of thing. I think that that would be a real positive because, as I said before, the cheapest way of fighting fires is by using volunteers and their equipment. We have a lot of firefighting machinery owned by FESA which was pensioned off after 10 or 15 years only having done 10,000 or 20,000 kilometres. So they are underutilised and they live in sheds, which costs us money as well. These days they do not even like the vehicles being on farms, yet the ones that are on farms get their batteries checked regularly, they run regularly and they go when you get in and hit the button. Whereas now, when we have them in designated sheds around the place, we have to have people that do a roster on them every weekend or whatever to make sure these things are going. The funding has brought some benefits but in other ways I reckon we have got backwards, mainly on the equipment side. If we were prepared to fund some of the private equipment, I think we would be much better off.
Senator O’BRIEN—I notice in the submission there is reference to grossly inadequate hazard reduction burn on public lands. How are we going on private land? Is there any program that you know of where private landholders are conducting fuel reduction burns on their own land?
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Mr Park—Not really. I will get Michael to comment on what is happening down his way, because the two areas are quite different and going out east it is different again. We will cover the east first. Going out to the east, a lot of the shires have two per cent remnant vegetation, and that is mainly in public hands, not in private hands. All the rest of the country is clear. Going east that is all cropped. Fire reduction is really only an issue at the beginning of summer after harvest or sometimes just before harvest when blokes get their crops burnt. So that is not an issue. Coming north into our sand plain country we have got small amounts. As I said, in our shire 53 per cent is rem veg, and 47 per cent of that is owned by the government. So, again, a lot of the private country is cleared. Being cleared means that there are big spaces of country where you can actually control fires. If you do get fires into private bush it is usually just a matter of running around the outside, putting a ring around it and burning in. So fire reduction on private country is really not a problem. What has happened is that people like DEC have now got responsibility for fairly big areas of what we call unallocated crown land in this state. It used to be the country that we were opening up 20 and 30 years ago that did not get opened up. It is not national park; it is really just vacant public land, and that is the sort of country that DEC have a lot of problems keeping tabs on because the resources just are not there for them to be able to manage them properly.
Senator O’BRIEN—The question might arise, if there were some sort of stewardship arrangement for farmers, what their responsibilities would be in that regard.
Mr Park—That would be in direct relationship with how much they were paid for stewardship, I should imagine. Again, those bits of country probably would be small areas rather than big areas, so the management of those in a fire situation is probably not quite as tricky.
Senator O’BRIEN—I expect that it would not be, but I was interested to see whether anyone thought that it was worth managing fuel loads in some of the longer established belts of native vegetation, either natural or planted.
Mr Park—Thirty years ago it started with some of the stuff down south for the salinity. There were blocks of country and caveats and whatever put on land, though that land was fenced off with government help. I was talking about this to someone the other day and they had not looked at it either. With those fences starting to fall down, the farmers are probably not going to be inclined to put the fences up, because they certainly are not getting paid any stewardship funding for that. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to those areas, because the management is nonexistent.
Mr Campbell—We have little pockets of native bush floating around. I think basically they have put them back under shire control to a certain extent but originally it was DEC country. On a lot of that country over the years the vegetation has grown right up against the fence. You most probably could get the okay to burn the bush but you cannot stop burning the fence because the fuel load is too high. So the farmer does not want to burn that bit of bush. He might know it is a threat to his place but he is going to lose his whole fence. Who is going to pay it put a break down the edge of it? The shire lets you go out 1½ metres from your boundary. Wooden posts are still going to burn 1½ metres off the boundary. With a lot of work, DEC will let you put in a break line. They might have a break two metres inside. Sometimes it’s along your boundary and sometimes it is a couple of metres in. If you decide you want to renew your fence line they will let you go out four metres but you pay for the dozer most of the time. Sometimes they will go
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 51 fifty-fifty if they are going to do a prescribed burn in that area within two years. Then you can do a bit of a deal.
Senator HEFFERNAN—Do they not have a break inside the fence?
Mr Campbell—Not all DEC land has a break right on your boundary, no.
Senator HEFFERNAN—Couldn’t you insist on that?
Mr Campbell—I do not know who would force them to do it.
Senator HEFFERNAN—No-one gives a rats any more generally in our area because they are frightened of going to court. On my northern and western boundary, all I had to have was a 12 foot break.
Mr Campbell—We have breaks inside our boundary; they do not have a break inside their boundary.
Senator HEFFERNAN—If they had a break inside their boundary and you put a back burn in down wind, you could actually burn without burning the fence.
Mr Campbell—Yes. They started burning yesterday, not on my boundary but presumably today they are burning on my boundary. They put this beautiful thing down, not on my block. On this particular block I have clearance right up to my boundary. I think the farmer did that—he paid for it before I bought the block. On the neighbouring place, there are two blocks there, 380 acres, and they have a beautiful great big break in there but it is not up against the fence—some of it is. About 150 metres of it is up against the fence but there is a section there—I do not know whether that section got burnt when Cyclone Alby went through—which has a fuel load like this in it. That is up against this fence. So there is a little pocket there which could create a crown fire. If a fire came across the paddock and got into that, it would put a crown fire through the bush. What is underneath would not really be relevant once a crown fire got into it. They did not go right up against the boundary because there are a couple of trees there and they would have had to burn the logs themselves.
They logged the area two years ago. They could have taken all the bigger trees out of the pocket, logged them and then put the break right along the boundary. At some spots it is about five or six metres. There are little pockets of bush and when a fire goes through, even though it is only a little pocket, that can be enough, if it has a few blackboys in it or whatever, to light something up two kilometres away. They are getting slightly better. Before they would not even look at it at all, but now you can talk to them a bit. They want us to pay to get the dozer in there to push these big trees over. Then you have to cut the trees out which are millable and store them so that they can take them away. Then you have all the rubbish which you have to burn up.
The other thing we have is people moving out to subdivisions around the town. Our shire has a fairly tight policy on how your grass has to be in the subdivisions. If they go in and slash it, the fuel load is technically still there. The grass might be short but there is still the same amount of grass in the paddock.
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Senator HEFFERNAN—At home, we have plenty of shire boundary, public road boundary, but we spray ours, except where we are going to cause erosion. We spray out through the fence.
Mr Campbell—If you get caught spraying through the fence in our shire, I think it is a $250,000 fine.
Senator HEFFERNAN—You want to sort that out. That is stupid.
Mr Campbell—Yes, it is stupid. The main road, the South-West Highway, runs through the middle of our farm and you will see where they have just done the new South Kwinana Freeway with a high traffic load.
Senator HEFFERNAN—You could put the argument that, if they are not prepared to let you spray through the fence, they can pay half the cost of the fence, as an organisation.
Mr Park—You are right. When you asked about fire breaks before, that was one of the problems we had in this last fire in Badgingarra. The Boothendarra Reserve had no break at all around it. At a couple of the public meetings people were saying, ‘We have to put fire breaks in. Why doesn’t DEC have to put fire breaks in?’ The answer was that DEC are not covered. They do try to put in fire breaks but it comes down to a case of resourcing. Boothendarra Reserve is about 4,000 acres. They had earmarked it so that they were going to put fire breaks in in the next couple of years but, of course, we burnt it before they got there. Hopefully they will. Even in the national parks which are alongside me I reckon I can burn back from breaks which are probably up to 10 years old but getting past that I do struggle a bit. We have breaks through there. If we can get them done every 10 years we think we are doing pretty well. So it gets down to resourcing. DEC do what they can afford to do but they are not forced to do any more.
Mr Campbell—There are smaller blocks in the rural towns with higher rainfall—say Bridgetown, Manjimup is going a little bit the same way, Boyup Brook, Nanup and all those— there are one acre lots and five acre lots. Most probably once people are there and they have a few livestock on them, it is not such a problem, but a lot of people are absentee owners and sometimes the subdivisions do not sell. Our seasons are quite variable and sometimes they will cut out early. Sometimes they will cut out in October; sometimes they will go through until November. Sometimes there is a very high fuel load in some of those areas but the smaller the blocks the harder it is to fight fire because of the fencing. Before they were open paddocks. Sometimes the fences are padlocked. The last Bridgetown fire got into the Highlands estate which had been slashed but there are very few houses up there at the moment and no fences. So we could easily access that fire. If the same thing happens in two years time and fire goes through that area, there will be a lot more houses there and it is going to be a lot harder to fight the fire. As you get into steep country and the five acre or one acre blocks, they makes fire fighting a lot harder.
Senator HEFFERNAN—Do you think you could make out a case, as we do with compulsory third-party car insurance—if you own a car you have to have the insurance—that there ought to insurance for property ownership, if it is government or private?
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Mr Park—I think people view it a little bit like that. At the moment, we pay around $40 a block for what is called the emergency services levy and the more people pay those insurances the less responsibility they take. That is my fear about those sorts of things.
Senator HEFFERNAN—The thing that gives me the heebie-jeebies is that the people who let rubbish grow under the clothes line and up to the back step and are not insured get more sympathy than someone who has kept things clear. If you fly over a fire, you can see people who have a garden and a setback. They do not get any sympathy. It is the person who does not give a rats who gets all the sympathy.
Mr Park—That is right, and we saw that out at the Toodyay fires. On the same day we had the Badgingarra fire we had a fire at Toodyay which burnt three or four times as much as what we burnt at Badgingarra over three or four days. Certainly when you have a look, the people who were insured did not get anywhere near the sympathy that the people who were not insured got. If you are not insured, you have taken that risk on yourself.
Senator HEFFERNAN—And you have not contributed to the party insurances or fire prevention. It is a little sensitive matter.
Mr Park—With the advent of ESL, I am not sure that insurance companies actually do put anything into fire fighting now.
CHAIR—Over our way they do.
Mr Park—It does not happen here now. They have a similar sort of ESL set up in the metropolitan areas, and that has replaced it.
Senator O’BRIEN—We are getting back to the situation of the nineteenth century and earlier, where the fire brigades only attended places that were insured—and cheered as places that were not burnt down! I am not sure we want to do that.
Mr Park—No, I am not sure we want to go back there!
CHAIR—Can I just ask, as an observation from a couple of cockies: the gear for fire fighting is getting better—do you think the fires are getting any smaller?
Mr Park—To answer the second part of your question: no, they are not getting any smaller! The gear is getting better. My slip-on, for instance, is a 600-litre plastic tank. Unfortunately, I bought that one just before they brought out another model which actually sits on the front half of your ute, so you can use the back half of the ute. It is quite a lot squarer than mine, and easier to get on and off. All those sorts of things are pretty good. But, no, the fires are not getting any smaller, mainly because we have fewer and fewer people on the ground. As we get bigger and bigger farms, that is how we have beaten the terms of trade: everybody just buys another farm. So you halve the population, you halve the number of farms, so you have half the number of vehicles at a fire—but you are still burning the same area of country.
CHAIR—So do you put firebreaks in?
