For a topic so seemingly controversial up until now, there was surprisingly a lot of agreement in the hearing room during the six days of evidence on fuel reduction burning in the Victorian Bushfires Commission.

A panel of seven experts assembled by the Commission’s legal team came to the consensus view that Victoria should burn between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of its 7.7 million hectares of public forest annually – an ambitious target when you consider 1.7 per cent, or 130 000 hectares, is currently burnt each year. The scientists ranged from the CSIRO fire investigator Phil Cheney and forest ecologist Professor Mark Adams to the more cautious Dr Michael Clarke, an associate professor and head of the Zoology Department at Latrobe University, with expertise in conservation biology and Dr Malcolm Gill, a scientist concentrating on plant diversity. No-one was suggesting burning would prevent bushfires altogether but all agreed it would reduce the number of fires that broke out and lessen the spread and intensity of those that did ignite, making them easier to extinguish. Cheney said a good enough, large enough prescribed burn would “stop a fire” in a eucalypt forest for one or two years after the burn and still have an effect on flame heights, ember production and rates of spread for as long as two decades.

The opposition previously attributed to “green” groups fell away – or at least did not make it into the hearing room. The evidence of Jerry Williams, who’s worked a lifetime in the US Forest Service, cut through the argument that burning was somehow bad for the bush. He pointed out the irony of refusing to burn forests in a planned manner only to later lose whole ecosystems in massive out-of-control infernos.

“A lot of people in my country equate saving something with not disturbing it, preservation,” he said.

He gave the example of a fire outside Denver, Colorado that affected a water catchment.

“For generations the approach to protect the watershed was to keep everybody out of it; limit disturbance, don’t log it, don’t thin it, don’t burn it. In one afternoon we lost the whole thing.”

Phil Cheney agreed the damage done by bushfires that erupted during drought conditions was catastrophic, “Just about every square metre of the countryside burns, and this includes the littoral areas alongside stream banks, it includes accumulations of peat up in the higher country. Some of those may have been accumulating for thousands of years, but under the drought conditions they will all burn… if you were there straight after the fire, you will see streams which are literally completely dead because nothing can survive in the ash.”

The scientists were scathing of Victoria’s current approach to prescribed burning. Fire ecologist Dr Bradstock, the director of the Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires at the University of Wollongong, said it was “probably better than nothing” but on a scale of 1 to 10 it only reduced the risk from a high of 10 to 9. The University of Melbourne’s Kevin Tolhurst said prescribed burning had the potential to reduce the risk of bushfire by two thirds, if done in large 1,000-hectare tracts burnt at least 70 per cent through, but he said burning at the level done by Victoria might be achieving a 1 or 2 per cent reduction.

The Department of Sustainability’s (DSE) assistant chief officer Liam Fogarty revealed he knew of no scientific basis for the existing target, either from the point of view of fuel reduction or conservation.

Fogarty spoke of a belief in, and passion for, prescribed burning within the organisation.

“Over a very large area of native forest I can see no feasible alternative,” he said.

He said there’d been more use of fire as a preventive tool in the ’80s, with Forests Commission workers “literally throwing matches out the window” as they drove home from work. He attributed reductions in prescribed burning during the ’90s to an “anti-forestry, anti-fire management movement”, saying there’d been an associated loss of “organisational focus and capacity” during that period. He acknowledged there were now communities that wanted more use of fire in their area as well as communities that wanted less. But he did emphasise the need for more science and more modelling. He said on Black Saturday there were instances were fuel reduction burns helped and instances where they did no good at all. He acknowledged some burns had not been particularly well executed in the first place.

Fogarty agreed the burning program needed to increase but talked about “incremental” growth over a decade. He said DSE had shown it could achieve substantial and sustained increases in burning, but admitted the organisation was running at capacity. He said a recent injection of $10 million would help but more was necessary.

It’s here that things get caught in circular argument and bureaucracy.

The secretary of the Department of Sustainability is Greg Wilson, a career bureaucrat who came to bushfire via the Premier’s Department. He argued the science wasn’t strong enough for him to embrace a specific, high target.

“I don’t think I could as a secretary go to the minister and then the government and say, ‘We are absolutely firm now. It needs to be that level. Just give us the money and we will do it,’” he said.

But when Counsel assisting the Commission Jack Rush QC put it directly to the scientists, Wilson’s argument seemed to crumble.

