Bushfires

The following are the first and second instalments of a speech given to Parliament outlining The Greens response to the February bushfire tragedy.

6 May 2009

 

Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) -- I would like to read a couple of statements:

"We were prepared for a bushfire; we weren't prepared for what came over that hill."

 

That was said by Mrs Norma Nelson of Strathewen, as reported in the Age of 9 April.

"It is my opinion that the extent and severity of the 2003 and 2007 fires is a result of poor public land management over the past 30 or so years exacerbated by the effects of a decade of drought almost certainly made worse by climate change."

 

That was said by Dr Kevin Tolhurst, a noted bushfire expert, in his submission to a Victorian parliamentary committee that predated this tragedy.

These are two statements with which we should all be able to agree, but agreeing on a way forward could be somewhat harder. I am addressing that part of the motion which relates to what we believe the royal commission should be examining.

In my speech on the condolence motion on this tragedy I said that heroes are people who take responsibility, even if that leads them to some sort of physical risk or personal sacrifice. Thinking about that, I have been posing to myself the question, 'What is a politician's responsibility in marking out a way forward?'. I believe it is, firstly and most importantly, to keep an open mind about the causes of the tragedy and the solutions for ensuring it never happens again.

It is certainly not to run to the nearest media outlet, while the fires are still burning and while people are out there fighting and risking their lives, and scream, 'We told you so', it is not to retreat to what you think is your safe political ground, and it is not to try to split a community in half, when that community is already suffering a lot of pain, in the hope that some votes will come out of it for you from somewhere. It is also not to amplify the most aggressive voices at the expense of all community members who have a right to be heard.

This is a new realm we are moving into. We experienced fire weather at levels never before measured. So if it is blame you are looking for, you will find it very hard to completely blame any one factor -- or to absolve anyone, either.

The forest fire danger index is something that members may know.

It is that scientific calculation, based on weather variables, that tells us the degree of fire danger. We are more familiar with it by the words 'moderate, 'very high, 'extreme' and so on that we see on those roadside signs.

When it was first developed the index was set at around 40 or 50 for 'extreme' fire weather, the sort of weather where there is very little you can do to directly fight a fire. I believe that 100 on the index was set as the weather we would have seen in the 1939 bushfires. On Ash Wednesday it was reportedly about 130.

The prediction for the fire danger index for the Melbourne area for Saturday, 7 February 2009, as at 4.45 p.m. the night before was 164.

The index consists of: H = relative humidity from 0-100 per cent; T = air temperature; V = average wind speed; and D = drought factor in the range 0-10, which tells us how wet the fuel is likely to be from recent rain or moisture. That gives us the formula FFDI = 2(0.987logD-0.45 + 0.0338T + 0.0234V-0.0345H). What you immediately note about that, if you have a bit of mathematics, is that it is an exponential equation to the base 2, meaning that for every increase of one unit of fire weather there is a doubling of fire danger. By contrast, a fire's rate of spread increases roughly linearly with the increase in available fuel.

The establishment of a parliamentary inquiry into the impact of public land management practices on bushfires in Victoria was supported by the Greens. We proposed to the committee chair a group of experts who could be called, and many of them were. One of them, Kevin Tolhurst, made his views quite clear. He said:
"... under extreme fire danger, weather will dominate fire behaviour. With low to very high fire danger, fuel levels are particularly important to fire behaviour. "

Contrast that with the statement of Mr Philip Davis in this debate, referring solely to public land management practices. Referring to public land, he said:
"... land management practices, which were the major contributor to the fires. "

Already you see there is a bit of a diversion from the biophysical reality into the political agenda. The Liberals at their core have a group of people who bathe in comfortable familiarity, whose minds literally shut down in the face of rapid change from past circumstances.

These are not the sort of people we want guiding us through the current era of climate change.

Kevin Hennessy, in his work for the CSIRO, has used established weather models to study the possible impact of climate change on the forest fire danger index, temperature being one of the major variables. It is possible to say that the effects of climate change are already to be found in the more severe fire weather we are experiencing. As Hennessy has stated, the frequency of extreme fire weather events could triple in coming decades, and unfortunately, as members should understand, temperature increases over the next couple of decades are already built into the system, arising from the current concentration of CO2.