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Mr Park—We do. I am not a great fan of firebreaks. As Michael said, I have only seen one fire that was stopped by a firebreak.
CHAIR—But, with great respect, a firebreak is very handy for the flank.
Mr Park—For burning back, yes. The only firebreaks that we have to put in in our shire are around our boundary. We have a lot of other firebreaks, mainly by way of roads and that sort of thing, that we can use for burning back. But in my area most of our fires are actually fought in bushland rather than open country.
CHAIR—At home we have a beautiful bit of TSR, travelling stock route, and the stock are not allowed to eat it anymore—native species and Christ knows what.
Mr Park—It is not allowed to be eaten? That was one of the real advantages. You fellows over there had natural grasses and that sort of thing, whereas we had nothing here. Our natural bush is not really edible.
CHAIR—And it does not do it any harm to be eaten, I have to say. But, anyhow.
Mr Park—Our stock just will not eat our natural bush.
Mr Campbell—I have a very nice railway line running through the middle of mine, which does not get used.
CHAIR—We used to burn the railway line every year. That was part of the practice.
Mr Campbell—You can get permission to burn it, but you are not allowed to burn their sleepers. But it has not been used. That is another tricky one: you cannot technically clear against your fences. A lot of it, where the scrub gets into the tea-tree/swampy type country, is right up against your fence, so it is relatively hard to burn those reserves.
CHAIR—Are we finished with questions? There you go, boys. I hope you get a good season.
Mr Park—It looked as though it was starting all right, but now we are looking for our second germination. We got rain at the end of March, which you never count on going through. It conned us into a false sense of security, because we got a couple of drips of rain on the way through, so we still have slightly green country out there now. But we would need a good half and inch of rain to keep that.
CHAIR—We are not allowed to talk cockie talk here, I’ve been instructed! Thank you very much.
Mr Park—That is unfortunate, because that is the most interesting stuff!
Mr Campbell—Can I just make one further comment. I think the strength of the bushfire brigades—not the fire and rescue, because they are separate here—is really based on the strength of the rural economy. At the moment, in most of Western Australia the rural economy is in a disastrous state. My situation is such that I do not know if I will be farming within a year or two.
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Technically, economically I should not be. Whether I will decide to hang in there for another year or two, I do not know yet. We have high-value land and a low income. That is why plantations are coming in.
We are losing experienced firefighters because they are getting older. I grew up with fire. I have been going to fires since I was 12. Now you cannot go to fires when you are 12. That experience is going and you will not ever get it back again. As the rural economy goes down, I think you will see a decline in your bushfire support.
Mr Park—On the point of experience, I was probably one of the last new land farmers in Western Australia, and my generation learnt to fight fires by burning off all the country that we were clearing. We were talking earlier about carbon sequestration and, Chair, you asked what Canberra could do. Instead of just straight forests for carbon sequestration, one of the things you could be looking at is some sort of agroforestry method, using animals to take the understorey down and thin that part out so that, if you do have fire in those areas, you are only looking at crown fires, rather than a full-on bushfire.
CHAIR—Bear in mind, with a carbon sink, if you get a fire you might get a bill in the mail.
Mr Park—Yes, that is exactly right.
CHAIR—We must finish. Thanks very much.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 56 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
[12.17 pm]
DATODI, Mr Raymond Francis, Director, Engineering, Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd
GROOMBRIDGE, Mr Sean, Director and Chief Executive Officer, Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd
ROOCKE, Mr Paul Andrew, Development Engineer, Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd
CHAIR—Welcome. Do you have any comments to make on the capacity in which you appear?
Mr Roocke—I am also a fire and rescue volunteer, as distinct to a bushfire volunteer, down in Dunsborough, so I have firsthand experience of the issues that are being discussed.
CHAIR—Do you wish to make any amendments or alterations to your submission?
Mr Groombridge—We have no changes to the submission that we have made.
CHAIR—I invite you to make an opening statement.
Mr Datodi—I would like to give you a brief history as to what prompted the development of this warning system, because the circumstances surrounding this pretty much fall into the framework of this Senate hearing. We moved down into the Yallingup area in 2004 and were embraced by the community. They are very fire conscious down there and we were very quickly brought into line on fire safety. There is a fire ready group in our area with a structure whereby one of the volunteer personnel assigns certain areas to the local community, who, in turn, look after small groups, and there is a network to transmit warnings by telephone around the system.
On 17 March 2009 a poll top transformer ignited some bush area in the order of a kilometre from my house. With that of course came a power blackout. I was in my house and did not take a great deal of notice of the blackout because they are not uncommon. After confirming that it was general and nothing to do with my own property, I went back to beavering away at doing what I was doing inside the house. Approximately an hour later I heard aircraft. I went out to investigate only to see that it was water-bombers. These water-bombers were quenching a fire. I could just see the top of the flames and I could see the smoke. The irony of it all was that I had absolutely no idea that this situation had occurred. There had been no warnings. The power had been lost. I had not heard from our fire-ready group because the person who was to call our group in our area was playing golf nine kilometres away and had no idea. He did not have his mobile phone, so he was not advised. It was a bit scary to think that here was a set of circumstances where there was a fire a very short distance from my place and we had had no warnings.
The community met after this fire. We had a meeting at the local fire station and a FESA representative came along and talked to us about it. The concerns of the community in our area were echoed throughout the entire meeting. People were concerned with power failures resulting in loss of landline communications, because most people have cordless phones. People had been
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 57 in mobile phone black spots, and there were plenty of those. There were comments in relation to latency in SMS messaging. All of these things added up to some serious local concern that should there be a catastrophic fire there is a very large risk that people may not be warned in time. I left that meeting a little disenchanted in that even though we knew a state alert system was to be trialled very shortly, with all due respect to FESA they had no choice but to use the Telstra network. With that came all the same issues that had been echoed around the room at the time. I thought there had to be a better way than this.
My background in electrical and electronics engineering gave me the knowledge to investigate this issue from an engineering point of view. Clearly, radio transmission was the way to go. I looked into this and I spoke to my colleagues. We came together with a system that integrated three technologies: radio, satellite and GPS. That has been described in our presentation to the committee. I put together a document and I spoke to various people and to MPs in our area, and gained advice from the local fire brigade people. There was a lot of support for the concept, enough to encourage us to go ahead and build a system and prove the technology. We needed to make sure that we could put our money where our mouths were on this one.
This project was motivated purely for humanitarian reasons. There was great concern, and certainly a personal one, that we wanted to try and avoid this situation we had faced. What I thought might work well was that if we had a warning system that could be put into the hands of the person at the fire front, he would have some technology available to him to transmit warnings to people within range of the impending fire. That was the basic concept and that was what we presented. That was the motivation behind this product. We were invited by a local MP to visit Canberra and present the product there with the aim of informing people of this facility. It has not been fully developed; we are not at the production stage, but it is certainly a proven technology. We ran a proof of concept demonstration in Yallingup which was well attended by a number of people. That is where the system sits at the moment. If you have any questions for me directly, I am happy to answer them.
CHAIR—Thank you very much for that. I have asked you this privately but I will ask you publicly now: what do you need of government?
Mr Datodi—Perhaps if I could allow Sean to answer.
CHAIR—There is a certain market that will sort out the product. What do you need of government?
Mr Groombridge—What I think we need from government, Chair, is support to see this sort of system trialled across the whole country. That, we believe, is something which can only come from engaging federal support for the system. The reason we think it should be trialled across the whole country is that it is a system which can be used to address a number of hazards which occur in different parts of the country. So whilst your inquiry is appropriately focused on bushfires—and indeed the genesis of our product is bushfires—it is not limited to the use of bushfires. It could be used for storm warnings, flood warnings—for any kind of natural hazard that a community might face. But we have only trialled this in our own backyard. We believe that in order for it to be fully developed, fully experienced as a system which has much more universal appeal, trial sites across the whole of the country would be more appropriate and will give us some experience to pick up local conditions, which we are not currently aware of, so that
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 58 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 it becomes a system which is tailored to the needs of the communities right the way across the country.
Senator BACK—Again, this is a question that has been asked previously, and perhaps you can give us an update—that is, its capacity to be able to communicate with mobile telephones.
Mr Groombridge—As we mentioned in our submission, there is not a direct capacity at the moment to communicate with mobile telephones, but we do we intend to build a mobile unit— essentially a mobile radio receiver—that will have the GPS unit, which will allow the warning to go to somebody who may be away from their property. We have a platform, a piece of equipment, we are looking at that has that kind of capability. The intention is that we will build that such that the user essentially receives two warnings. They receive a warning as to whether they are in danger where they are at that moment in time; and they also receive a warning which relates to where the home property might be. When I say their home property, it could also apply to their business property as well. You would have a fixed location and a mobile location, and it will deal with those simultaneously.
Senator BACK—Is it a technology that has more application in built-up areas and rather in the West Australian context the extensive wheatbelt, Goldfields and Pilbara areas? Do you believe the technology has any application in those wider, diverse areas?
Mr Groombridge—Yes, absolutely. It is designed really so that it will deal with people who are in remote areas rather than primarily dealing with people who are within city areas. The technology and the architecture is such that it will reach any part of Australia, including offshore islands. Indeed, the technology can be exported. It will reach any part of the world.
Mr Roocke—In addition to what Sean has mentioned there, the application in a less built-up area, such as in our south-west if we go out to the wheatbelt area, the unit can actually be used as a pager system, which we are looking at for the volunteers to be alerted to the fire. At the moment there are various mechanisms where that happens. Not only is it just for public alerted it can be used for activating and mobilising people.
CHAIR—They haven’t already got a phone system?
Mr Roocke—It is different in different shires. In the Busselton shire there is currently an SMS system plus a group call, but that predominantly goes to the FCOs and then the FCOs will phone around multiple volunteers. They then have the fire and rescue service, which is different again, where all the members come up on a group call.
Senator BACK—You have no doubt followed the Victorian royal commission. How appropriate would your technology have been working properly had it have been deployed in that circumstance? Do you have any view in terms of its architecture as to how effective it may have been?
Mr Groombridge—We are commenting from the other side of the country and without any real firsthand knowledge of it. But having prefaced it in that way, there is, from what I have read, a lot of concern that inappropriate warnings, particularly in terms of the language they used and the time it took to deliver warnings, was a key issue. From what I have read of the findings of
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 59 the commission, that gets raised time and time again. One of the instances I mentioned in the submission to your inquiry is that over two million SMS messages were sent in that particular incident, but it took hours for them all to be sent. That is not because of incompetence, but the SMS messaging system is piggybacked onto a communications medium which was never designed for emergency warnings; it was designed as a social/business network. One of the things that we did not assume anything other than asking: what is a decent set of requirements for a warning system? We started with a blank piece of paper. That is a fundamental difference, because it allows us to then say, ‘What would an ideal system have? What are the circumstances that we face in this country with these sorts of dangers and how do we build and use technology which overcomes all those deficiencies and yet is practical and affordable as a community?’