“Do we defer… pending further resolution of some of the issues or do we act?”

The response from the panel was unequivocal. More research was needed, yes. At the highest ends of the scale, the ecological effects of widescale planned burning were unknown. Sometimes ecological values would be sacrificed to protect human life. But, as Dr Bradstock said, that was no reason not to do it.

“We don’t defer. We push ahead, in particular in those high priority areas such as the foothill forests… We go ahead; we can’t keep waiting. But some of these other systems, obviously, we may need to find out more before we decide upon future levels of treatment,” he said.

Professor Mark Adams agreed.

“Yes, absolutely we must commence now. There is no reason to wait. There is good evidence, as I say, for the foothill forests to which you referred… delay is just an invitation for further trouble… we can begin now with very little concern that the impact of prescribed burning would be deleterious,” Adams said.

Even the more conservative members of the panel made it clear that the uncertainty about long term impacts only meant proceed carefully and with monitoring.

“I think there is a profound lack of knowledge of the consequences for a vast majority of species… We can’t wait until we know everything. We clearly have to manage now… but we need to do this in a sensitive manner that considers the consequences of these actions in an adaptive monitoring framework.”

Dr Clarke was equally clear. “Inactivity is not an option. It is a decision, if we don’t move forward. But, if we are going to be active, we need to be learning from it.”

Commissioner Ron McLeod didn’t appear to accept the secretary’s reference to science as an impediment.

“I think in terms of science, the science goes well back to the 1960s when substantial areas of knowledge were gained in bushfire science-based management which has continued from that period on,” he said.

“While there is still room for improvement, as there always is with science, I think it would be wrong to suggest that there is a lot of original science that might need to be done in Victoria to assist your planning process before you can really get on and start with achieving results?”

The other problem for Greg Wilson was that the DSE’s own corporate plan for 2008-2011 indicated its desirable target for fuel reduction burning was between 4 and 6 per cent.

“I can’t deny that that was articulated as a strategic direction,” Wilson said.

But he described the reference as an idealistic “light on the hill”.

“I think it is perhaps properly characterised as a longer-term aspiration or something that we should strive towards achieving, subject to all the qualifications and the caution.”

“With the lessons of 7 February, is it not a task that needs to be attacked with some form of urgency?” Jack Rush asked pointedly.

“Absolutely,” agreed Wilson. “If I can point out the planned burning program straight after 7 February. Our guys were out there… they want to do more and they were working hard to do more.”

But the secretary backed away from the 4 to 6 per cent target so much that proceedings became a long winded attempt to determine whether the 2008-2011 corporate plan was still in effect. It was a conversation that clearly frustrated Rush.

“The Government will want to say, ‘We need to take stock and make those decisions’. In the interim for 2010, we’re saying we need to steam ahead anyway, we need to put those submissions into the process, but we are not going to stop,” Wilson said.

“Is there any advice that you have received from your people that are responsible,” asked Rush, “to suggest since 7 February that the target of 4 to 6 per cent is not an appropriate target?”

Wilson replied: “There is a view that we need to head towards that figure. But everywhere I’ve read that, the Esplin report and others, there is also a caution about this is not about burning substantially more land, it is about doing it smarter as well, and it is about making sure the community are brought along with that.”

Ultimately though Wilson was still arguing against setting a large, concrete target, warning it could skew the focus onto chalking up the hectares rather than doing the possibly harder and more costly, strategic fuel reduction burns.

“If I were talking to Ewan Waller and our fire people, I would be saying, ‘Our target is to do as much as we can to mitigate risk and achieve ecological values… that is the minimum, that is what you have got the money to do and you must meet that’. Whether you stop there, I would say, ‘No. You keep going and you do more,’ and we have done more.”

Wilson said Treasury had always been “accommodating” when the DSE got the opportunity to do more burning and applied for more money to do it. But this is exactly the kind of piecemeal approach Jerry Williams had warned against on the strength of the US experience.

“I think in my experience, watching areas that take this problem on programmatically, using a program approach where budgets and personnel skills and monitoring and evaluation are ongoing are essential elements. In places where we have done a little more burning and attempted to treat the problem on a year-to-year basis, on a catch as catch can basis, we have failed.”

Dr Michael Clarke also advocated the use of targets.

“I absolutely endorse targets if they are based on smart objectives. If there is not a measurable outcome at the end, then our objectives are vague and we are unlikely to achieve them,” Dr Clarke said.

