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| Title: | Fire Management on Public Land - Victoria Burns While Its Bureaucracy Fiddles | | Topic: | Fire | | Year: | 2015 | | Author/s: | Dexter, B.D; A. Hodgson AM | | Abstract: | Will Recent Legislative Changes to Crisis and Emergency Management Improve Fire Management on Victoria's Public Lands?
This report is the third in a series which analyses the prevention, suppression and planned use of fire on the one-third of Victoria that is public land. It identifies on-going failure, since the mid-1980s, in government policy and strategic direction to cope with the State’s major natural hazard – bushfire3.
Victorians benefited from the reforms enacted as a result of Judge Leonard Stretton’s inquiry into the 1939 Black Friday bushfires, and from emergency management reform (1986) following the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. However, five years on, they have yet to benefit from many of the key recommendations of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.
This report identifies lessons now unheeded from previous reforms, and problems which successive Ministers and their Departmental Heads have either not addressed or worse, have resisted. Successive governments have also failed to maintain forest fire management as a primary core business of the State. In the meanwhile, over the past three decades costs associated with public land fire suppression have increased more than sevenfold while the effectiveness and efficiency of fire management has progressively declined.
A combination of the misuse of science by ideologically-driven interest groups, and bureaucratic acquiescence/indifference, has seen successive governments become disengaged from the practice of landscape-scale fuel management. This development appears to have been aided by the 2009 Bushfire Royal Commission’s Implementation Monitor, and by the current Emergency Management Commissioner. As a consequence of the failure to adequately manage fuels, both the community and the environment have paid a heavy penalty with the increases in destructive bushfires, particularly since 2000.
The report examines, in the context of forest fire management on public land, the recent creation of what is argued is a large new government ‘silo’ - Emergency Management Victoria – that now has ‘oversight’ [control] of crisis and emergency management, including bushfire, under an ‘all agencies / all hazards’ model.
The appropriateness of the increasingly mandated ‘top-down’ command and control system which now exists under the ‘generalship’ of the Emergency Management Commissioner is evaluated in the context of the concurrent existence of a State Crisis and Resilience Council and its three standing sub-committees: risk and resilience; capability and response; and relief and recovery.
The report exposes:
The new and significantly more costly, while less effective way of managing bushfire in Victoria;
A failure to implement the 2009 Bushfire Royal Commission’s recommendation on fuel management;
A failure to ensure an adequate state of preparedness commensurate with the known risk; and
An increasing failure to aggressively attack and quickly bring bushfires under control.
The report argues that successive Executives of the agency responsible for the prevention, suppression and planned use of fire on public land have failed to maintain an effective and efficient organisation. As such, the agency appears to be incapable of re-organising itself.
The report recommends the creation of a Forests and Lands Conservancy with a dedicated mission to conserve the sustainability of soils, catchments, flora and fauna and uses and values of the forest environment for present and future generations. A core task of such a Conservancy is to protect the public land estate from Victoria’s major natural hazard – bushfire. The planned use of fire in the landscape is a major component of that task.
Finally, the report recommends the appointment of an external, independent panel to advise the government on appropriate structural arrangements and resourcing for the Forests and Land Conservancy to manage fire on Victoria’s public land and related matters under the provisions of the Forests Act 1958.
The report poses a significant political challenge for the Andrews’ Government, while offering a reward whereby all Victorians would again have a nationally and internationally recognised agency [Forests and Lands Conservancy] dedicated to forest, woodland and public land management more generally, and to environmental conservation. An agency that would again take seriously the development and implementation of strategies and programs for the prevention, suppression and planned use of fire in the landscape. | | Type: | Submission |
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