Emergency Services Fund
Dear Editor-, The State Governments new “Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund” demonstrates just how far the politics in this once wonderful country have degenerated to. Forest Fire Management and the CFA are to be funded from this.
When I joined the CFA nearly 60 years ago they were there to put out fires and protect the community, and were good at it. There is little they appear good at now apart from having the vast sums of money disappearing down a black hole.
During the eighties the local Forests Commission did an outstanding job of cool burning to reduce the fire risk.
Fires from lightning strikes etc., in the bush were usually just put out with hand tools, it is difficult with bulldozers and aircraft now.
This cool burning protecting the environment continued until the National Park came on to the scene, and from then on the environmental destruction from hot fires grew destroying native wildlife, along with the destruction of neighbouring farms, communities and water supplies. Right at the moment there is a stream of mud coming down our river from the recent fire in the National Park.
The little fuel reduction burning that is carried out now is nothing like the cool burning necessary, it is just another hot bushfire killing nearly everything. So bad is it that groups like the Bob Brown Foundation are trying to stop all fuel reduction burning, they have learnt nothing from one fire after another in National Parks.
This foundation appears to have no idea that cool burning is necessary and the need for it to be done properly like it has been done in the past to protect the environment.
The Aboriginals did this without even matches for thousands of years, giving the beautiful open grassy environment described by the early settlers and explorers.
The early settlers had little more than matches for an open grassy environment that was still around when I was a kid, this was until they were stopped from doing this cool burning.
The input is needed from people like George Peet OAM and David Packham OAM, who invented the aerial incendiaries and flying technique used for proper cool burning from the air.
This was so successfully used in WA, where they had a Government capable of learning things when Dwellingup went up in 1961, something we have no resemblance of here, following disaster after disaster.
What they have got now is not working and their solution is to throw more money at it. Just from watching this last circus at Licola it would probably take less than five per cent of this fire-fighting money to stop the risks with prevention from proper cool fuel reduction burning.
I suspect there is so many snouts in the trough the money from this fund will take priority.
It has also been stated from Canberra that money from this fund will be used to create even more public land like National Parks that destroy the environment.
The environmental destruction needs to stop, not more money thrown at it.
Yours etc.,
L.Ralph Barraclough, Licola