Our current suite of policies was founded a quarter of a century ago out of the learnings from the Ash Wednesday fires. In those fires most able-bodied persons could save themselves and their homes by 'staying and defending'; most people who died were in vehicles or were frail or elderly or were firefighters in a risky situation. Studies of building design and situation show that a combination of preparation and good design could seemingly almost guarantee survivability. If you were capable of defending your home and well prepared to do so, you could stay in your house while the fire raged around you; and even if the house caught fire, you could survive inside it for 15 or 20 minutes until the fire passed. Then you could escape to burnt ground.

This became the basis of our current policy set, which is 'Prepare, stay and defend or leave early'; fuel reduction burning; local, volunteer CFAs for rapid first attack and asset protection; exemptions from tree-clearing rules and recommended design for building location; and a building code for specified bushfire-prone areas.

That policy set failed us in the February fires. The proof is in the losses and the deaths. The proof is already there in the anecdotes from people who described the fires as something beyond imagination or experience, and the proof will soon be available in scientific analysis that is under way. Those were the right policies for past circumstances, and to researchers such as David Packham and Phil Cheney we owe our respect and gratitude. Unfortunately though, circumstances have changed, and our policy settings must change as well.

If someone is a climate change sceptic -- and there are plenty of them lurking around here -- they will see no need for a change to our existing suite of policies. They will think we just need to do all of them a bit better. To them this fire was just an extreme statistical outlier; we had one in 1939, we had one in 2009; sometime in the next 100 years we will have something similar. But odds on the next one will be less extreme and those existing policy settings that I talked about will be sufficient. Fortunately, the state parliamentary inquiry that I referred to dismissed the sceptics and recommended that the Department of Sustainability and Environment incorporate climate change predictions into its key planning. The committee, however, did not exactly put its thinking cap on and map out any overall approach that could be taken in order to do this because, candidly, the existing policy set is a relatively easy and low-cost one for governments to implement compared to some of the alternatives.

It leaves most of the decisions, and therefore most of the responsibility, to individuals. Many are going to shy away from a total reconsideration of the past suite of policies. Those policies will still be effective in fires less severe than those of Black Saturday and the days that followed, but clearly the public is already making up its mind. People's understanding about what a fire-prone area is has changed. It now includes established suburbs and regional towns. People in Bendigo were staggered to see a fire, apparently a bushfire, in houses 5 kilometres from its GPO.

The people of Warburton evacuated en masse as fire risk rose in the week after Saturday, 7 February, and many of the survivors of the fire say they would never consider staying to defend their house again. The truth is those official policies suggesting certain behaviours bear little resemblance to reality in a fire event. It would be better if we started with that acknowledgement even though it raises more questions than it answers.

Some of the answers could come via region-wide fire planning. I argue that the royal commission should recommend the state government lead an effort involving emergency services and those responsible for planning controls on private land to assess the likely risks of more frequent and intense fires across whole regions. It is practical to do so. There are computer models available to estimate the progress of a fire at the landscape scale, taking into account vegetation, fuel, slope, weather, and incorporating assets and human population into an overall risk assessment. Those models should be run for all populated areas. The results themselves might provide a wake-up call to communities and responsible authorities but the results could be used to design more scientifically our defence mechanisms.

The Greens pushed for, as part of the Rudd government's stimulus package, additional funding for the bushfire cooperative research centre. They and their associates have plenty of expertise for this task.

That methodology would allow actions such as fuel reduction burning, land-use controls, building controls and evacuation plans all to be better informed by possible fire behaviours. I want to discuss each of those issues. Firstly, I will quote from the parliamentary inquiry:
"In the committee's view, a minimum average of 5 per cent of the public land estate should be treated by prescribed burning each year. This would represent an annual target of 385 000 hectares ..."

This annual figure of planned and controlled burning they recommend has only been achieved once since white settlement. What does such a seemingly precise figure mean anyway, in the context of more than 2.5 million hectares having been burnt in the last three bad fire seasons? Reading the report, I could not find any link from the evidence to the recommendation.

There is a report Analysis of Disturbance by Fire on Public Land in Victoria, put together by public land agencies in 2002. It was the first effort at setting ecological benchmarks for burning frequency and comparing them to the actual situation of public land at that time.