So I believe that, yes, had it been in place in Victoria, then the messages that were received by the community would have been much more appropriate and much more easily updated by the authorities. As the situation developed, the capacity of the authorities to update the advice to recipients would have been much greater. I am talking about a delivery time for everybody of minutes, not ours.
Senator O’BRIEN—Could you tell us about affordability?
Mr Groombridge—Affordability comes into two categories I suppose. The infrastructure itself, and how much it costs to put up and established a system on a tower; and how much the individual might pay for a home unit. I should stress here that the equipment is fairly small scale. The sort of thing we are talking about mounting on a tower has two components, one of which is the size of the TV aerial and they is the size of an upside-down coffee cup. It is fairly small scale. So the chances of being able to mount it on any tower are pretty good. The cost of that we currently estimate at about $50,000 per installation. That includes the transmitter, which is in the base of the tower. The cost of the home unit, the receiver, we are currently estimating in small numbers at about $350. I would expect to get to somewhere in the order of two-thirds of that number were we to produce in larger numbers.
CHAIR—What would your message say? When I was a kid—it is like driving in the tunnel in Sydney: they tell you to leave the wireless on. If something goes wrong you get the message on the wireless regardless of the station you are tuned in to—we always had a rule at home to have the bloody wireless on in summer That is why I was a bit mystified when you said you did not know the fire was there. If you can smell the smoke, you know you’re in trouble. In that Victorian fire, depending on the fuel load, the canopy and the geography, it ran up one valley faster than another. The flaw was that all their information was out of time. The best place to control all this is from the air, with the person being precise. What would your information tell me about the fire? Would it tell me I am in the line of a piece of the fire that is running fast and is going to get to me in 15 minutes—or if I am in the slow bit, on the flank or in the front? Other than to say there is a fire, what else would I get?
Mr Groombridge—The way we have the system designed at the present time, information comes in in two forms. There are six levels of warning in our design at the moment—this is not a fixed item, but it is just the way we have designed it—three of which we have designated as alerts and three of which we have designated as alarms. The fire control officer can instigate a progressively more and more severe level of alert. That will be indicated in a text form on the
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 60 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 receiver—the home unit—and will be accompanied by a different tone for each level. If the level is changed by the fire control officer then the tone will change.
CHAIR—My worry is because I am not going to sit inside the house, waiting for the change of the tone. I will get off my backside, get in the truck and get going. How am I to know from your system whether I am in the direct line of fire?
Mr Groombridge—I will answer the second part of the question. As well as those tones, the equipment has a readable text form. That text can be anything. It could be, for instance, ‘Evacuate your property now but only use roads to the west.’ It can be a free-form text.
CHAIR—If that information is wrong because someone giving the instructions to the machine looked at the map wrong, there could be serious consequences.
Mr Groombridge—Rubbish in, rubbish out. Absolutely. But we are trying to make the control of the system as foolproof as we can. Equally, we have to make it as dynamic as we can. You have to allow people who are competent and trained to make that information available.
Senator BACK—The one message goes out to all consumers, doesn’t it? You do not segment it. You were just saying that you could tell Senator Heffernan to leave now by the road to the west. Is that the case or is it the case that ‘everybody in the Barragup area out to leave now’? Is it as general as that?
Mr Groombridge—Paul will explain how it works.
Mr Roocke—I guess the best way of describing it is that the incident control officer or whoever is designated within the incident management structure has in front of him a map on a screen. He can draw a geofence. If he wants to alert a community that there is imminent danger of a fire and that they should put in place their action plans as they have determined, he can draw on his screen a polygon around that area and the message will only be activated for those people in that area. If you are five kilometres away and there is less risk of you being affected by it, you are not suddenly going to try to traipse off with everyone else, but you can still be alerted at a different level. They can then go and draw another polygon around that area and say: ‘There’s less of a risk but be aware the current state under the six levels is currently high. Put in place your action plan.’
Senator BACK—When you develop a mobile unit then presumably the message will be edited so that somebody holding a mobile unit will know which geographic areas are actually the subject of either an alert or an alarm.
Mr Roocke—If they move into one area that has got a higher alert status, they are going to receive that message.
Senator O’BRIEN—In terms of the terrestrial communication from the towers, is that line of sight communication or is it—
Mr Groombridge—No. We are using the frequency that is equivalent to a pager frequency, and that has been chosen to have the best chance of penetration of vegetation on the one hand
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 61 and capacity to follow the topography of the land with another. If you are in a deep gully, somebody at the bottom of the gully will not get that message directly, so we have developed and trialled a small repeater unit, which can be sited more locally to that position which can then be particularly targeted at people who are at the bottom of those gullies. So the repeater unit receives the message and immediately retransmits it to cover that dead spot.
Senator O’BRIEN—Some communities might need their own repeater units to be covered.
Mr Groombridge—Yes.
Senator O’BRIEN—Are they a similar expense to the tower based equipment?
Mr Groombridge—Repeater units: we are estimating about $4,000, so it is much cheaper, lower power, lower height, shorter range but designed to fill in those gaps.
Senator BACK—The dead space.
Senator O’BRIEN—What sort of coverage from the towers that you were talking about earlier would you expect? I am just trying to get an idea of how frequently you would have to have these towers arranged?
Mr Groombridge—The range that we are currently using with the power and the frequency is a radius of about 50 kilometres from the tower and, for ease of maths, that is a bit less than 8,000 square kilometres per tower.
Mr Datodi—That particular power and frequency was designed to cover what we thought would be an average shire area, bearing in mind that our concept was—
Senator O’BRIEN—Is there such a thing as an average shire size?
Mr Datodi—We have to start somewhere, and none of this is set in concrete, obviously: you up the power, you can up the range. Bear in mind also that this was selfishly designed to protect the people in Yallingup. Bearing in mind that the idea was that the local firefighting brigade would have access to this warning system, as long as we were within a 50-kilometre range the original concept would suffice. The dimensions of transmission, multiple towers, all of that technology is available. The technology is basically future proof in the sense that, as demands are more clearly defined, the technology can be adjusted accordingly.
CHAIR—Do you depend on the grid for power?
Mr Datodi—Only for normal transmission, but obviously it is battery back-up. The receiving unit is battery backed up. The battery will support the unit for approximately three days, and should the transmission get lost—and this may well happen if a fire takes a tower out—the home alarm unit will alarm and advise the homeowner that they have now lost protection to avoid them having a false sense of security that they are being guarded. At least they know they have lost transmission. It may well be because of a fire and, in its own right, will alert them to make inquiries: why have we lost transmission?
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 62 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
Mr Groombridge—We do anticipate that the ground infrastructure would be organised such that there would be at least two towers covering any given area. Because they have got a 50- kilometre radius from each tower, the towers can be geographically quite separated. So the chances of taking both towers out in the one incident are minimised.
Senator BACK—The system is obviously usable beyond fire.
Mr Datodi—Yes.
Senator BACK—For example, a lost child or any emergency. As you say, you would draw a polygon around an area of interest and send a message to the people in that area.
Mr Groombridge—Yes. One shire suggested that it might be used for advising people to put in their fire breaks by date X, and it did not take them very long to latch on to say that they also ought to pay their rates by date Y as well.
Senator O’BRIEN—Do you see these being in every household in the community or just those that are in areas that may be fire, cyclone or flood prone?
Mr Groombridge—I think that is something that would come out of a wider-scale trial that determines which of the areas and which communities are most at risk and which are those that only very, very occasionally at risk. But, because the architecture is such that it does not need a chain of these things—so one does not have to be joined to its neighbours—they can be isolated and positioned accordingly. You could have, for instance, one which covered the areas of, let us say, Alice Springs but that does not mean to say that you have to cover the whole of the Northern Territory just to get to Alice Springs. I think that is something that would evolve with the evaluation of the system and the evaluation of the various dangers that it can alert people to.
Mr Datodi—One of the really key issues here—and one of the very useful technologies that has been integrated into this system—is satellite communications. From, if you like, the incident controller at the fire, his geofence coordinates have to be transmitted to the tower and from the tower to the people. We have chosen to use the iridium satellite network to do that. The advantage of that is that you have a totally flexible, dynamic communications system. Following on Senator Heffernan’s comment about the person in the air, this can be triggered from a person in the area because it is relying purely on the satellite system. It is not microwave, where it needs to be in alignment. You have actually got this totally flexible coverage. Any satellite modem connected to any piece of equipment can talk to the tower.
Mr Groombridge—My main business is in satellite communications—when I am wearing my other hat. We have satellite equipment on this network which will run out of aircraft. We have lots of those systems and a lot of experience in that sort of thing. Indeed, as Ray says, the controlling officer could be sat in an aircraft with that literally helicopter view of the situation and that could be the advice which is then sent out through the system.
CHAIR—Having been to a lot of fires, on time information and control from the front of the fire communicated is much better than a regional fire control officer at the fire ringing Wagga. It is all out of time and a burn break is put in when the fire is past the burn break et cetera. Also,
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 63 the reliance as a comfort by the community on the signal versus general awareness can be a risk. There is a certain need for being fire conscious.
Mr Datodi—Yes.
CHAIR—It is a bit like a calculator. Some people now cannot do a multiplication by hand; they have to rely on a bloody calculator. I am sure the market will sort out where it goes. Obviously in hidden valleys and things like that are the most obvious places. With a plain’s fire, unless you drink too much or something, most cockies are very conscious if there is a puff of smoke. But, in a valley situation, you do not know where the fire is coming from. In our area, you actually dial 000 and you get Wollongong and you ask them where the fire is at Junee and they say, ‘We’ll have to get back to you.’
Senator BACK—In terms of your development plan stage 2, how far away are you from being able to actually implement, subject to funding being adequate?
Mr Groombridge—Subject to funding is, of course, a big ask. In terms of development refinement of the system that we have so far, we have plans to proceed with that on our own account, which is going to take us something in the order of about three months or thereabouts.
Mr Datodi—Yes, three months.
Mr Groombridge—Were funding to be made available, our stage 2 could be started in something of the order of three to four months.
Senator BACK—And the funding per state to establish the trials you want to do?
Mr Groombridge—I did not actually do it on a per state basis, but the total is about $15 million. That would be on the basis of three sites in each state and territory with 1,000 receiver units on each site.
CHAIR—One of the big traps with fires these days is pressurised water systems in homes— and you lose the power and you lose your water. Some things in life are pretty obvious.
Mr Datodi—Yes.
CHAIR—Thanks very much. We are very grateful for your innovation and your appearance.
Proceedings suspended from 12.52 pm to 1.30 pm
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 64 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
CAPORN, Mr David, Executive Director, Community Development Portfolio, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia
HARRISON-WARD, Ms Josephine Charlotte, Chief Executive Officer, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia
HYNES, Mr Craig Anthony, Chief Operations Officer, Fire and Emergency Services Authority of Western Australia
CHAIR—Welcome. I invite you to make an opening statement and then we will ask you a few general questions.
