Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As previous speakers have informed the House, the coalition supports the Telecommunications Amendment (Integrated Public Number Database) Bill 2009. It will bring benefits to the community by giving people warning of pending disastrous events. However, I have to say that, on a scale of one to 10, there is other legislation that this parliament must address that would rate higher and would have prevented the loss of all of these lives. Perhaps we can get a signal out to people. I hope they will be better than I am at responding immediately to all the SMSs that I receive. I often have to catch up with them two or three days after the event, which in this case would not have done my health much good. But the real question is: should we be warning people of an event that guarantees death and destruction of property or should we be taking steps in this parliament to see that it does not happen? To raise this issue at this point in time is just part of the conspiracy of state based authorities and their vertically integrated fire suppression groups. Once there used to be the bush fire brigades, the fire brigades in the urban areas, and environmentalists over there somewhere. Now that has been vertically integrated and, what is more, in the vertical integration, the environment departments run the shop. They know nothing about putting out fires; they are not even very approving of putting out fires or addressing the fundamental issues. I have with me some very comprehensive information and media comments, over decades, that address this problem.

Having now got through the tragedy of the fire, the valedictories in this place and the memorials, the defensive structure, the smokescreen—excuse the pun—is up to protect the bureaucracies whose public policy has failed, and failed thousands of people, and to divert public opinion away from the one and only thing that will fix the problem. It is interesting that suddenly we are talking about communications. There is nothing wrong with that, but why should we have to be able to inform people about a wildfire—a ‘nuclear’ event—if we have taken provision to make sure it cannot happen?

Then we get into building by-laws. We should remember that a lot of the houses that were blown away on this occasion, and on the occasion some years ago here in Canberra, had survived previous bushfires. Bushfires are, admittedly, part of the Australian ecology. But the houses did not burn down before and they did not blow away. I watched a replay here in the parliament of the ABC’s Q&A program. A historian from Marysville, a lady of some capacity to observe and know, said that there were no flames in this instance in Marysville; everything went black and the houses started blowing up. It was not a case of the fire jumping from this tree to that tree to something else and then catching a house on fire; the houses blew up. There is only one reason for that: the deliberately created fuel that was in the surrounding forests. It created a ‘nuclear’ event, and the heat preceded the flames.

We are talking about building systems and bunkers. We are talking about everything. This is very carefully orchestrated by those who do not want to take the blame and who do not want to change their policy. It is quite interesting that we are talking about building codes all of a sudden. Of course we should talk about building codes, but we do not have to go over the top if we have a safe forest environment. Some people had protective bunkers and survived, but some had them and died. On the matter of arson, of course it is to be condemned, but we will catch the last arsonist the day we will catch the last drug dealer. It is a fact of the problem; it is a tragedy. Opposite my house there is some open country, with only a row of houses intervening. Last week a bloke went out on a hot day to mow his lawn and he started a fire, which took me by surprise. Is he an arsonist because he chose to mow his lawn at lunchtime in a bit of spare time? Not one word do we hear.

Fran Bailey, the member for McEwen, got up in this place the other day and said, ‘We have got to have fuel reduction,’ and the Prime Minister wobbled all over the place about it. Let me tell you, in the Canberra fires so did the then Prime Minister. The states get them frightened. The states have made bad mistakes that have killed people, yet they are already putting up—excuse the pun again—a smokescreen so as not to do anything else. Consequently, the parliament should be dealing today with legislation that obliges the states and private forestry owners—everybody affected—to keep their forests a safe environment.

It is going to cost them a lot of money if, all of a sudden, they have 80 bulldozers working somewhere. Russell Broadbent said to me last night that the fire front in Victoria was 270 kilometres long and that if the weather reached the intensity that is predicted it would be goodness knows how long. We were never allowed to touch a tree, yet there are 80 bulldozers working in what is left of the Victorian forests. Four hundred thousand hectares are dead and any metre of that soil, I can tell you, will have been sterilised. There will be no seeds left after these intensive fires to allow regeneration.