Those benchmarks arrive out of ecological drivers, such as maintaining biodiversity and regeneration needs of different plants, mostly -- the effect of different fire regimes on fauna populations is something we do not know enough about. Members might like to look at Birds Australia's publication Fire and Birds -- Fire Management for Biodiversity of September 2005, which says:
"Biodiversity loss is associated with high fire frequency, intense broadscale fire, and fire exclusion, all of which tend to homogenise the landscape. "

In the earlier report I mentioned it was shown that each broad ecosystem type, and there are 200 of them across Victoria, has a tolerable fire interval. For dry forests, as an example, it is between 10 and 50 years. We know that 10 years post-fire fuel loads in dry forests recover to about 10 tonnes a hectare and then stay on that level on an ongoing basis. They will not get much higher; they will not get much lower.

The climate over the first 10-year period could have a real influence, particularly as it determines how much fuel gets created.

With more than a third of all public land having been burnt in just three bad fire seasons since the publication of that report, it is time for that to be completely revised. That is the sort of scientific base that we would need to plan for burning for the preservation of the ecology. But such a program is probably not going to do double duty as a fuel reduction program. Yes, it will reduce fuel loads at the landscape scale and in some ecosystems; in others the accumulation of fuel and biological matter over centuries is the norm.

Flying over Kinglake it was quite noticeable that even in the midst of this conflagration there must have been a range of fire intensities. You could see it by the extent of damage to the canopy and the pockets of lightly burnt forest among the devastation.

That is not surprising given the diversity of ecosystems and the fact that -- take out the Wallaby Creek catchment -- 20 per cent of the Kinglake National Park had been fuel reduced over the last decade, much having been done recently.

Tolhurst illustrated in his research into the alpine fires that fuel reduction across the landscape more recently than 10 years ago can reduce the extent and severity of wildfire in time and space. That can make a difference, but it will not provide the surety you are looking for for your town or home. The ecological illiterates out there would not know the difference between burning for fuel reduction and the best fire regime for biodiversity health across 200 different ecosystems, but they will happily grab a convenient standing argument and turn it to another purpose. The problem with that is it will not get anyone the outcome they are looking for. Kevin Tolhurst, in his submission to that same inquiry, said:
"At the moment the primary method of quantifying fire management effectiveness is to tally the number of hectares burnt in prescribed burning programs or the area burnt by wildfires. These are easily measured parameters but do not give much indication of how effective management is being."

It will mean resources will be re-directed into burning hundreds of thousands of hectares out there in the Big Desert or the Coopracambra National Park just to achieve the magic number without offering greater certainty of safety to Kinglake or Cockatoo. It is a feelgood target, it is a political target, it is a 30-second sound byte target, but it does nothing to ensure the confidence of towns and communities across Victoria. The government, quite rightly, did not take the bait on that.

Clearly what is needed to make Victoria a safe place to live is a strategic approach to burning, particularly in what the Department of Sustainability and Environment fire plans call zone 1 asset protection. It is the area managed for maximum fire protection for human life, property and highly valued assets. Take the example of Marysville pre-fire. According to the plan its fuel management zone 1 and 2 area is about 45 square kilometres, and that is on all sides of the town. Some 9.5 square kilometres of that had been fuel reduced in the last 10 years; most in the last 5 years, in fact.

Over the next two years a further 5 square kilometres was planned as a series of very small burns measured in hectares rather than square kilometres and nestled tight up against the town. Of course the fuel reduction program made some difference to the fate of Marysville, even under the extreme conditions felt during those devastating fires. Precisely how much of a difference is something only an expert can tell you. If a greater area had been burnt, it probably would have made some difference.

It may have reduced the energy of the fire but maybe not its speed, at least not to the extent that anyone would have noticed. Intense and broadscale burning within many kilometres of the town may have reduced the amount of spotting, but that was never going to happen because the surrounding mountains are cloaked with wet forests managed for timber production, not fuel minimisation.

While we are at it, let us get rid of this preposterous argument put around by the Victorian Association of Forest Industries that forest thinning reduces fuel. Here it is from the Native Forests Silviculture Technical Bulletin No. 13, Forestry Tasmania:
"One of the major planning constraints associated with thinning is the higher level of fuel present after the operations. Tree crowns (heads), bark, and other harvest residue make up the fuel load. The climate on the floor of the forest is altered by thinning, with higher wind speeds and temperature, lower humidity, and lower moisture content in the fuel itself."