Ms Harrison-Ward—We thank you for the opportunity to appear before the select committee on quite an important topic. As you would be aware, we did provide a written submission. I do wish to draw to the attention of the committee a number of developments that have occurred since we wrote the submission back in July 2009. I have a copy here that I will provide to the committee, but I will briefly summarise. We have had amendments to the Bushfires Act 1954, the introduction of total fire bans, the implementation of our state alert system, our bushfire protection guidelines have been released in an interim form, and we have had the establishment of an interagency bushfire management committee. I will leave that there and table an amendment.
CHAIR—Would you like to make an opening statement?
Ms Harrison-Ward—As you know, the Fire and Emergency Services Authority is a large organisation of nearly 1,300 staff and we support more than 30,000 volunteers. We provide services throughout the state. Bushfire is a major occurrence in this state, as you would know. We attend around 6,000 landscape fires in any given year across the entire state. Anything that can be done to reduce the severity and incidence of bushfires at state and national level and at a local level is most welcome.
CHAIR—Thank you. We are wondering why fires, with better gear, are still not getting smaller.
Senator BACK—I wonder if you could advise us of the funding model that is used here in Western Australia: what it was historically, how it is now and how adequate it is. And could you pick up the question of cover for those who do undertake their own insurance on properties and assets as opposed to those who do not.
Ms Harrison-Ward—Prior to the introduction of the emergency services levy seven years ago, the funding for emergency services was through a different type of system. The career fire and rescue service was funded through a historic three-way split system of 12½ per cent local government, 12½ per cent state government and 75 per cent through insurance premiums. The volunteer fire and rescue service was funded 100 per cent through local government. SES—and the bushfire brigades as well—picked up a little bit of money through the federal government
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 65 and a little bit through the state government but predominantly through local governments and fundraising of volunteers.
Since the introduction of the levy, which is a property based levy system that applies across the state, the funding now comes through that source. In seven years we have seen quite an amazing turnaround in what was provided previously. If we look at the bushfire side of things, we see that we now have 615 registered bushfire appliances in the state, and in those seven years we have replaced 77 per cent with either new or refurbished appliances. We still have a long way to go with it. Buildings are also being replaced with new buildings and minor structural sheds. The operational grants for the bushfire brigades and SES has also seen quite a significant improvement. Over the seven years, around $100 million has been put into the bushfire brigades and provision of grants to local governments. A lot of this information is detailed in the State of the service report, which I have here. It details each of the services and what the emergency service levy has done for the emergency services, in particular the volunteers, in this state. Do you wish to see that?
CHAIR—Do you have a break-up on gear versus administrative fixed overheads and personnel? Do you have how much you actually spend on equipment?
Ms Harrison-Ward—In terms of bushfire brigades?
CHAIR—Yes.
Ms Harrison-Ward—I would have, but not at my fingertips. What happens is that, every year, an independent committee is established. There is a board chair, and the committee comprises volunteers, local governments and FESA. People put in to receive grants and then it is distributed. In terms of the grants committee, $17 million goes between the SES and the bushfire brigades.
CHAIR—What about the churn? Over our way we cannot get money for a pumper hose or a tank. But we can get it for a tanker. What do you do with your trade-ins, as it were?
Ms Harrison-Ward—Dave can talk about our trade-ins.
Mr Caporn—We assess trade-ins all the time in order to find what best use they can be put to. We have made decisions where we have allocated the trade-in to other areas of need. We are very careful in doing it because we do not want to start another ongoing oncost that we cannot meet, so we really do examine the suitability of the redeployment of the equipment, material or appliance. In a lot cases it will be decommissioned and sold.
CHAIR—Stop there. Sold. Is that back to a farmer somewhere?
Mr Caporn—In some cases.
CHAIR—We can get Victorian trucks that are allegedly worn out with 25,000 kilometres on them. We think that, at $15,000 or something versus $280,000 for a new one, they are pretty good value. Do you do that here?
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 66 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010
Mr Caporn—We have done that in cases where it is suitable. One of the arrangements we can make is to say, ‘Yes, you can have the vehicle but we will not support it for operating expenses.’
CHAIR—We do not get the support. The game has changed. You can get money to go and do a course and learn how to work a chainsaw, even though you have been using a chainsaw all your life.
Senator BACK—I want to take you to the question we have been addressing—that is, the possible tension between fire prevention and mitigation in the first place and fire suppression and lead agencies. In your submission where you refer to multiple agencies and tenures you make the point: ‘The effectiveness of bushfire mitigation would be enhanced if the multiple agency and jurisdictional arrangements were abandoned. The principle or pre-eminent fire agency should be enabled to manage bushfire preparedness, regardless of tenure or ownership.’ Would you outline the rationale behind that in the Western Australian context.
Mr Hynes—Obviously the multiple layers of tenure and different responsibilities in legislation in Western Australia and elsewhere can be problematic in getting a strategic overlay of where you do your mitigation work. Certainly, the legislative amendments that the CEO alluded to earlier have addressed that in part in Western Australia.
We have also established what we call an interagency bushfire management committee where we can look at the fuel load management on a tenure-blind process, and that is certainly where we are coming from in that submission: it is so important that you get that tenure-blind approach. Fires do not see any boundaries, and you need everybody working in cooperation, from people in local government to public land managers and people with private fuel loads. That is certainly our emphasis in Western Australia now. We want to see that become more the way we do business, and that is being facilitated by the legislative amendments and also through the interagency bushfire management committee, which reports through FESA to the Minister for Emergency Services.
Senator BACK—How long has that legislation been in place?
Ms Harrison-Ward—It came into effect in December last year.
Senator BACK—So it has had a fire season?
Ms Harrison-Ward—Yes.
Senator BACK—Are there any learnings?
Ms Harrison-Ward—There are going to be a lot of learnings. We have had quite a busy fire season this year. You would be very aware of the major Toodyay fire as well as the Badgingarra fires; we will be doing a number of post-incident analyses of those.
Senator BACK—Is there anything at the moment in that legislation that you see would need amending?
Ms Harrison-Ward—I would not want to pre-empt the outcome of those major reviews.
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 67
Senator BACK—Staying with that issue, I want to move to the concept of community engagement. I wonder if you could explain to the committee the community based fire and emergency services managers and the relationship between FESA and, presumably, local governments on that.
Ms Harrison-Ward—Sure. We currently have 17 partnerships with FESA and local government to employ either a community fire manager or a community emergency services manager. It is on a fifty-fifty funding basis, and those managers are employed under a memorandum of understanding and a business plan between local government and FESA to look at bushfire issues or, if they are an emergency services manager, all the emergency services issues within that local government area. So they do things like assist the local government with the bushfire network. That program now goes hand-in-hand with the UCL, or unallocated Crown land, management project as well. Those managers will look at ESL grants. Some of them are also designated as the chief bushfire control officer of that local government area; those who are not then work hand-in-hand with the chief. It is a very successful program, and there are another 12 or 13 local governments who wish to enter into partnerships with us.
Senator BACK—How long has the longest of those partnerships been going—two or three years?
Ms Harrison-Ward—They have been around for quite some time, but there was not a great deal of take-up in the initial stages. When I became CEO four years ago we looked at the reasons why and I spoke a lot to a lot of local governments. At that time FESA was employing all of them and they were housed in FESA. We have totally revamped that program now so that there are different ways they can be employed. FESA can employ the person and recoup the cost from local government, but most local governments are going towards—which I support because then there is a local ownership—employing the person themselves. They operate, in the main, out of the local government office and spend generally one day a week with the FESA office, but they still meet the requirements of both. That has really proven to be a success and local governments are really seeing the benefits of this program.
Senator BACK—So each community manager is actually funded by a single local government or shire?
Ms Harrison-Ward—No, we do have some that have joined forces. I have on my desk now a proposal from three local governments who wish to have a partnership. I also have a manager that I employ who covers all of the pastoralist councils up in the mid-west Gascoyne area.
Senator BACK—How many partnerships did you say there are now; was it 34?
Ms Harrison-Ward—No, 17, but I do have requests for another 12 or 13—funding permitting, of course.
Senator BACK—Excellent. I want to take you to the winter burning program. We have had discussions here in Perth and elsewhere about the merits of prescribed burning and fuel reduction et cetera. Could you take us through the elements of your winter burning program. I think you said that the Bushfire and Environmental Protection Branch developed the criteria.
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Mr Caporn—This program commenced development about 18 months ago. The key to it was to identify simplistic guidelines, basic things that land owners, particularly those with five- hectare lots that you get a lot of in the Perth Hills, could understand, use and participate in. All the science was checked out in relation to it to come up with a formula that was simplistic. We then went about creating a guide and a DVD that could be easily read and used by anyone, and then we went about conducting field demonstrations. It was initially implemented specifically for the Perth Hills, and all the science is around for that, for self-ignition times et cetera. We are now expanding that. It has been very successful and very popular. We have started to do some work in Busselton for this year. We see this as the tip of the iceberg of expanding the program. It is mainly for small property owners of five-hectare lots and things like that.
Senator BACK—The acceptance rate?
Mr Caporn—The acceptance rate is good. We have not done a full evaluation of it, so it is all anecdotal, but we are a getting a good turnout. There are always 90 to 100 people for field demonstrations generally, which is really good for these sorts of things. Because it is so simple, people are actually doing it. That is the anecdotal feedback at this stage.
Senator BACK—So, at the moment it is in the Perth Hills, is it?
Mr Caporn—Perth Hills is where we fully implemented it. This year we are moving to Busselton. We have seen that as the next targeted area, so we are hoping that we will get all of that program implemented in Busselton for this year for the small landholders.
Senator BACK—In those areas would that be the sort of role that the emergency services managers would take carriage of?
Mr Caporn—Not necessarily. That will definitely be part of it. Our bushfire environmentalists like to kick things off to make sure we get it right, so we go down there and our team, our scientists, run the first demonstrations. They make sure the regional staff are right across it and then the regional staff take that on in cooperation with local government support.
Senator BACK—You have now had one fire season with the state alert system. Could you give us the benefit of the knowledge you have gained as a result of going through one fire season with that, please.
Ms Harrison-Ward—Since it was first activated we have used it on nine occasions and successfully sent out around 20,000 messages. We have used them for cyclones and for fire. We certainly need to continue to enhance the system, which we will. There is a lot of education that still has to go with the program in the alerts as well. For example, when we put the alerts out sometimes we are putting it out into an area where the fire may already be to alert people to evacuate, but for some people receiving the messages the fire is already upon them. I do not know any way around that, because you are putting it out to an area so it is always going to be difficult to give very much warning when the fire is immediately called in there. But mostly we have had very good support and feedback from local governments and the community. Obviously we have also had some negative feedback, with people saying either, ‘I didn’t receive it,’ or ‘It came to me too late,’ and we continue to review that and work with the provider to keep
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 69 on enhancing the system. What is being looked at nationally with the big issue is mobile phones being able to capture the roaming mobile phones. That is being done at a national level.