‘Save the forests,’ they tell us. ‘You have to save them from those dreadful foresters; they cut down a few trees.’ The damage that has been done to the health of the Victorian forests in the last fortnight could not have been achieved by men with chainsaws in a century. Suddenly it is okay to push over trees all over the place for containment lines. The spotting in the last fire was preceding the flames by 20 kilometres, so what sort of a containment line do you need for that? They are always talking up their containment lines; they will not talk about the fundamentals.

I refer the parliament—and I hope those present will get a copy and read it—to Peter Clack’s book Firestorm: Trial by Fire, which is the story of the Canberra fires. It tells it all. Above all, it tells us how the first integrated bureaucracy came to be formed, here in Canberra. A Liberal senator was substantially responsible for it, and you can work out who it was if you like. The president of the country fires section said:

When Humphries became minister with the Liberal Party winning government in 1995, Jeffery tried to undo the amalgamation. ‘I warned him this was going to happen. I begged him but he wouldn’t listen.’ Before the collapse in the council’s role—

that is, the rural firefighting council—

rural landholders had radios, pumps and other equipment that were part of the suppression force. They were discarded and phased out.—

because the environmental groups got control of the system. He went on to say:

The organisation—

meaning the Rural Fire Service—

had to be independent of the bureaucrats, but it went downhill. The way they have ignored the Bush Fire Brigade, they have used parks people over experienced bushfire captains. When I wanted to burn off, a parks officer rang me up and said she wanted to come out and talk it over. It held us up for an hour. It meant it got very hot and we nearly lost half the place.

In 1961 in Western Australia we probably had the first of these ‘nuclear’ events, because European forest management policy was much the same as has been promoted in recent times by green activists. The government of the day did not have to go seeking preferences from minor parties and they introduced the first program of what is known as prescribed burning. For years and years approximately 20 per cent of the forest—whether it was used for forest harvesting or whether it was a reserve—had prescribed burning. The undergrowth was burnt out in a cool burn in exactly the same way Aboriginals had done it for centuries. After the war and with the advent of green activism the campaigns started: ‘You can’t have smoke blowing from these fires. People will get asthma.’ I bet a few of those who died would wish they had only had asthma. The campaigns started and what happened is just as is described in the book—the Perth bureaucracy and the environmental bureaucracy took over.

Some years ago a firefighter and forest manager said to me: ‘We are experienced people, we have our 20 per cent per annum planning for prescribed burning in the forests of WA and we wake up on the perfect morning with all the indicators right for a cool burn. But can we go out and light the fire? No.’ It is five o’clock—they are early risers down there—but they have to wait for the boss to turn up in Perth at nine o’clock. They say, ‘Please, sir, can we start a fire?’ And he says: ‘Well, have you checked this? Have you checked that? Have you checked something else?’ Suddenly it is lunchtime and, to quote Mr Jeffery here in Canberra, it is too late, too dangerous. Consequently, that 20 per cent in Western Australia has dropped to eight per cent.

We are told that it is all too hard—that is another greenies’ defence. ‘Yes, we do not disapprove, but it is very difficult, you know, and it has got to be done scientifically,’ and I will get back to the science in a moment. The reality is that in New South Wales—I have quoted this in parliament previously—the forestry department, in the areas for which they remained responsible, were achieving 20 per cent of cool burns each year. As this was transferred to National Parks and Wildlife in New South Wales, they got that down to 0.5 per cent. Look at the bombs that you would be aware of, Madam Deputy Speaker Vale, that have occurred in New South Wales. Kings Park has been burnt so often it cannot recover.