On fuel reduction, the figures speak for themselves, and they are well known. There was a precipitous drop in the extent of fuel reduction burning with the arrival of the Kennett government. Public land was not a priority for it, except where it could flog it off. And with that fall no doubt there was a falloff in the ability to maintain expertise and long-term professional development among firefighters. In Kinglake over the entire decade of the 1990s there was one recorded fuel reduction burn totalling 148 hectares in 1999.

Mr Philip Davis said, 'Even the people in the leafy suburbs and even some of those people who might have voted for Mr Barber at the last election would now accept that there has in effect been flawed policy in relation to public land management'. Yes, many of them live in bushfire-affected areas, as he well knows. I am sure he scrutinises the voting results across his electorate as closely as anyone. He would be wise to take some time to listen to their voices instead of the echo of his own.

Economic rationalists, not environmentalists, need to step up and take the blame for the failure to keep up fuel reduction burning. That much is clear. Fuel reduction obviously reduces fuel, it does not eliminate it. There is always going be a residual fire risk, and, as Tolhurt has demonstrated, in extreme fire weather that risk rises exponentially, with the chances of extinguishing a fire at first attack falling off quickly under those conditions.

People printing up 'No fuel, no fire' bumper stickers are basing their campaign on a fallacy. There is no such thing as no fuel in a natural or farmland area, even immediately after a fuel reduction burn. Those slogans are just meant to kick people in the guts, not to educate or empower them. Putting priority into fuel reduction burning in close proximity to towns, in some cases right up to back fences, obviously creates a whole new level of difficulty. There is real risk to health and amenity and many of the things that make it great to live in those areas.

High levels of communication and consultation are required, and the liability for escape burns gets higher, and that cannot just be swept under the carpet, as Mrs Petrovich tried to do. I know she will be the first and loudest to blame the government when something goes wrong.

The Victorian National Parks Association claims that only one -- --

Business interrupted pursuant to standing orders.

CLICK HERE to read the full transcript of the first part of the speech in Hansard

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Business resumed 3 June 2009:

Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) -- This is a continuation of a previous contribution I was making when we ran out of time last sitting Wednesday. The slight difficulty I have now is that in the interim the royal commission has commenced, and this is a motion to provide an opportunity to suggest which matters the royal commission should examine.

A number of the matters that I was going to put forward and explain at length have already been picked up by the royal commission, and I am quite pleased about that. I am not proposing to provide a running commentary on the progress of the commission so far; however, as I have previously said, it is doing a very good job. I have read all the transcripts up until about a week ago, and I will continue to do so and to take great interest in the picture that is emerging.

In my contribution last time I was finishing up discussion of the issue of fuel reduction burning. The Victorian National Parks Association claims that only 1 per cent of fuel reduction burns escape inadvertently, which is a good safety record by the standards of any hazardous activity. Re-lit fuel reduction burns are also a source of ignition, and inevitably that will increase as we run more burns, particularly as, I have argued, these burns need to be for asset protection and closer to towns. In many cases we could be burning all the way up to people's back fences.

It is my view that it is up to the residents of each town as a community to understand and accept the risks associated with the way fuel reduction burns are being conducted and managed. Clearly most citizens do not get involved in that process despite the Department of Sustainability and Environment having had a three-year role in the process of fire operations plans. You can go to a website, you can download the information, you can understand what areas are planned to be burnt and when, and there are opportunities for public input into that process. But that is a common problem with all sorts of community plans. Whether it be health, education, community services or urban and built form, the things that people value most about their community are often put down on paper by authorities, but people do not always participate in that process.

Of course in any community there are going to be differences of opinion and perspective. A town like Marysville, for example, lived off the tourist trade with its features of tall trees and wet gullies.

Blackened landscapes and smoke from fires over Easter would have been a turnoff for many tourists. In the Yarra Valley winemakers are a big part of the tourism industry, but they are also affected by air pollution. You can read about that in reports by the Australian government's Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation. It has done a study on the impact of smoke on the process of making wine. In any community there is going to be a diversity of views, and it is our job as politicians to know how to listen and how to build consensus and then to strike the right balance. The blaming that has been going on is probably inevitable, but it makes our job a lot harder, and I believe bumper sticker slogans do not contribute anything.

There is also the issue of fuel reduction on private land, and in certain landscapes this is going to have to be addressed; no-one seems to want to grasp the nettle.

This was put to the parliamentary Environment and Natural Resources Committee, which listed it as a recommendation but did not map out a detailed response or a way forward.