CHAIR—There are a group of people sitting behind you whom we have just heard from, called Sentinel Alert Pty Ltd, and who seem to be two generations ahead of all that technology. Have you had a talk to them?
Ms Harrison-Ward—People at the regional level have, yes. We have a system that works and that has been used very successfully. We will continue to look at things that will enhance it and that will continue to move it—
CHAIR—I am generally pretty alert in the summer. I can sniff it, and if you can sniff it you are in trouble. What does the general alert say—there is a fire in your area, or look out the window? What does it say?
Mr Harrison-Ward—No, it has three different levels of alerts that go out.
Mr Hynes—We certainly do not rely on this system to notify people of a fire in their area unless it is an emergency. We still rely on all the normal processes of making sure people are well informed before a fire season of what their risks are and are aware. We do not want them to start relying on technology to make them fire savvy.
That is our message this year: we are saying, ‘State alert is something we are going to use in an emergency when we want people to get a message quickly and to assist us in moving them out of an area or getting them to stay in an area. We can use it in any of the hazards that we deal with.’ We certainly still want to rely on our public information going out, which is very effective. In Toodyay the most effective thing when the fire quickly entered a housing estate was that some volunteers on motorbikes knocked on doors and told people to get out. We put out state alerts during that day, but for those people it was too quick. They needed to get advice and they needed to be aware of their surroundings. We should embrace the technology and continue to use it, but we still have to rely on people being bushfire savvy.
CHAIR—I absolutely agree with that. I said earlier that some kids today can only add up with a calculator; they cannot add up with a pencil.
Mr Hynes—That is right.
Ms Harrison-Ward—Very true.
Senator BACK—I want to follow up on SMS delays. Is that something you experienced in high-volume areas when you were trying to get messages out?
Ms Harrison-Ward—We did have delays in getting the first one out. That was during the cyclone. That was more to do with the provider systems error. That was sorted out afterwards. We have had reports that, in the main, SMSs went through very quickly. We do reports after each activation. I do not have the results of all of those at hand but I could provide them. We go through them and look at what did not work, what did work and how we can improve it.
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Senator BACK—I go to another topic that has been covered in our discussions: the question of publicly owned land as opposed to privately owned land. Why is it that the state government is not bound by the Bush Fires Act? Is that something that was picked up in the amendments to the act?
Ms Harrison-Ward—Not in this current one, but you may be aware of the Community Development and Justice Standing Committee that looked into fire and emergency services legislation and put forward 88 recommendations. The ones that went through last year were what we saw as critical amendments that needed to be in place before the fire season. Cabinet has given approval for the development of a single contemporary emergency services act for this state. That act will bind the crumb.
CHAIR—We heard evidence earlier—it seems a bit corny to me—about a fence against public lands of some nature. As you know, the private landholder is responsible for the fence. You will not get any assistance out of the government. Why would it be a crime, with a $250,000 penalty, to spray through the fence for a fire break? If the government is not going to maintain the fence and the private landholder does not want to have the fence burnt, they could run down the fence with a spray and spray 10 feet on the other side of the fence which, in general circumstances, would protect the fence if a fire comes.
Ms Harrison-Ward—Into public land?
CHAIR—Yes. Why isn’t that a reasonable thing to do? If I have to pay for the fence if it gets burnt, why aren’t I allowed to take a reasonable precaution to save me that trouble?
Mr Caporn—You would probably come into contact with some of the local government law in relation to this. Generally, we know that when we start doing things on properly that is not our own we start to get into the realm of committing offences. One of the things that FESA have tried to do with respect to this, wherever we see a law or a set of guidelines that might prevent people from prescribed burning, is create a way around that with a guideline on what to do about it. For example, we have a smoke management guideline; we are now just completing a guideline on roadside and railside burning which would cover some of these issues. But it still does not authorise people to go into Crown land and start doing these sorts of things. It is an issue that they cannot—
CHAIR—As Senator Back said, you have some sort of dispensation as the Crown, and I do not. I know what I would be doing. We have a rubbish tip at home and every year it magically catches fire—it is a public rubbish tip in the area—and it saves digging a new hole. It is just magic.
Ms Harrison-Ward—These recommendations, of which there were quite a number, also picked up the issue of everyone having fire management plans. A committee was set up to look at fire management plans. That will be something. As you know, an act takes quite a significant amount of time to develop when you are going from three acts to one. Those things will be picked up.
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CHAIR—So if it was more cost efficient, and more reliable—if I have to put a firebreak in, I have to protect a fence—rather than have the Crown do it, for the simple effort of spraying 10 feet through the fence or something, everyone saves the trouble.
Ms Harrison-Ward—I would suggest that those are the types of issues that would be picked up in the fire management plans in those individual locations.
Senator O’BRIEN—I want to go back to the winter burning program. I am interested, firstly, whether you could supply the committee with the material that you referred to in your submission DVD and manuals and the like.
Mr Caporn—The DVD is in the back of the submission.
Senator O’BRIEN—Very good; thanks for that. In terms of how it works, I can envisage in other parts of the country massive barriers being put up to this by local government, by neighbours. Presumably there are no state government barriers to it here.
Mr Caporn—No.
Senator O’BRIEN—But in other places there would be. The generation of smoke and the potential for over burn are problems. How is all that managed, and what are the risks that people participating take?
Ms Harrison-Ward—FESA adopts a very strong community engagement program. We do not just rush in and do things; we go in an talk to the communities in the first instance. The communities tend to want to look after their communities, and want to look at reducing risk, so that is on the first hand. It is about working with the communities. Dave will be able to go through the process that it has taken to get them to that point.
Mr Caporn—Yes, in fact this document covers off all of those issues. One of the things is safety first, because the last thing we want to do is cause planned fires that go wrong. Basically, if we work on five hectares, it works on a five-year plan for that property—taking into account, obviously, there are a lot of areas they do not want to burn, where the home is et cetera. It talks in this document about consulting your neighbours, letting them know about the smoke issues. What we try to do there is convince people to engage their neighbours and participate together, so that we have extra protection around that. So it provides all that information because, exactly as you said, you get an unplanned fire and nobody bothers about the smoke because there are bigger issues, but you have a planned fire and everybody complains about it. So it does take into account all of those issues. The last thing I want to do is start neighbour disputes.
Senator O’BRIEN—What role does local government have here in these issues?
Mr Caporn—A significant one. They attend all of the field demonstrations. In fact, all of the volunteers have representation at these. When we actually take it on, there is participation also with the regional people and teaching people how to conduct these burns.
Senator O’BRIEN—Presumably, your example there of wind speed measurements is available through the Bureau of Meteorology?
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Mr Caporn—Yes, it is. If you look at the science behind this, it can be very complicated for people. When you read this booklet you will see how very simple it is. That was a key target for this: any Joe can pick it up and use it.
Senator O’BRIEN—It is good to have such a focus in your publications. In terms of problems with local government, are there any areas where particular local governments have been resistant to this strategy?
Mr Caporn—It is in its early stages. Perth Hills have been saturated in relation to it. We are moving to Busselton this year. The first year was all about the science. Now it is about rolling it out to the various locations. So far there has been total cooperation, but it is not state wide on this guide.
Senator O’BRIEN—The issues in the state of Tasmania tend to be around forest regeneration burns and the like. And, because of some climatic conditions, temperature inversions and the like, and the retention of smoke, there is much more resistance in those areas. Are there any such regions that you have to have regard to in this plan?
Mr Hynes—Certainly, in the south-west land division, I think the acceptance of smoke has become quite apparent in the last couple of years. I suppose that is because of the high media attention on that. The amount of complaints we get is less. I certainly think that with this winter burning program a great offset has been that, while people are very timid around fires, when they see fire in a controlled environment in a winter burn, where the fire behaviour is very mild, they really start to understand that fire can work for them. That really helps with them understanding the way fire works. After setting a break, we just burn back. On a bigger scale, they understand what has to happen in prescribed burnings, so it is a very good offset in getting the community to understand that fire is actually a friend in many instances. That is a really good offset of it. We feel that the high profile of fire has assisted in the acceptance of the smoke around the community in this last year in particular. But there is no doubt that the cycle will turn, and that is when we will have to make sure that we are still getting people to understand that fire needs to be used to fight fire.
Senator O’BRIEN—Thanks for that.
Senator COLBECK—Following directly on from that, in respect of the five-year plan, am I right in saying that it has effectively been developed around a particular location and land type at this stage and has been considered for a move to a different region?
Mr Caporn—Yes.
Senator COLBECK—I ask the question because of some of the arguments that we have heard about specific local biodiversity values, whether or not they actually get picked up as part of that process and whether in fact it is perhaps better to have a burn every two-year cycle so that the cycle is a 10-year cycle, not a five-year cycle, based on the values that exist within that particular region. Are those sorts of things considered as part of the document?
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Mr Caporn—Yes, they are. They are not to be confused, of course, with the broader prescribed burning across the state. But, certainly for this, they are considered part of the document.
Senator COLBECK—I am not familiar with the specifics of the particular locales or what biodiversity values might be remaining—whether it is conversion of former pastoral land or it is sparsely populated woodlands or whatever—but obviously there would be variances in the different communities that you are talking about. They would dictate potentially different management cycles.
Mr Caporn—One of the challenges that WA has is the variety and diversity of vegetation. This document I have indicates some of the visual fuel load guides throughout our state. Every region has a different fuel load of vegetation, so it is an issue. That is why we cannot just implement this statewide immediately; the fact is that we have to focus on those zones and say, ‘Right, get the science right for that area and then come in and teach people and then move to the next.’ It is not something that you can say that one fits all about. That is exactly what you are pointing out.
Senator COLBECK—Going back to some evidence we have heard today about management of the overall mosaic, if you like, and some discussion on escapes of fuel reduction burns and things of that nature, can you give us some information to clarify, from your perspective, some of those issues?
Mr Caporn—Prescribed burning is no doubt a contentious issue, no matter which jurisdiction you are in. The fire agency in Western Australia support fuel management because we know that fire intensity is the biggest issue when dealing with unplanned fires. A lower intensity gives us the opportunity to put in fire suppression activities that will be successful. With fires with high- fuel loads and high intensities, you are just taking a chance. With some of the changes in the climate and with all of those aspects of drier fuelscapes and fuel loads, the mix just cannot be sustained and disasters can occur.
The aspect of properly managed fuel or prescribed burning is something that we are now wanting to get a lot more cohesive and strategic about across the public and private lands, the plantations and the unallocated Crown land. That is the intention of our interagency bushfire committee, in which we are now sharing all of those values at risk. Western Australia, in the last couple of years, through the Fire and Emergency Services Authority and with the support of the Department of Environment and Conservation and, more recently, Western Power, has undertaken a bushfire threat analysis. We have completed that for the south-west land division and the Pilbara, and we have only one aspect left, in the Kimberley, which will finish the whole state.
