Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If I may I will give the chamber the figures that Senator McGauran referred to. We in Western Australia would regard, in bushfire circumstances, five to eight tonnes of fuel per hectare on the floor of the forest to be the upper limit that we would regard as safe to put personnel and equipment into a fire fighting circumstance. When my colleagues from the WA Bushfires Board went to Victoria earlier this year they were confronted with documented fuel loadings of 40 to 50 tonnes to the hectare. That is 10 times. And in some instances there was 140 tonnes to the hectare. From a duty of care point of view, to ever put personnel into a circumstance where they were trying to control fires at 150 tonnes or 50 tonnes to the hectare is absolutely criminal and it is equally bad to have communities residing where you have levels of fuel of that type.

My experience in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Pilbara and the centre of Australia into the Northern Territory is relevant to this discussion. It emphasises the impossibility of being able to measure these sorts of greenhouse and other gases that are emitted from fires. Every year in the Kimberley region an area the size of Tasmania is burnt in wildfires.

Until 1996, our managers in the Kimberley region had no capacity to even know where fires were, let alone to share information with station managers, Aboriginal community managers and other land managers. It was at that time that my manager, Peter Saint, combining knowledge from a career in naval intelligence and a knowledge of communications, started to use the twice-daily Landsat satellite imagery available from the US military along with work from the CSIRO in Perth, Curtin University of Technology and the University of Western Australia so that we could get twelve-hourly plots on the presence of fires in the Kimberley region.

Why was this important? It was important because he could then plot them and communicate with land managers, pastoralists, Aboriginal land managers and conservation and land management managers. For the first time ever, we were able to get on top of some of these fires, but you must understand that they burnt out tens of thousands of hectares. No effort to put out the fires worked except getting around them with graders or moving them to a piece of breakaway country or to river country and then having them burn out. Unfortunately, not only have fires been an annual event but also the biodiversity has been destroyed. Native plant species have been destroyed and the annuals and perennials that come back up have been the result and the cause of this.

I have spoken in this place about the excellent program called the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project which has been undertaken now for the last seven or eight years. It is coordinated by the Northern Territory bushfires organisation, the Northern Territory government and the West Arnhem Land fire group. In that project, early-season burning is undertaken in preference to late dry season fire tinder programs. The excellent result of that is that the Conoco-Philips company pays to the West Arnhem Land group through the Northern Territory government the figure of $1 million a year in consideration of 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas equivalents documented by CSIRO, Bushfire CIC and others to have been saved. That is in one small geographic area of West Arnhem Land. It is absolutely impossible to be able to measure this across the rest of our nation, but here is a start; here is a circumstance in which we can measure carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, saved, for which an American oil company pays $1 million per year.

We had a lamentable situation in south-eastern Australia last season and we are experiencing it again this season. In Western Australia, we would say that a minimum of five to seven per cent of the forest needs to be burnt annually to be able to get on top of and control wildfires in a mosaic pattern. There is nothing new about this. The Aborigines have been doing it for 30,000 years. We would not have the mediterranean, eucalypt-dominated forests that we have if the Aborigines had not been doing it for 30,000 years. In Western Australia, we say that that figure of five to seven per cent is an absolute minimum and it is defended strongly. Regrettably, the pressure that comes on every year against that project is criminal.

In Victoria, the equivalent figure is less than 0.5 of one per cent. I mentioned at the beginning of my presentation the fuel loadings in the forests in the Black Saturday fires in Victoria. Less than one-half of one per cent of those forests is being burnt. In New South Wales, the figures, which I quoted in this place the other day, are lamentably low. When he was the relevant minister, the current Premier of New South Wales, Nathan Rees, blocked 2,100 prescribed burning activities last year alone, and this year the number of hectares burnt I think is only 20,000 or 30,000 hectares. It is just not possible to measure it. The question was asked about the cause of fires—whether it is lightning, men, women or children. In Western Australia, we always say that, during our summers, the three main causes of bushfires and wildfires are men, women and children. I say to you again that it is impossible to measure the effect, because you cannot predict what the size of a fire will be.

Let me give you one example of a circumstance illustrating the benefit and the value of prescribed burning. In a fire east of Perth in a place called Karragullen in 2005, a fire was under way in typically hot Western Australian summer conditions with northerlies and nor’-easterlies. The temperature was 42 to 45 degrees and humidity was down at about six or seven per cent. I mention humidity because it is critical. If humidity levels are 15 to 18 per cent or higher, you tend to find that the atmosphere gives moisture to plants. When that humidity gets below 15 per cent, plants yield up humidity to the atmosphere.

This was a 30,000 hectare fire heading straight for eastern suburbs of Perth—housing, schools, hospitals and communities. It was in territory that had not been burnt for some 12 to 14 years and it fortunately got into an area which had been burnt two years earlier. It was only when they got that fire in the forest that had been burnt two years earlier that they were able to control it, contain it and stop it. CSIRO documentation and modelling, validated afterwards, indicated that that fire would have extended to 100,000 hectares if it had not run into that area burnt by the fire some two years earlier. That is what the modelling showed. In that 100,000 hectares, there were at least three suburbs of our city with countless units of housing and possibly lives to be lost.

I conclude my comments with the fact that we are always going to have bushfires in Australia, we are always going to have uncontrolled wildfires, until we get into the situation of reducing fuel levels, not exclusively by burning, grazing, slashing but other technologies—proper land clearing. But I remind you that the 7 February fire alone put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere equivalent to one full year of industries’ contribution to greenhouse gases. We cannot ignore it in the discussion of this particular legislation, however flawed or not flawed people believe it to be. We must consider wildfires. We must consider bushfires. We must consider mitigation. And we must, in some way, take that into account in terms of its measurement.