The reality is that all of the criticism of prescribed burning is an ass. The member for Canning reminded me to check my records of a very good piece of Western Australian research using the grass tree. It has a very technical name but we mostly call it a black boy. They are very ancient trees. Some are hundreds or thousands of years old. They grow very slowly. These people went and looked at the rings in one of these ancient trees; they actually ground off one side of it. They are called black boys because they respond to every fire and their debris, their dead leaves, burn off. It leaves a ring on the trees and you can measure the fires. And you think the Aboriginal people did not know the science of our forests. A very interesting article came into my possession. Josephine Flood states in her book Archaeology of the Dreamtime:

One of the Aborigines’ most important artefacts was the one that is largely invisible to the archaeologist: fire. Much of the vegetation encountered by early white settlers in Australia was not natural but artificial: an Aboriginal artefact created by thousands of years of burning the countryside … Aborigines never put out their fire.

That was confirmed, as I will point out, by Governor Phillip. In December 1642, at the north end of Storm Bay, Tasmania, Abel Tasman wrote:

Amongst the trees, two were remarked whose thickness was two, or two and a half fathoms—

a fathom is six foot, nearly two metres—

and the first branches from sixty to sixty-five feet above the ground … the country was covered with trees; but so thinly scattered, that one might see everywhere to a great distance amongst them … Several of the trees were much burnt at the foot …

It was a parkland environment. Why were the trees so big and so healthy? Because they had space. In this campaign of ‘save the forests’ we let them grow closer and closer together, and anybody knows that if you have got to stir up the fire in the lounge room you push the logs together. That is the other contributing factor. William de Vlamingh sailed up the west coast of Western Australia, right opposite Perth, in January 1697 in the heat of summer. He wrote:

No men were seen but they observed many smokes …

He went all the way to Geraldton, at the northern end of my electorate, and all the way up. In January, the Aboriginals were carrying out burning. Captain Cook, one day’s sailing north of Cape Howe, in the Bega area, wrote:

In the afternoon we saw smoke in several places by which we knew the country to be inhabited.

           …         …         …

After this we made an excursion into the country which we found diversified with wood, lawns and marshes; the woods are free from underwood of every kind and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole Country or at least part of it might be cultivated without being oblig’d to cut down a single tree.

I could go on. I mentioned that Governor Phillip made similar remarks. That was the nature of Australia and that was the nature of our forests—forests that became a huge economic resource in the early years of colonisation. Jarrah was cut down in Western Australia to pave the roads of London and of course was used for sleepers under half the railway lines of the world. We were told that if you do that you destroy the biodiversity of the forest. The forest was in perfect health when we arrived. Eventually in Western Australia we learnt the lesson of returning to the Aboriginal practices, which are still being stared down. And this is the threat that we are not addressing.

Back in my period as Minister for Forestry and Conservation, an article about fires appeared, on Monday, 23 April 2001, stating:

The Australian Conservation Foundation attacked Mr Tuckey’s stance, noting that native trees were naturally fire retardant and protecting them was the best means of encouraging local fauna.

I bet the people around Marysville think they are fire retardant! I add that, at the time, I seriously thanked the Conservation Foundation, because in future all we had to do was get a heap of woodchips and dump them on the fire and it would go out, because they are retardant! What body with any credibility in Australia could say that? As I have said, they are ducking and diving now because their policies murdered people, and what have they done? They are saying: ‘Yes, I heard Flannery on the television the other day. Yes, I agree with hazard reduction, but it is very difficult.’ It was not difficult for 300,000 Aborigines—without bulldozers, without helicopters, without anything. They could burn in the middle of summer. Why? Because they constantly maintained that situation.

This government has got to legislate to control all owners of forests so that they maintain those forests as safe environments. The member for McEwen made the point: until they do it, give them no money; give them nothing. The families of the 200-plus people who are dead and the thousands of people who have lost their homes deserve better than having us dancing around the edges on this issue. No fuel, no fire. Then you do not need special houses, then you do not need bunkers and then you do not need to be warned, because the fire is no threat to you personally. They will still exist and they will exist at a level that is pretty impressive, but it will not take people’s lives or blow their houses away, and normal protective suppression measures will do. In that fire, the estimate on the index was 100. Firefighters have got to get out on that index at 2.5. So any of that is a waste of time. The tragedy of me having a ministerial council and being told by state ministers that they were going to do nothing— (Time expired)

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