We recently got a Commonwealth grant for that work. That identifies for us, using a risk management process, a strategic analysis of all the bushfire threats across the state, and obviously the coastal areas are key there—areas where infrastructure of power, rail, road and communities are. It tells us where our extreme risks, our high risks and our moderate risks are, so we can then concentrate those fuel management arrangements, whether it is through prescribed burning or other aspects, depending on what the community wants to accept or what we have to do. That is our approach.
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On the issue of escape burns, unfortunately, in some instances we are talking about large fuel loads and very large areas and the approach that, in particular, the Department of Environment and Conservation uses. They have a very good program and have been very successful and probably lead Australia, and certainly safety is a major concern and you must have a very good prescription and very good contingency plans. In the main, I think the amount of escape burns would probably be something that we would have to accept but certainly we try to minimise.
Senator Colbeck—Would those escapes be in any way impacted by a lack of investment in previous years and perhaps getting into a situation where you are trying to catch up in circumstances where you have got higher than desirable build-ups and having to bring those areas into—what are some of the reasons behind some of the escapes?
Mr Hynes—Sometimes, say, the weather is very much something that is an important aspect of managing a fire and understanding any unforeseen changes in the weather that could occur that can contribute. I suppose it is lack of training in some people. There are probably myriad examples I could give where a fire may escape but our experience is that it is not a common occurrence, and we would be hoping that a proper contingency plan is there to make sure that any escapes are brought under control as soon as possible. I think in that last fire season, it would be a handful of fires I know of that were escapes, and the effect of the prescribed burning target being met was very successful. There are a lot of issues related to meeting a target with prescribed burning because there are many factors: having the right times to burn, whether it is too wet, too dry or the weather is not conducive, so there are a lot of issues relating to getting the right window of opportunity.
Senator BACK—One of the areas that the federal government contributes quite significantly to in this area is in research. The Bushfire CRC is coming to the end of its life. Could I get your advice on where you think funding should be placed for future research; and would you also comment on the criticism by many that the Bushfire CRC is, if you like, the slave of the fire services and therefore not conducting research widely enough to satisfy those interested in the bushfire world? First of all, what should happen to the CRC or what should happen to research; secondly, your comment on its focus?
Ms Harrison-Ward—In terms of the Bushfire CRC, we have discussed this quite widely across the fire and emergency services agencies across Australia. FESA’s push has always been to broaden its scope to include other emergency services because we are a holistic organisation. We feel very strongly about the outcomes that have come from the Bushfire CRC. We have received a lot of assistance. A lot of their research has then turned into practice. We would like to see that funding continued. It is a very important area. Research into bushfires in this country needs a lot longer than just the small time frame it has been given to operate as a CRC.
Obviously, from a Western Australian point of view, we would like to see some of the research being not so, I suppose—not to offend anyone—east coast-centric. We are very unique over here in WA and we would like to see some more localised research occurring. We believe that broadening it into the streams that have been discussed at agency level for some time is definitely the way to go.
Senator BACK—So what would your recommendation be, given the fact that CRCs have got a limited life; how would you like to see the future of bushfire and related research managed?
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Ms Harrison-Ward—I think it has to continue to go the way it is. All of the states have signed up to the Bushfire CRC. We all actively participate in it. A lot of the time, in the data that we are provided, it is a very collaborative approach. It is not just about bushfires. It also looks at things like the safety of firefighters and recruitment of volunteers. There are a whole lot of issues that come out of it. It is not just for fighting of fire. There is a lot of research into the prevention side, the preparedness side and the response side. In terms of longevity, there has also been a lot of talk about having a centre of excellence set up on a permanent basis. That is something that we believe would be great to have for a topic of fire and emergency services. You are never going to have any shortage of topics to research to continue to prepare this country and, right down to the local level, to be prepared and respond to any type of emergency.
Senator BACK—Do you accept the criticism that is made of it: that it is too much dictated by the fire and emergency services at the moment? If you do accept that, how do you believe that could be addressed going into a new research format?
Ms Harrison-Ward—Obviously, I head up a fire and emergency service agency, so you are talking about me. I personally do not believe it is, because we work in partnerships with various institutes and universities, so there are a whole lot of those projects that go on. It is not as though the fire services do it all by themselves. To broaden it, it can be by other topics. I do not know how you would do it. I am not sure you are referring to in terms of the criticisms. It cannot be all things to everyone, and there has to be a systematic approach to the research that is undertaken and particularly how we are going to implement that research. That is the next part. It has to be something that can be used by the end users.
Senator BACK—Linked to the same area, you have given us some details in your submission regarding arson and the programs that you have implemented to try to increase community awareness of and decrease the impact of arson, particularly in the bushfire environment. Could you give us an understanding briefly of where you have gone with that, what the outcomes have been and where you are going into the future with it?
Ms Harrison-Ward—Certainly. Just before I hand over to Dave, as part of that package of critical amendments that went through with the Bushfires Act, emerged from a number of cases that had gone through the courts that the definition of ‘property’ was flawed. So that has been changed to ensure that it is also an offence for fires on crown land. That was picked up as part of the amendments that were strengthened.
Mr Caporn—Our approach is pretty basic. It is about identifying where trends pop up. One of the things that FESA has done is in respect of a web-based reporting tool that is shared between us, DEC and also the WA police arson squad. The key here is to identify where we get a spate of incidents in an area, and then marshalling all the local resources to be able to try to pick up that person or persons or whoever is doing it. Generally these things do not start off with a big bang and a massive fire—although they can. Generally they start off with a series of small fires. This reporting tool that we have been working on is already working very effectively, to the point where only this week we received contact from the Attorney-General’s Department saying that they are getting very interested in perhaps supporting it to go Australia wide. That is obviously in the early stages of discussion. The issue is: we will do that, and once we have identified that there is something of concern to us here, we will go to that local area and work with the local police, the local government, with all of the general resources that they can
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 76 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 leverage, and then try to proactively identify who is doing this. That can be things like looking at the schools, the absentees and things like that. It has made a difference. We have led the way— when I say ‘we’ I mean FESA—in respect of supporting our arson squad to get the highest clearances in the country for the last few years. In the last reported period there were 193 persons charged by the arson squad, supported by FESA. That included criminal damage, arson and 72 offences against the Bushfire Act. So it has been very successful and it has been acknowledged Australia wide. I have had to send out some of our key people to a number of forums to actually provide information on this that has been picked up by other states.
Senator BACK—Thank you. Lastly, you have obviously been following the royal commission into the Black Saturday fires. Is there yet anything specific that may find its way into application for Western Australia?
Mr Hynes—We have been working with all the agencies related to the national arrangements for fire danger ratings and emergency warning systems. As recently as yesterday, we were again hooked up with all the national agencies, talking about learnings from last year so we can take them into the next year. The other aspect that was prominent in the royal commission was that the fact that we had a CRC meant that very quickly after the fires we had a team of researchers who knew each other working with the agencies in the field and getting data that the agencies were seeking about the construction standards, the fuel loads, what worked and what did not work. I think that was a very good benefit of the CRC—being able to get that into it. Certainly in July we will be looking into the final report of the royal commission. There is no doubt that there will be recommendations about construction standards and, I suppose, the arrangements for fuel management and community warning systems. We certainly are taking the lead and working with other agencies to make sure we are prepared for that.
CHAIR—Thanks very much. Do you think we have all learned something from the Canberra fires? The Canberra fire started out in the Brindabella Range, and it was left for several days. One of the reasons it was left was that they thought it was an occupational hazard to go in and put it out. There were a lot of planes on standby that could have put retardant out, and the state authority thought, ‘No, we’ll wait till we declare an emergency and the Commonwealth can pay for the retardant.’ There were all those sorts of decisions. Do you think anyone is listening or learning?
Ms Harrison-Ward—From my perspective, I believe so. One of the key aspects, as you know, is that when a fire arises you have to jump on it as quickly as you can and get it out. Around the Perth Hills areas, we have what we call zone 2 responses so that we can get to those fires and throw everything at them to get them out before they take off any further. It is probably appropriate to get Craig to speak more about the fire side.
Mr Hynes—I think there is no doubt, and I am sure they would agree over there, that the fact is that there was a lack of cohesion and there were issues of land tenure, who was in charge and information being shared across agencies. That has to be a learning. I know they have addressed those matters in some ways. In Western Australia, I suppose we are devoid of those things because we have a single-agency approach and are working with DEC. The other thing is that we have certainly learnt about the fire behaviour and the effect of the ember attack. Justin Leonard from the CSIRO did a lot of research that we have all learnt from about construction standards
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 77 and also the fact that you do not have to be sitting on the interface; you will be losing houses and people in areas that you think would not be affected.
CHAIR—Thank you very much. We are very grateful for your assistance and the good work you do.
Ms Harrison-Ward—Thank you for your time.
Mr Caporn—There are a number of publications there. We are happy to leave them behind.
CHAIR—Terrific.
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[2.19 pm]
ENRIGHT, Professor Neal, Professor in Plant Ecology, School of Environmental Science, Murdoch University
CHAIR—Welco me.
Prof. Enright—I did not provide a submission to this inquiry but was invited to come and answer some questions.
CHAIR—Do you want to make an opening statement?
Prof. Enright—Yes. I have prepared a short document. I may not get through all of it as an opening statement but I can refer back to it, and I can provide it to you in full.
CHAIR—Thank you very much.
Prof. Enright—Basically, I am a plant ecologist with a longstanding research interest in the population ecology of woody plant species in relation to fire. Over the past 25 years, I have worked on Banksia and other shrubland species’ responses to fire in the high biodiversity shrublands of the Mount Lesueur and Eneabba sandplain region of south Western Australia, and I have worked on similar vegetation types in the Grampians Little Desert region of western Victoria. Along with the Emergency Services Commissioner of Victoria, Bruce Esplin, and CSIRO fire scientist, Dr Malcolm Gill, I co-authored the inquiry report into the 2002-03 Victorian bushfires, generally known as the Esplin report.
My main interest in fire ecology concerns fire regimes—that is, the frequency, season, intensity and spatial pattern of fires associated with particular vegetation types—and how they affect the persistence and abundance of key plant species and overall biodiversity. These interests clearly intersect with the issue of fuel reduction burning as a management tool, since the use of planned fires to reduce fuel loads affects all of the components of the natural fire regime. Beyond that, I can just refer to these notes in relation to any questions you might have.
Senator BACK—Could you give us the benefit of your advice or thoughts on that very question you just finished on, Professor Enright? We have been trying to come to terms with the question of the impact of specifically prescribed burning on the biodiversity of plant and animal matter—in your case, plant matter. Could you explain to us your thoughts on the eucalypt forests?