I have driven and flown the path of the Kilmore fire from north-west to south-east, to the point where it was at its most intense just before the wind change turned it. This fire started in grassland, burnt through private plantations and jumped what you would have thought was a reasonable fire break: the Hume Highway. It then burnt through many square kilometres of farmland and private bushland; it tragically killed many people and destroyed many homes before it ever reached the Kinglake National Park.

You would not know it, though, from the almost total emphasis on apportioning blame to public land.

This blame started while the fires were still burning and came from people who could not possibly have understood the circumstances of the fire. I am talking about the ill-informed comments of Senator Ron Boswell in Queensland, who pronounced what the cause was and what to do about it. It seemed like he was talking about a fire other than the one we in Victoria experienced and suffered from.

When the royal commission proceeds to that part of its investigation we will learn more about the exact timing and actions taken in the first attack on that Kilmore fire, which is quite important. Claims have been made that on Ash Wednesday the vast majority of fires were extinguished very quickly, even under those conditions. The amount and arrangement of fuel held in those plantations on the highway west of Kilmore is absolutely diabolical, but now being private land -- they were formerly government-owned plantations -- I understand they are the responsibility of the Country Fire Authority at first attack. But the CFA is simply not equipped to attack a fire of that type in these conditions.

You could not imagine a more diabolical arrangement of fuel than that which you see in a pine plantation, with the quantity and arrangement of that fuel vertically providing the worst possible fire conditions. I believe the particular fuel hazards associated with timber plantations on private land warrant special rules and arrangements.

But once we start contemplating a mechanism for managing fuel on private land as part of the district-wide plan that examines the hazards, if you like, blind to the different tenures and looking only at biophysical features, the implications just keep getting bigger. A whole new suite of laws would be required, and they would have to be carefully balanced against the rights of private land-holders. An agency responsible for carrying out those activities would need to have cooperative agreements with land-holders.

There are some powers around this in the existing CFA act, and I hope that yet another inquiry in the form of the royal commission does not simply flag the issue and then turn away, because by focusing solely on public land, at least as far as my electorate is concerned, we miss more than half the picture.

This brings us to the issue of land use controls.

We have had high population growth in forested and rural areas, and that has quite simply put more people in harm's way. Reflecting on Mr Davis's comments about the royal commission into the 1939 fires, there has probably never been a time since, perhaps, World War II when there have been as many people living right in the forest. In those days it was about timber communities and an industry operating right next to the trees they were cutting. These days it is a combination of the tree change phenomenon and the economic growth that regional areas have experienced which has brought more people into those areas.

In fact, between the 2001 and 2006 censuses, a mere five-year period, the population of Kinglake grew by 400, which was a 35 per cent increase; and Yarra Glen's grew by 252, which was a 22 per cent increase. Across many of the other smaller hamlets in that broad arc from Kinglake West down to Upper Beaconsfield, a 5 per cent to 10 per cent growth in population in just a five-year period was quite common.

What this fire showed us is that entire regions can be consumed in just a few hours. I think the idea of wildfire management overlays (WMOs) for certain locations in a municipality is now redundant. We are talking about fires that can take out entire landscapes across a number of municipalities in just a few hours. If you go back and read the panel reports associated with past WMO amendments, it is clear they were not contemplating anything like what we have just seen.

That is not the fault of the municipalities. The practice note issued by the state government is what guided them, and they duly complied. The panel set up to look at the amendments checked that they complied with the practice note, and the CFA gave its advice according to the same set of criteria. The combination of that limited approach and the contribution -- not that I am downplaying it -- of a bit of local knowledge from the CFA is no longer sufficient to deal with a fire that can move so far and so fast.

I note also that a number of shires, including Wellington, Alpine and South Gippsland, do not yet have WMOs, and I believe they are all attracting their fair share of population growth. If the view of the real estate agents are anything to go by, they are becoming desirable places where people can go and live close to the bush.

While I believe the overlays need to be expanded, I do not think creating a few more building requirements or regulations is sufficient. It is the zoning and subdivision controls that ultimately decide or determine what activities are allowed and how many persons are likely to be in harm's way. The Greens' long-running criticism concerns the number of possible activities covered under section 2, which deals with 'permit required', over many of the zones. Councils are then left with little ability to control accommodation, industry and infrastructure activities, as well as residential homes being built in these areas.

