Opinion

NSW Farmers CEO Pete Arkle has criticised environmental politics holding up rebuilding efforts across the state, saying we need less talk, more action ... Mr Arkle said the independent Natural Resources Commission described the new Private Native Forestry Codes as a significant improvement over the previous codes, with a number of additional environmental protections relating to koalas, unmapped streams and harvesting intensity limits.

Clarence Nationals MP Chris Gulaptis has welcomed the certainty the Bill provides to the timber industry and the significant koala protections included. “Farm forestry is a vital component of the NSW timber industry, generating about $482 million and employing 835 people on the North Coast alone,” Mr Gulaptis said.

A North Queensland football coach and first aid officer who has spent his life working with troubled youth has put his hand up to assist in rehabilitation of criminal offenders through a trial of Katter’s Australian Party’s Relocation Sentencing policy. Relocation Sentencing, which has long been touted by the North Queensland-based party as “circuit-breaker solution” to the unrelenting youth crime crisis, would involve repeat offenders being sent to remote properties to work the land while completing compulsory therapeutic programs over a 6-12 month period.

Both researchers I referenced show regular low intensity burning, as practised by Aboriginal people across the landscape, has been lost and Dr Fletcher believes the loss of cool, mosaic burning since European settlement has left us, as a nation, dangerously fire prone. Philip Zylstra seems to have missed this critical point.

In his 24 October response on this issue, Zylstra states that in their study seven times more area of recently burnt forest was burnt than long unburnt forest. That is not in dispute. But was this because there were seven times the number of ignitions in these areas to start with because of chance or differences in area or because of some flammability factor? We simply do not know because this basic statistical requirement was not considered in the study.   Is the conclusion biased, by how much, and in what direction? Who knows?

I have recently re-read Think Trees, Grow Trees, a 1985 publication from the Institute of Foresters of Australia. This excellent little book was the brainchild of, and was edited by Dr Wilf Crane, one of my contemporaries at the Australian Forestry School, a notable forest scientist and famous and eccentric character ... To me, the most important part of the book (in terms of contemporary relevance) is the chapter called Living with Fire. It is written by Phil Cheney.

The Nationals leader and member for Maranoa David Littleproud says Labor has broken the hearts of Maranoa locals in its first Budget ... "in Labor’s first Budget, Maranoa locals have been held back and left behind in three key areas - cost of living, childcare and infrastructure.

The mapped fire histories of the southwestern forests show that bushfires have been most frequent in forests with dense understoreys promoted by previous burns, and far less common in areas that have not been burned for several decades, allowing the understorey to naturally thin. Two new voices have entered the discussion on this here and made numerous claims, but their ill-informed comments have distracted from the point.

RVOTDS. Game Management Authority (GMA) (Vic) arranged a first-ever count of Stubble Quails in Victoria early this year, and the resultant report it assisted in drafting, has recently been published. The report’s authors have admitted only 101 birds were counted, yet the figure was extrapolated via complex methodologies up to an extraordinary estimate of 3.1 million.

From a Concerned Citizen: Messers Toole and Farraway are vocal proponents of the so-called “upgrade” of the Great Western Highway from Katoomba to Lithgow. ... The project does not deliver an expressway to Sydney - it leaves the Central West and Western Tablelands the only region in NSW without an expressway to Sydney ... The vision that should be adopted and made a reality is a standalone expressway between Western Sydney and Lithgow: the Bells Expressway.

Dear Editor, I am compelled to respond to the naïve and dangerous comments by Professor Phillip Zylstra on forest bushfire management in Western Australia, in your most recent edition. I agree with the Bradshaw critique of Zylstra et al’s paper and I found Professor Zylstra’s defence to be unconvincing.

Following the critique of a research paper by Zylstra, Bradshaw and Lindenmayer “Self-thinning forest understoreys reduce wildfire risk, even in a warming climate,” by Jack Bradshaw, readers might be interested in some broader analysis of Mr Zylstra’s fire research work ... His research appears to be the base to advocate for what might be described as a wilderness approach to fire management across the broad Australian landscape.

Elders of Australian forestry temporarily reinstated sustainable fire management more than half a century ago, before a new generation of ecologists dismantled it. These new experts employ the Climate Cop-Out to explain the inevitable resurgence of pestilence and megafires. Now Forestry Australia is collaborating with them to ‘reimagine’ our future. To achieve this, they have to reinvent our past.

For rural and regional communities, especially those crying out for dams for flood and drought mitigation for decades, Budget Paper Number 2 from the Commonwealth 2022-2023 Budget makes depressing reading.

On the night of October 2nd, 66 citizen scientists surveyed for endangered Greater Gliders in native forest across Victoria. The state government has either released these areas of forest for logging in the current Timber Release Plan or plans to release them under the proposed Timber Release Plan (TRP). Surveys were carried out in six locations across the state: Toolangi, Black Range (near Taggerty), Warburton, Wombat, Alberton West, and Colquhuon forest, East Gippsland ... ARR.News ask KFF a few questions.

In 1971 the United States Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz spoke wisely and bluntly about the perils of organic farming. “Before we go back to organic agriculture in this country, somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve or go hungry.”

Our paper published in 2022 shows that, according to DBCA records, bushfires have been seven times more likely on land previously burned by them than on land that they have not burned. Mr Jack Bradshaw’s educated guesses about the causes of karri regeneration prior to 1850 do not change this, they use speculation to distract from the hard evidence we are discussing.

“It is the fight of the fundamental industries – food and power. We should never plan for one to miss out over another.   If the past few years have taught us anything - pandemics, geopolitical unrest and floods, it is we don’t know what is around the corner. Uncertain times call for brave infrastructure investment decisions": Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers CEO Hugh Christie.

The East coast of the island is swollen with water – the bulging rivers purging to sea, or finding relief beyond their banks, the waters spewing and sprawling across paddocks and swirling down streets. The anxiety of sandbagging in the race to beat mother nature is real. The threat of the unknown is immense. The realisation of the brutal damage done: heartbreaking. If only we’d built more dams. Damn.

Over my life I have come to the conclusion there are two type of people: the “could have, should have, would haves”, and the helpers. The “could have, should have, would haves” are the majority. They would have handled things differently, ie, “you should have done things differently and then you could have not been in the trouble you are in”. They were out in force this week when television stations showed the frantic efforts to save broodmares in the Goulburn Valley floods.