Prof. Enright—Most of my work is actually in shrublands but also in dry eucalypt forests with shrubby understoreys. We have been doing research over the last five or 10 years on the affects of short fire intervals on plant communities of this sort, north of Perth.
Senator COLBECK—What do you mean by ‘short intervals’? What is your definition of ‘short’?
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Prof. Enright—Shorter than what we regard as the average interval under natural conditions for that vegetation type. In the case of shrublands, we have estimated that the natural fire regime might be for a mean interval of about 15 years. So a short interval would be any management prescription which led to fires being repeated at less than 15 years.
We have looked at fire intervals ranging from three through to 16 years and conducted experimental burns, with the help of the DEC fire management staff of the mid-west region. Two of theses have been submitted in the last few days at the University of Melbourne, where I was working until recently. One of them was on the coastal calcareous shrublands north of Perth. The other was on the acid sandplain shrublands in the same general region. The outcomes of both of those theses draw conclusions suggesting that fire intervals of five years or less lead to significant reductions in woody plant species richness. Fire intervals between five and 10 years are likely to lead to reductions in woody plant species richness, not as quickly and more in relation to a combination of factors mainly concerning the occurrence of drought years following the fires. If you have fires more frequently, the intersection of fire followed by drought will also become more frequent. In those circumstances, that window between six and 10 years will also tend to lead to a loss of some woody plant species.
Senator COLBECK—Have you interposed that with the data that might come from fire management agencies that would say, ‘Okay, fuel loads get too high within X cycle’? What is the comparison with the cycle that might be called up for a prescribed burn in those areas? Is it less than five years or is it, as we heard this morning, 13 years, which is the average. That is getting more towards the natural cycle for those sorts of bushlands. What is the interaction between the two things that might occur? Is the fuel load build-up and requirement for mitigation drastically different from the estimated natural cycle?
Prof. Enright—Fuel loads tend to build up to a level where there have been some very large wild fires within seven or eight years of a previous fire, and the fire management people at DEC were concerned about the relationship between fuel loads and recurrence of large fire events in these kinds of plant communities.
Senator O’BRIEN—Is it scrubland that you are talking about?
Prof. Enright—I am basically talking about vegetation up to about two metres in height that lacks a continuous tree canopy. The occasional tree may occur in the landscape, but it is predominantly banksias, acacias, epacris—a range of low, woody shrubs ranging from one to two metres in height.
Senator COLBECK—If the fuel loads are building up to those sorts of levels within, say, seven years, how does that reconcile with the estimated natural cycle of 15 years? Or are there other factors that are causing the higher frequency?
Prof. Enright—It has to do with the probability of ignition, fire spread and fires encountering areas that are younger in age. The landscape tends to be broken up into patches of vegetation that are of different ages since the last fire. At a landscape level, if you have large continuous areas of natural vegetation, you get a certain degree of self-regulation of the fire regime through the interactions of certain patches with others.
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Senator BACK—Are you in agreement from a management point of view that it is necessary to control fuel loadings in areas that are likely to impact on human, built and biodiversity assets?
Prof. Enright—Yes. In our 2002-03 inquiry report we recommended that there should be an increase in the amount of fuel reduction burning being done in Victoria. It had reached quite low levels, around 80,000 to 100,000 hectares a year in a public estate of seven million hectares or so, and it certainly needed to be increased, especially in fire protection zone 1, the zone which surrounds built-up areas—the urban-rural fringe around Melbourne, areas around the edges of regional towns—and other forms of infrastructure. There was a clear recommendation that those issues needed to be addressed and that there was a case for an increased level of fuel reduction burning for protection of life and property.
Beyond that, there were also statements made that the relationship between the amount of fuel reduction burning and the effectiveness of fuel reduction burning is still not clear in a scientific sense. Most of the experimental research relates to fires conducted under moderate to, at most, high fire danger weather conditions. It is very difficult to actually conduct experiments under extreme fire danger weather conditions. As we move up the scale, we do not really have as good an understanding of how fuels will behave, even in fuel reduced situations.
There have been a number of studies—and I am sure you will have heard from a number of people this morning and in your meetings elsewhere in the country—of case studies that have been done looking at the fact that a particular wildfire may have been slowed or stopped when it encountered a fuel reduced block. That is certainly true and there are many examples of that in a number of forest types in southern Australia, particularly where the fuel reduction burns had been delivered within the previous five years. One of the main issues is that, once you get beyond five years and you get into high fire danger weather conditions, the value of those previous fuel reduction burns drops away quite quickly. I think you heard from McCarthy and Tolhurst in Melbourne about the studies that they have done trying to quantify exactly how that relationship works.
So a large issue surrounds how much fuel reduction burning of the public estate in different parts of the country in different vegetation types can actually be done at the frequency required to deliver the wildfire suppression and life and property protection benefits that we want. If we were to deliver at that level, what would the costs of that be? Do we have the economic, manpower and time resources?
You will also have heard about the fact that delivering the fuel reduction burns is quite problematic in terms of the window of time that is available. If you think purely of the parts of the year that are not too cold and damp or to hot, dry and windy and take out weekends, school holidays and the days within those zones in spring and autumn that are too windy or fall outside the prescription envelopes, the estimates for most places in Victoria are that fewer than 20 days a year are available for fuel reduction burning and in some years zero days a year fall within the prescription envelope.
Senator BACK—Have you had the opportunity to examine the areas that were the subject of the fires in 2009 in February in Victoria? Were any of the recommendations from your 2003 report implemented in those areas? If so, what were the outcomes? Do you know whether any
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 81 recommendations you may have made as a result of 2003 were not implemented in the areas that were affected on 8 February last year?
Prof. Enright—I moved to Perth two years ago and have not been back to see the areas that were burned in 2009, so I am not really able to comment. While all the recommendations of our inquiry report were accepted by the state government, some were implemented and others were not. Certainly recommendations concerning the emergency communications systems did not come to anything, as we know. The increase in fuel reduction burn targets that was recommended was acted upon but they have had trouble in meeting any new targets, so fuel reduction burning levels are still relatively low and there have been subsequent inquiries and reports that have continued to recommend increases in the amount of fuel reduction burning. One of the issues with some of the high impact areas in the 2009 fires relate to the vegetation types and the fact that some of these areas were high biomass, wetter eucalypt forest areas dominated by mountain ash, and these areas are probably the most difficult to fuel reduction burn because the fuel loads can become very high. At the same time the fuel moisture levels are high and tend to remain high right through the spring so that by the time the fine fuels are dry enough to allow them to burn you are probably entering weather conditions that are inappropriate or too dangerous to risk the burning of them.
Senator BACK—I have just noticed a publication by Byron Lamont and Dr Miller in which you were examining anomalies in grass tree fire history reconstructions for south-western Australian vegetation. This has been used in the past and arguments have gone backwards and forwards to indicate whether or not this is, as I understand it, evidence of mosaic burning or burning patterns by Indigenous peoples before European settlement. Is that the case? Is that what this paper was examining?
Prof. Enright—That is the argument that is proposed by the people who wrote the original papers describing the grass tree fire reconstruction method—Ward and colleagues, 2001—and subsequent papers. Their argument is that the fire scars on the grass trees were much more frequent prior to the 1930s and going back into the last century; they had become fairly consistent. About every three or four years we get a band on the trunk of the grass tree which indicates the occurrence of a fire. We investigated the issues we had with that. We compared satellite imagery for the last 30 years—since Landsat imagery became available in the 1970s— with known fire records from a region north of Perth. We compared the satellite image record of known fires with the grass tree banding record for that 30-year period and found that there were anomalies, that the grass trees did not always accurately record fire events.
The other thing is that going back into the past we get the situation that every grass tree seems to show these very close bands that suggest very frequent fires. If that were the case it would suggest no patchiness in the landscape—that every three years, regardless of whether it is this year, next year or last year, in one of those three years everywhere is being burnt. That just does not gel with the scientific data we have on the requirements of many fire-killed plant species, which simply could not survive such a fire regime. It seems to us that, as we go back into the past, this accumulation of narrow bands on the grass trees is problematic and it needs more work, so we have suggested that there needs to be further study; there needs to be verification of just what these bands are actually telling us.
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Senator O’BRIEN—I want to go back to your evidence about the response in shrublands to fires at a frequency of less than five years and five to 10 years. Presumably you have a hypothesis as to why there is less effective regeneration in those areas where the fires are more frequent. Can you just explain it for us.
Prof. Enright—Certainly. The basic fact is that there are a large number of shrub species that are killed by fire and so depend upon seeds for recruitment after fire. There is also another large set of species which resprout vegetatively and so can survive through the fire event. The above- ground parts get burnt and killed but they regrow from lignotubers, root suckers or other below- ground parts or buds protected beneath thick bark. So there are two basic strategies.
The fire-killed species are the ones that are most vulnerable, because after any fire they depend on how many seeds they have produced in their lifetime, how well protected those seeds are and how available they are to germinate after the fire. Some species carry those seeds in woody fruits in the canopy, like banksia species do; others drop their seeds each year after they have flowered and the seeds have been produced, and those seeds accumulate in the surface layers of the soil. In many species the seeds are stimulated to germinate by either the heat or the smoke chemical signature of the fire, so when the winter rains arrive, typically some months after a fire has occurred, we get this massive germination event of new individuals coming up in that first year after fire.
Particularly with fire-killed species, it depends how long it takes a seedling to grow to maturity and to start to produce seeds. There have been a number of analyses done in south- western Australia suggesting that that time ranges from as little as two years to as much as eight or 10 years, depending on the plant species you are talking about. That is until the time of first flowering. Typically, as a rule of thumb, we multiply that by a factor of two or even three to get something like an estimate of the number of years for that plant to have grown in size and, each year as it gets bigger, to start to produce more and more seeds. In its first year of reproduction it may fail to actually set viable seeds or it may set a very small number of seeds. In its second year of being reproductive it will tend to produce more seeds, and in its third year more seeds again, and so on. So it takes some time after the threshold point of reaching maturity before it has actually produced and stored enough seeds, either in the soil or in woody fruits on the plant, to ensure its own effective self-replacement—that is, when it dies in a fire and it releases its seeds or its seeds are stimulated to germinate, there are enough seeds that have a chance to become a plant which in itself has a chance to survive to become an adult. Obviously, not all seeds germinate—many are eaten; many die in the first summer—so there is a high attrition rate. You need quite a lot of seeds to get one new adult.
Those sorts of plants are highly vulnerable to short-interval fire events. Typically, if we multiply that range of values—two years to eight years—by two or three we end up with a range of four years to 16 or six to 24. It suggests that a number of species certainly will not do very well if fires are being repeated at five-year intervals or even 10-year intervals.
Senator O’BRIEN—What about controlled area fires and the ability of seed to spread from outer areas and the like?