It was Kevin Tolhurst who made the point that political will was the ingredient that would make the difference when it came to prescribed burning.

“It is something that is a major issue for any land management agency… the consequence of an action today may not necessarily be seen for several decades. So, the political will and resources that need to be applied now may be seen to be, ‘Well, we can put that off’ and research is seen often in the same way, but that has severe consequences two, three, four decades down the track… this long-term view needs to be taken.”

Cost unknown

How much Victoria spends on fuel reduction burning is kept secret despite more than a decade’s worth of efforts to uncover the exact cost. Greg Wilson was unable to give the Commission a figure on the annual cost of prescribed burning and therefore unable to measure it against the cost of fighting bushfires. He said the costs weren’t broken down in that way. The Commission heard the Auditor-General had highlighted this lack of transparency more than once, in 1992 saying, “The overall significance of fire prevention is such that the funds provided for fire prevention activities should be clearly identified in the department’s annual appropriation for the perusal of the parliament and, subsequently, the public.” A parliamentary inquiry called for the same thing in 2008 and the DSE’s own 2006 code of practice states, “The department will ensure its annual expenditure on prescribed burning is recorded.”

Wilson had to admit it was a shortcoming.

“I’m not aware of us having met that requirement, to be frank, and it is something that I think we need to do more work on… I can only say, having taken on the role less than six months ago, offer perhaps the reasons put to me, which is that there are so many joint and common costs between suppression, fuel reduction burning and other fire related activities that it is somewhat of a vexed issue.”

Whatever the cost, Phil Cheney believed fuel reduction made more sense than continuing to pump money into firefighting.

“Our current system has failed; that expansion to bigger and better suppression systems is going to fail,” he said.

Jerry Williams agreed a defining feature of the megafire phenomenon was that it exceeded all efforts at control.

“More specifically, it challenges our doctrines. We have a notion that, as wildfire threats increase, we can match those with increasing suppression force and we have found clear limits of that. Bringing the bigger hammer, so to speak, doesn’t show much promise, in my mind,” he said.

Dr Bradstock suggested costing was unavoidable.

“Ultimately that will become part of the political process. Governments and potential governments have to cost this out, put that out for debate and the community decides the level of protection it can afford via this mechanism.”

Seasonal workforce

The Commission heard that compared to 1,500 to 2,000 permanent staff in field operations in the 1980s and early 1990s, DSE now had 237 ongoing staff, 637 project firefighters and 81 casuals. The shift to a largely seasonal workforce was something the Australian Workers Union’s Cesar Melhem likened to “fighting a war with a part-time army”.

Melhem said that there had only been an overall increase in 23 field staff between 2004 to 2009, something he said was in breach of an announcement made in September 2004 by the then Labor premier, Steve Bracks, who promised 151 new field crew in the ensuing four years.

“But unfortunately they have broken that promise and we have only seen an increase of 23 field firefighters,” Melhem remarked.

“We are still waiting for the other 128. I think it’s good to put a press release out, but to actually implement that is another thing altogether.”

You might expect a union official to come out with such claims. But Melhem’s evidence went unchallenged, with lawyers for the Commission not seeking to cross-examine him. His claims were not countered until the secretary of the Department of Sustainability gave evidence.

Greg Wilson didn’t accept there had been no increase in manpower.

“There has been an increase in the hours in recent years of project firefighters. There has been, as I understand, a doubling of people with fire-related accreditations in the last five or six years. There has been an increase in budget allocations and resources. So, as I said, the increased effort may not fully be reflected in the number of AWU staff, but there has certainly been a big increase across the board in capability and resources,” Wilson said.

But there was an acceptance more staff were needed – although Wilson indicated they wouldn’t necessarily be full time, year round. He said changes were underway but pleaded cabinet-in-confidence.

“We have those plans. Inevitably they get back to funding, which means they are put to the minister and to a cabinet committee, which means they are cabinet in-confidence. So I can’t actually elaborate on them.”

Inside perspective

The evidence of Athol Hodgson was particularly powerful. He is an insider who has seen how the system works.

From 1971 to 1977 he was officer in charge of the Forest Environment and Recreation branch of what was then the Forests Commission. From 1977 to 1983 he was chief of the division of Forest Management with the Forests Commission, in 1983-1984 he was the Commissioner of Forests and from 1984 to 1987 he was the chief fire officer with what became the Department of Conservation Forests and Lands, responsible for the prevention and suppression of fire including prescribed burning. In 1987 he retired and worked as consultant to the Environmental Protection Authority of Western Australia for a review of fire policy and management practices.

