Opinion

Just two days after the NSW Upper House enquiry into floodplain harvesting, NSW Water Minister, Melinda Pavey, tabled another attempt in parliament to pass floodplain harvesting regulation. The bold move by the NSW National Party was taken despite the ink being barely dry on the consultation that sought to address the end of system flow target for the Darling Baaka, licensing to the legislated legal limit, and to maintain volumes and entitlements within existing SDLs.

John O'Donnell provides a number of points in response to CSIRO findings on fuel loads, prescribed burning, climate change and forest fire activity in Australia over the last three decades.

Einstein supposedly said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Australia’s current approach to forest management is insane ... Now the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee has published “Lessons to be learned in relation to the Australian bushfire season 2019-20”. It would be amusing if not for the ongoing dire consequences.

Jack Bradshaw. Exposing the hypocrisy of the WA government in banning sustainable timber harvesting in native forest but supporting the strip mining of the same forest.

The NSW Minister for Local Government, The Hon Shelley Hancock MP, a week out from the local government elections released a consultation paper.    The paper concerns the operation of the Code of Conduct provisions of the Local Government Act. These are contentious provisions both in their terms and in their operation ... The Code of Conduct provisions are a bureaucratic supervision of community-elected representatives.

Voices4Cowper launched their report recently to an online audience of around 100 people ... The participants broke into break out rooms with a facilitator in each room. Two questions were asked, "what did you think of the report?" and “V4C - where to from here?”

Recent catastrophic bushfires and reports of threats to species have highlighted concerns about the management of Australia’s forests. Most prominently, there are increasing concerns that forest management is failing to ensure forest health, build ecosystem resilience and protect threatened species. These concerns are real, but the key drivers are not well understood. A body of opinion and media coverage often presents timber harvesting as the primary threat to forest ecosystems and suggests that creating more national parks will protect threatened species and habitats and reduce the risk of severe bushfires. Yet the situation is far more complex.

Dr Canadell said in response to my comment: “Our study doesn’t discuss forest management.” This statement is Not True ... Dr Canadell and his colleagues failed to consider critical evidence which demolishes the CSIRO argument.

The community is awaiting follow up from local Member for Bendigo West, Maree Edwards, regarding the petition to close local wetlands to recreational duck shooting and instead make them a sanctuary for the threatened species which call them home. The petition attracted just under 500 signatures, mostly local, compared to a petition by shooters to have duck shooting remain which obtained 21 signatures (11 local).  

Since  the Black Summer bushfires,  there has been fierce debate over the role hazard reduction burns  played in the severity of the fires, but Dr Canadell says  prescribed burning has not actually changed ... Dr. Canadell was absolutely correct in saying we’re burning a really small amount. I wonder why, then, he finds it difficult to imagine that fuel loads are driving megafires ...

Peter Rutherford. This photo essay may provide a different perspective on the questions as to whether we burn and if we do burn, how often. Perhaps the relevant question is not whether we burn but how do we burn.

Mountain bike events should be held on private property to avoid conflicting use with culturally-important Noongar sites and fragile biodiversity. So says University of WA professor of biodiversity Stephen Hopper, a view which traditional owner of Koorumdinup (Mt Hallowell), Menang man, Larry Blight shares.

Greg Westcott. More than 40 years on from the demolition of the historic Portland Roads jetty, the community is divided by persistent lobbying by a minority of local property owners for the construction of a rock wall and boat ramp that, when completed, will extend out from “the point” about 190 metres into deep water.

The whole landscape needs maintenance by mild fire. But academics and fire chiefs talk of asset protection zones, strategic zones and management zones with different fire regimes. They just don’t get it. Firebreaks don’t work in extreme weather. They can’t stop firestorms and long-distance ember showers. If you need to reduce accumulated fuel, you haven’t been maintaining the landscape properly.

Mark Allison, Agribusiness Australia. Like many businesses, agribusiness is the same in many ways. There is risk and uncertainty, there is profit and loss and there are inputs and outputs ... There is a tendency within the agricultural markets space to focus on the income side of the profit equation. The price of beef received at the sale yard, or the price of grain delivered to port. Discussions of input pricing rarely occur in the agricultural press.

This map is demonstrative of the unrelenting push by Australian bureaucrats and politicians to force rural and regional Australians out of the bush and into the cities and large regional centres.

Peter Rutherford, SETA. ... evidence that the three dimensional fuel loads, which have become the norm in much of the NSW forested landscape, are an artefact of over 200 years of fire management neglect and are not representative of the of up to 60,000 years of evolution, shaped by the intelligent use of fire in the Australian landscape.