Prof. Enright—The problem is that the areas that are not burned are not able to send their seeds into the areas that are burned in many cases, because the seeds are stored in the soil and do
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES Thursday, 29 April 2010 Senate—Select ARI 83 not disperse very far or the seeds are held in the canopy and they disperse after the fire actually causes the canopy fruits to open and then those seeds are blown out of the fruits and disperse then. So there is a limited amount of seed of many of these fire-adapted species that would actually disperse—and they would have to disperse in the first year because that is when the opportunity for recruitment is best. It is when the landscape has been cleared of competition. There is lots of bare soil, there are nutrients released by the ashing of plant material in the fire and there is more soil moisture because there are fewer plants with the root systems tapping that soil moisture supply. So it is in that first year after fire that you have your highest amount of recruitment.
So, from these unburnt communities surrounding burned areas, in many cases the species are not dispersing seeds or are not dispersing many seeds. So it is limited in the role that it can play. That varies from one vegetation type to another. For some major forest species—some eucalypt species—there would be a reasonable amount of seed dispersal potentially from an unburnt to a burned areas. But, in shrub lands, for example, there would be relatively little.
Senator COLBECK—There would be a range, though. My discussions with people in the forest industry would say that anything within a tree-high length of the three has a much higher chance of regeneration. For example, harvesting a coupe with a clear-fell and then burn, if all parts of that coupe were within a tree-height length of the boundary, the recruitment and the regeneration of that area from natural seed cast would be much stronger than if the boundaries were further out.
Prof. Enright—Yes, particularly in the case of a number of the wet eucalypt forest tree species.
CHAIR—In 1910—a hundred years ago—there were horse and carts, a few trucks and mostly hand pumps and now we have got everything from helicopters to planes to big trucks. Why aren’t the fires smaller?
Prof. Enright—That is a good question. I suppose climate change is a bit of a curly one. Some people argue that it does not exist; others argue that it does. For at least the last 20 years there have been data sets constructed looking at things like the daily fire danger index in various places in southern Australia, and it does seem to be increasing through time. There is a statistically significant increase. The annual sum of forest fire danger index seems to be a measure that the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne and a number of CSIRO groups and others have agreed seems to correlate quite well with the number of fires per year that are occurring and the area burned per year also, then this measure—the annual sum of the daily forest fire danger index—seems to be one measure that might be useful.
When we look at that for almost any climate station in south-eastern Australia—and work has not been done to the same extent in south-western Australia yet—there is a significant positive correlation through time of increase in that measure. So there may be a relationship there between this increase in fire danger weather conditions and increase in number and intensive and severity of fires. As I suggested earlier, there was a decline in the area of fuel management burning in Victoria from the late eighties through to the end of the 1990s. It is possible that there was some effect there on a reduced effectiveness of the fuel management program on fire size.
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CHAIR—Would that explain the change in the weather and Mother Nature winning and man losing? Back in 1910—I cannot remember 1910, mind you, although some people would think that—people would man a hand pump with a 500-gallon tank.
Prof. Enright—There were massive fires in the 1850s in Victoria and in 1939. Fuel reduction burning did not become significant until after 1939. We may have been to some extent lucky with some of those weather conditions, but I a number of people have also identified that individuals were able to use fire much more freely back then. So you had farmers and other people in bush settings who were using fire to manage the landscape themselves in whatever way they saw fit. That is no longer acceptable and that probably has had an effect. But the question is: were they impacting on biodiversity values by doing that, and could we go back to such a procedure now? I do not think we could, on occupational health and safety grounds on biodiversity.
CHAIR—Do you think there is as much fire awareness now as there was 100 years ago? The average annual wildfire in Cape York Peninsula is five million hectares, with the biggest being 11 million. It is virtually unoccupied—14,000 people live off the coast—and you could explain how they could have some pretty big wildfires up there. But in Victoria, for instance, are there a lot fewer people in the bush or is it that no-one gives a rats anymore?
Prof. Enright—There has certainly been some level of rural depopulation, and I understand that the numbers of volunteers in the CFA and other state agencies have tended to decline through time, either for financial reasons or simply because there are not the same number of people.
CHAIR—You do not think it is because there are too many lawyers these days?
Prof. Enright—We are certainly risk averse. It certainly was the case that that affected procedures and decision making in the fighting of the 2002-03 fires in Victoria.
CHAIR—Do you think that there is some myth? Maybe it is just a television thing that is a bit like footy, where footy is now a TV product with too many boofheads, too much money and too much spare time. But, with fire, do you think there is a sort of myth that it should not be a risk to go and put a fire out? For example, a snake handler occasionally gets bitten. Do you think we have this public perception that fire, for the general population, is something you just do not go near because of the risk averse thing and that it is someone else’s job? I was amazed when the forest mob in New South Wales, when the Canberra fires were burning, said, ‘We are not going to put that fire out because of occupational health and safety.’ We would not have got anyone to jump out of the trenches in World War 1 or be a tail gunner in World War 2 if we had all adopted that attitude.
Prof. Enright—Well, our society has changed quite a lot. Today at the university electricians from a range of private companies are going through every office and every room in the university retagging every electrical cable. That is done annually. Every heater, every computer screen, every hard drive—everything—has to be checked and approved, at extraordinary cost. Perhaps we could say, ‘What are the chances that any of those cables are faulty or a problem?’ We never used to do that—
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CHAIR—But that is because we have got too many lawyers with not enough work.
Prof. Enright—Perhaps so, but—
CHAIR—So should we, in a metaphoric sense, shoot two out of three lawyers to fix this?
Prof. Enright—Well, that is a similar question to the one asked about politicians!
Senator BACK—Before we get too pessimistic—and that is exactly what I am going to do—I would be keen on your response to this. I came away from the hearing in Melbourne with a deep sense of pessimism about the likelihood of Victoria facing again exactly what they faced in February last year. The reasons, very briefly, were these. There is clearly no agreement between the key agencies about who has the final say for, in this particular case, fuel reduction, burning or management of the different public lands. You described the low level of prescribed burning in your 2003 report and you mentioned that the level has not been substantially increased. They told us that there are now far fewer people involved in forestry and far fewer people skilled in the forests and their ecosystems and, as a result of that, management of forests, including fire. They told us that there are far fewer skilled people able to do the work. You do have just made the point that there are fewer volunteers et cetera. There are more people living in fire prone areas than ever before. As was just mentioned briefly, we have this concern with occupational health and safety and welfare. I will be very keen to see the recommendations of the royal commission, but I will not hold my breath, because we have seen so many major reports, including the Nairn report, whose recommendations have been endorsed and then promptly ignored. Do you think that is an unduly pessimistic outlook for Victoria, or do you think it is a realistic one?
Prof. Enright—I think it is quite a realistic one because the increase in fuel reduction burning that they would have to achieve is probably unachievable, both economically and in terms of the human resources that are available. Some things will probably come out of the royal commission. They have already forewarned that they will scrap the stay and defend policy. I certainly endorse that. There is absolutely no evidence of what happens once the fire danger exceeds the index value of 100. There is no way of knowing what individuals will be confronting if they try to save their home, so it is inappropriate for them to stay under those sorts of conditions. If those sorts of conditions are going to become more frequent then we have to look at how people assess risk and respond to risk. Some of the local councils are probably partly at fault here because they want ratepayers and they have allowed building in locations that are perhaps not particularly fire safe and do not meet building codes that are suitable for the circumstances. There are things that need to be done at those sorts of levels. We need to ask what level of individual responsibility people are prepared to accept, what levels of community responsibility local councils are going to front up and accept and what demands they are going to make on people when they move into those areas. So there are things that can be done there. Fuel reduction burning is only one part of the equation. It is a very big ask in Victoria. They have much more complicated topographic circumstances, higher fuel load vegetation and more extreme to catastrophic fire danger days than typically occur in the higher biomass forests of south-western Australia.
A lot has been made of how well the authorities and agencies do in south-western Australia. They do a very good job here. They treat a reasonably high area per year. The record of wildfires
AGRICULTURAL AND RELATED INDUSTRIES ARI 86 Senate—Select Thursday, 29 April 2010 indicates that there is a small frequency and small size of wildfire events here, relative to south- eastern Australia. I do not know that you can put that down solely to them doing it better here. I think there are the environmental circumstances of the more mountainous terrain, the much larger area of high-biomass wet forests and differences in fire weather and fire behaviour conditions that make it a more difficult problem in Victoria. They will have to throw a hell of a lot more money at it to fix it. Then, of course, there are the biodiversity issues that would be associated with trying to do that in those large areas of national parks.
Senator BACK—This committee will hopefully move towards making some recommendations as a result of these hearings. In Canberra, during our first hearing, we heard from people associated with New South Wales bushfire services, and they were telling us that 0.2 per cent of the Blue Mountains, be it national park or whatever—I am not familiar enough with it to know its legislative base—is prescribed-burned on an annual basis. After seeing what happened in Victoria, and knowing the population and the topography of the Blue Mountains, it causes me as a member of this committee to ask: aren’t we just setting up the Blue Mountains for an 8 February 2009 situation? When it does happen, are we all going to beat our breasts saying, ‘Why didn’t someone do something,’ or, ‘Why didn’t someone make somebody accountable’? I would appreciate your comments on that, because it seems to me that therein lies a role for the Commonwealth in terms of making agencies who are responsible accountable.
CHAIR—And have a think about this in the future, with more people moving to a bush setting for their home. For example, Dick Smith built a house out in wherever it is in Sydney there, and he said, ‘Bill, come over and have a look,’ and he had all these fire hazard reduction features, copper and God knows what. Should the market help sort this out a bit with fire premiums? It costs more to insure your car in the city than it does in the country—that sort of thing. Do insurance companies just keep spreading the risk across the whole of the community, including the people who are risk averse and clear around their house? Or is it just too scary to contemplate that there might be some variation in your insurance premiums depending on the building code and where you are? Can you get a rebate for being cautious?
Prof. Enright—I am not an expert on insurance and I think I probably should not seek to answer that. I do not know what the insurance industry does in relation to this, no.
CHAIR—Well, we have got to pack up and go back to Canberra. We are very grateful for your evidence. We thank everyone who attended today and those who assist us technically.
Prof. Enright—Can I just draw your attention to one more document. It is currently sitting in the offices of the department of climate change in Canberra and it is called Interactions between climate change, fire regimes and biodiversity in Australia—a preliminary assessment. It was published by a CSIRO consortium including Dick Williams from the CSIRO in Darwin, me as a co-author and a number of other people. It is currently embargoed and sitting on some desk in Canberra, but it should be released any day.
CHAIR—So you would go to jail if you gave that to us now?
Prof. Enright—I would indeed. But I am happy to leave the reference with your staff here, and it should be available very soon.
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CHAIR—Right-o. Thank you very much. And thank you very much to the Conservation Council of Western Australia for sitting through the entire proceedings.
Committee adjourned at 2.58 pm
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