For this first list of activities, the complexities of other issues such as 'stay or go' become even greater. Perhaps residents could develop the necessary skills and knowledge over time to make decisions about their own households, but when a fire is bearing down on a winery where 200 guests are attending a wedding or some such similar event, what exactly is the plan?

The regional fire modelling ability I mentioned earlier could become the basic input for land use planning, but as always with the Victorian planning provisions we have state governments, whether they be Labor or Liberal, standing by the almost-anything-goes approach of planning rules which neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. Councils are stuck with a limited, state-determined set of planning tools, and the process of changing the scheme is just torturous.

On building controls, the royal commission should get to the bottom of what went on in the building standards board, with the government's newly adopted bushfire code and why experts such as the CSIRO are saying it is actually a weakening of the code in some areas. When it comes to standards needed to improve accessibility or sustainability of buildings the building industry usually gets its way, and it seems it has prevailed again.

The government has gone from saying that it is the toughest standard possible to -- after these revelations from the CSIRO -- calling it the toughest standard available.

While it is at it, the royal commission should call the Victorian Association of Forest Industries -- which has been bleating about not having been called -- to ask it what role it played in watering down the standard, because it was straight out of the gate in applauding it when it first appeared, which suggests it knew the fix was in. Everything we do for sustainability we also do for bushfire protection. For example, there are strategies such as catching rainwater for home and firefighting supply; covering windows for radiant heat, whether from daily sun or from a bushfire; sitting houses on ground-connected slabs, which achieves both ember exclusion and thermal mass; and distributed energy systems to reduce the vulnerability of households to blackouts.

On this subject, let us kill off the furphy of clearing trees to protect homes. Trees around your home make very little difference to fire risk. Ground fuel, undergrowth and other sources of heat load such as woodpiles and outbuildings make a huge difference. That was understood by Dr Andrew Sullivan decades ago when he created the CSIRO bushfire house survival meter. Standing trees, providing they are not leaning over your home, do not make a lot of difference in his tools for calculating the probability of survival of a house. The house survival meter is still on the CSIRO website.

In fact some experts say -- Kevin Tolhurst said it in his testimony to the royal commission, and I am not proposing to start quoting testimony before the royal commission in speaking to this motion -- that standing trees could reduce radiant heat, screen flying embers and reduce wind speed Wind speed, we will discover, was a very important factor in the destruction of homes that occurred during the bushfires.

These understandings have been there for a long time and form the basis of the exemptions from permit requirements to remove native vegetation. The biophysical calculations that have been made going back to research by Dr Andrew Sullivan are the basis for the reasons we have the exemptions from native vegetation removal in the scheme. It is a pity more people do not understand what those exemptions are. It is a pity that people champion the cause of that individual who illegally cleared trees in the Mitchell shire, because if they chose to investigate the exact circumstances, they would find that he did not do it with an eye to fire protection; he made such a mess that he had served upon him a fuel hazard clean-up notice because of the amount of slash that he left lying around after that vandalism.

The results of scientific research which is currently under way, studying which properties survived in these fires and which did not, will reconfirm all this.

The research is not yet available in a published format but probably the first place we will get to read it is when it comes before the royal commission.

I compliment the government on the priority it has given to CFA resourcing in the last budget. However, I echo the call by the United Firefighters Union of Australia for a national inquiry into the adequacy of fire services resourcing. Obviously, with more megafires inevitable, the sharing of resources across states is important. Imagine a scenario where we have multiple megafires in multiple states. This needs to be a long-term investment in people and equipment.

I had quite a bit to say on the issue of evacuation systems and the 'stay and defend' policy, but it is of course the first issue the royal commission addressed. On the first day of testimony, put simply, the commission called the CFA and asked, 'Why did you not give a warning?'.

The CFA said, 'Because it is not our job'. It went straight to the heart of the matter. It is the most important and difficult of all issues -- that is, the role that individuals' decisions played in the events of this tragedy. Most of what I have talked about until now has been about various biophysical phenomena, but the role that humans played in the mix made a huge difference or was a huge variable. How official policy and action might reflect this reality is now, I think, well and truly at the front and centre of what the royal commission is addressing.