His message to the Commission was heartfelt, and blunt. He said there had been a failure over three decades to create a safe environment for the state of Victoria.

“What I mean by that is that the government of Victoria with respect to public land management has allowed fuel levels to accumulate to levels that I believe are quite unnatural and they have accumulated to the levels and got so dry in a period of drought that it became impossible to stop some fires unless you were standing beside them when they started,” Hodgson said.

He said those unnaturally high levels of fuel contributed significantly to the fact that so many people died in a matter of hours on Black Saturday.

He said increasing the targets for fuel reduction burning, and enshrining those targets in legislation to provide for accountability, was the single “most significant recommendation (the Commission).. can possibly make for the future of our forests and the future of the people who live in and near them.”

Hodgson said a target provided a benchmark to measure performance.

“If a target is not set, then the accountability of DSE to protect forests by means including fuel reduction burning rests on an interpretation of what is proper and necessary… It has several advantages. One advantage is that it would allow DSE to argue vigorously for sufficient money to run the enterprise so that that target is met. It would allow the people of Victoria to judge whether or not the government that administers that legislation has succeeded or failed, and without a clear, defined target, nothing will change.”

Hodgson lamented the shift to a largely seasonal firefighting workforce at the DSE.

“Regrettably I have to admit that I was partly responsible for getting part-time firefighters into the organisation. We used to call them a mobile support crew in those days. It morphed itself into what is now known as project firefighters. That project has failed. It failed in 2009,” he said.

“It failed spectacularly in 2006 when fires broke out in the Alpine area on 1 December and some of the project firefighters that were intended to be there for the firefighting season hadn’t even been trained. Some of those partly trained project firefighters were sent to various places in the Alpine area but they were never allowed to go on the fire line. They were used to put up and pull down tents and refuel vehicles.”

But this veteran fire man was adamant that the DSE should not be lost in any merger with the CFA.

“You can’t hand this sort of job, sir, to a lay person. To hand the responsibility for this work to a lay person is unthinkable, in my view. To take away from DSE even part of the responsibility, fire suppression I think you are talking about, and give it to a lay person is folly and it would be costly,” he said.

“When you say lay person, you are talking about a person without the forestry skill?” Jack Rush asked.

“I’m talking as a person, the CFA being the person,” Hodgson said.

“The CFA does a magnificent job in the areas for which it is skilled. It is not skilled in working 365 days of the year deep in the forests. That is what is required and that is the difference between what I call a lay person and someone else.”

Hodgson said he was a strong critic of the present DSE and it was deficient in many respects but he would “fight to the death” any suggestion that it be totally abolished.

The West Australian example

The West Australian witnesses were arguably among the most credentialled on the topic of fuel reduction burning. Richard Sneeuwjagt is the man responsible for WA’s planned burning program, managed by the state’s Department of Environment and Conservation. He developed the manual on fuel reduction burning, the so called “Red Book” of forest fire behaviour tables and was awarded the Australian Fire Service Medal in 2008 for his contribution to fire management services over 40 years.

When pointed towards the West Australian model as a guide for Victoria, DSE secretary Greg Wilson said his advice was that the landscapes were different in topography, weather and patterns of urban settlement.

“Things are a lot more complex here, a lot more risky, a lot more variable than they are in Western Australia,” he said.

“So that’s advice you say you have received from Mr Fogarty?” Jack Rush clarified.

“Yes,” Wilson said.

But WA’s Sneeuwjagt dismissed suggestions WA was prohibitively different from Victoria when it came to transferring the knowledge developed there. It’s true WA’s south-western eucalypt forests only constitute 2.4 million hectares compared to Victoria’s 7.7 million hectares of forest. And Sneeuwjagt acknowledged Victoria’s terrain is steeper and its vegetation susceptible to longer distance spotting.

“In stating that, I believe that there are more similarities than differences,” Sneeuwjagt said.

He dismissed suggestions WA had vastly different patterns of settlement.

“No, I think there is a lot of similarity. The south-west is our most densely rural area in the state..There is a lot of.. rural-urban interface. It is an escape for the tree changers.”

The Commission heard WA had implemented a broad-scale planned burning program since large fires in 1960/61 prompted a Royal Commission and a recommendation to boost the preventive use of fire. The pioneering of aerial burning had allowed safer burning over large areas. Since the early ’90s WA had been aiming to burn approximately between 6 and 8 per cent or about 200,000 hectares per annum.

“Well, it certainly has been a very public target. If we don’t achieve it, we certainly get our critics, so it is very much a public thing. We believe it is something we ought to try and achieve but not at the cost of good, effective fire management. So, we could go out there and do all the large blocks out in the hinterland and achieve the eight per cent. We don’t do that. We base all our planning on the risk analysis as well as the requirement for biodiversity management. That means that some years we fall below the target, but we still have achieved our different objectives.”

Last financial year, WA spent about $9 million on prescribed burning and the Commission heard cost of suppression in the south-west region has varied over the last five years from $7.7 million to $15 million. Last year Victoria spent $350 million on firefighting. Sneeuwjagt was obviously proud of his state’s record.

“We haven’t had a forest fire fatality, we haven’t had major property losses for 50-odd years. We haven’t had a wildfire in excess of 30,000 hectares since 1961. This is despite a very severe annual fire season with high proportion of ignitions from both natural and human causes, so our record does stand pretty well. It is not just good luck. Over 50 years we have managed to keep it fairly good and I think our savings, because of our intensity and comprehensive prescribed burning program, speaks for itself,” he said.

“We are in a unique position that nobody else in the world could actually have that experience and show that on a graph. I think my objective of being here as well is to hopefully inform others that here is an example of where it works. It may not be able to be applied directly to the same exact way that we do in Western Australia with some of the advantages we have, but the principles are very much the same and we have at least shown that it can be done.”

Rare agreement

At the Commission, fuel reduction burning even brought together such diverse groups as the Victorian National Parks Association and the logging industry. In the witness box, neither was opposed to fuel reduction burning. Philip Ingamells, from the VNPA emphasised instead the need for good research and monitoring of the ecological effects of planned fire. He respected the advice of the panel on targets but drew attention to the need for more research and information management, like fire records and monitoring over time to produce databases for flora and fauna.

“In 30, 40 years time when climate change is worse, when our fire situation is worse, when we have to manage fire for public safety clearly, and for biodiversity the managers are going to be absolutely lost without long-term data to understand how things work. If we don’t do that now, if we don’t set up that now, to put it bluntly, I think it might be a bit of a stuff-up. We have to give the tools to the future managers. We have to give the future managers the tools we would like now,” Ingamells said.

He compared a hectare-based target to saying the medical system had to treat so many patients a year.

“We have to monitor very quickly so we can move into a more sophisticated series of targets.”

He also reminded the Commission planned burns could get out of control, and stressed the need for resources to do it strategically.

“I think you have to be strategic about that target..I think we have to be very clear about the prescriptions for those burns and to have that subject to scientific scrutiny,” he said.

The deputy chief executive of the Victorian Association of Forest Industries, Lisa Marty, also saw bushfires as a significant risk to an already contracting timber industry.

“We certainly consider that standing timber in a forest is a commercial asset and should be protected as well, and we consider that prescribed burning has a benefit in that respect,” she said.

She explained a significant amount of native forest available for commercial timber production had been lost in the three most recent large bushfires, something that’s had a financial impact given the industry harvests only about 0.1 per cent of the public native forest estate each year, according to Marty’s evidence.

“So I believe that since 2004, 47,800 hectares of the ash forest that was available has actually been burnt and, if you include mixed species types, it is about 20 per cent of the forest that’s available. So I think the result of that for the next two to 50 years will be a decline in the actual amount of timber that can be sustainably harvested.. So I think that’s going to have quite a significant impact on the size of the industry and the viability of the industry.. particularly in the context of resource reductions.”

One DSE insider commented he thought the Commission’s examination of fuel reduction burning had taken the discussion to a higher level, finally. With so much apparent agreement, and with so many oft-cited impediments cleared away, the challenge is now at the feet of the Commissioners to recommend a way forward. Then it will be up to the Victorian Government to balance the dilemma summed up by the American Jerry Williams of planning for rare but disastrous megafires.

“If there is a lesson that we might draw from the megafire phenomenon it is that it is extraordinarily low risk. Less than maybe 1/10th or 1/100th of a per cent of all fires that we deal with become a megafire, but they result in enormous consequence: ecologically, socially, human, economic consequence.”