If members are interested in this issue, they need to go back and read the review of the evidence for the 'prepare, stay and defend, or leave early' policy. This was conducted by RMIT's Centre for Risk and Community Safety as a project for the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, and it was done quite some time ago. It says, on my reading, that the evidence base of this idea was never as conclusive as some wanted it to be. Yes, it is self-evident that you do not want to be in the open or in your car in the middle of a firestorm. That is an easy observation to make. But the viability of this sort of binary policy -- stay and defend, or go -- fails to reflect the great number of variables and the great number of choices that different people will make and that the same people might make at different stages or in different circumstances, and those can change quickly. As has been now exposed in the royal commission, in this group of fires we found a much higher than normal number of people who died whilst sheltering in their homes.

I will not say any more on warning systems. I will just note that some time back the Greens brought a motion into this Parliament in relation to warning systems and how they would have been valuable in the Tottenham chemical fire, and that came out of the learnings from the Coode Island fire. All members supported that motion. As I think we have now discovered, nobody disagrees with the proposition; it has all been about the timing of implementation.

There will be enormous differences across the community about what people intend to do and what they might actually do when the fire is coming. Many of these decisions would be based on age, gender, experience and many other factors. I believe the emphasis has to be much more on 'leave early'.

I want the hero of these fires to be not the person who fought the fires or committed any other act of physical bravery but the guy who simply saw the risk, decided it was not a risk worth taking, never mind the inconvenience, got up that morning, packed his precious family into the car and got the hell out -- just to get away from the risk. I say 'he' because there is a dramatic gender difference in attitudes to evacuation versus staying and defending, and that plays out in a very complicated way. Forthcoming research by masters student Mae Proudley in relation to the South Australian grassfires from some years ago will illustrate this to members if they choose to read it.

I have no doubt the commission will be strongly engaged with the issue of early warning systems to provide people with the information they need about the bushfire risk, not only on a given day but also in their immediate area. I do not believe anyone is talking about forced evacuations.

But when the claim is made that we do not have enough roads to evacuate people, let us model that and study that and see if that is true or just a presumption. We have fire drills for buildings. What about fire drills for towns? I am not saying everybody will participate, but such exercises could be run to develop the learnings that we might need in order to know what would happen if an evacuation was called.

Remember that what we are talking about is an increasing number of very high and extreme fire-risk days along with a steadily growing number of people living in high-risk areas. These sorts of warnings and evacuations will be an increasing burden on personal lives and local economies. The question that is quite relevant is how far to evacuate. Do I just evacuate out of the bush into a town? Into the next big town? All the way to the city? I think there was one person who spent the entire day in the air-conditioned cinema complex at Northland. How far do I have to go to be safe, and how long will I be gone?

These are questions that the authorities need to answer. The answers are quite complex; it is more than just the issue of whether there should be a bunker down the road. What will be down the road for me? People who leave will be worried about when they can come back, based on this recent experience of road blockades that were there for a number of days. Who will care for their animals? Are they going to be worried about looters?

Some studies show that the decision to leave is made less on what officials say and more on what neighbours are doing. When your neighbour packs their car and comes down the street and the last thing they do is pull up in your driveway and say, 'I'm going', that appears to be the most effective trigger for other people to pack up and go as well. In fact the literature on evacuations is generally pretty thin.

There are manuals out there on how to run an evacuation -- some of those relate to floods and cyclones, which are very different phenomena -- but the sociological literature on how and when people decide to leave is pretty poor. Some people will not have the capacity to leave -- for example, if they do not have cars. Moving frail, elderly people could be a real problem, given that we know more than 300 people died from heatwave effects in the week prior to the fires across the state.

Imagine if this fire had occurred on a school day rather than on a weekend -- a five out of seven chance. That has been raised by the royal commission already: who would have been responsible for the evacuation of schools? Official policy and action must support the decision that people are likely to make, not leave them to their own devices or pretend they will conform to one of two convenient types. This is by far the most complex task for the commission to examine and for the emergency services to implement. For us, as political leaders, it is a question we must answer before the next fire season. I think that puts us all under pressure, and it is the question that disturbs me most.

In conclusion, I have stated why I think the past pillars of bushfire policy should be comprehensively reviewed in light of the changing circumstances. The royal commission could recommend incremental improvements to past policies, or it could connect the dots and see the need for a complete rethink. I am hopeful it will be the latter, but, regardless, Greens members across Victoria will be part of forming that community consensus on the way forward.
 

Click here to read the 3 June transcript in Hansard. 

Image credit: “Ashes to Ashes”
Acrylic on Canvas, 2009
Original work by Ursula Theinert
Artwork reproduced by kind permission 
of the artist and provided by Art Image Promotions