Bundarrah Days

Ross Bradstock , well known enemy of Mountain Cattlemen, makes the same claims against fuel reduction burning that he made against alpine grazing athough, to give him his due, he thinks that Black Saturday could have been prevented by the wholesale removal of forest and it's replacement with concrete.

To him it was a disaster that nothing short of radically unprecedented and impossible action could have prevented. Or, that's what he says publicly. What he says in private is likely to be a whole lot different.

Brackstock who is yet another dime a dozen professor of cattle dung and knows next to nothing about bushfire in practice is also a stranger to the truth. They may have met on the odd occasion but they're certainly not on friendly terms.

He says that fuel reduction measures can only mitigate the risk posed by fires to people but cannot eliminate it. We can't eliminate disease either but we cure some and mitigate others through the practice of medicine.

Here's what he said about Black Saturday.

"The scientists are saying the heat and wind were off the scale and several areas that had been burnt recently burned on the day."

That's a huge great misrepresentation. When a wildfire such as Black Saturday passes over a recently burned area it is going to set alight any available fuel. You don't need to be a Professor at Aunty Jack's Uni to work that out. What is debatable is the intensity of the fire. If the fuel burden is lower than the surrounding area there will be less firel and that's indisputable. Of course, when there is a surrounding wildfire it will be somewhat hotter than a fire limited to burning on recently burnt ground simply because the heat generated by a fire consuming massive amounts of fuel will make it so.

I shouldn't have to explain this but Bradstock should be made to explain why he feels the need to hide the truth and mislead people.

The fact that the heat and wind were "off the scale" on Black Saturday seems to have made little difference to most of Victoria. The 1.5 million ha burned in 2003 didn't catch fire again despite the "off the scale" factors. The 1.1 million hectares burnt in 2006-07 didn't catch fire again either despite the "off the scale" factors. But what is really telling is this. Both 2003 and 2006-07 burnt just as powerfully and for much longer than the Black Saturday fires in weather conditions that were benign by comparison.

Blind Freddie is no Wollongong Professor but even he can read the signs and they don't point in Bradstock's direction.

All he has proven is that too little fuel reduction burning is of little use in mitigating wildfire fed by massive fuel loads. He played the same game with alpine grazing. He and his mate Dick Williams set out to prove that alpine grazing does not reduce fire risk on the high plains by studying an area which scarcely carried any cattle. Their conclusion about cattle was the same as their conclusion about fuel reduction burning.

They say neither works because there is still fire where they are practiced. The truth is otherwise. It says that if there were sufficient cattle and sufficient fuel reduction burns there would be far less wildfire.

This green ploy is so obvious it's laughable. Reduce both FRB and grazing to a level where they can't achieve much and then they say they don't work. It's like batting Bradman at number 9 and complaining that he didn't hit a century.

THE fires of 2003, 2006-07 and 2009 do not come under the heading of tragic act of nature.

These were manufactured fires, born of a cynical manipulation of the natural environment where neglect does the job demanded of it by radical greens.

Manufactured fire is all about fuel. It was easy for green land managers to accomplish heavy fuel loads in our forests and they did that by implementing a program of totally inadequate fuel reduction burning.

It wasn't so easy on private farmland but the intent is plain to see. Native vegetation offsets are not about preserving native flora but about providing fuel for flames on private farmland assisted by laws and regulations against clearing fallen timber and other environmental waste.

Black Saturday was for the green movement the culmination of manufactured fire. Whilst we are not claiming that their agenda actually requires the deaths of innocent people we don't believe they won't care if it causes tragedy. It's all grist for the green mill.

What the green agenda does require is that people become so frightened or disenchanted by life in rural areas that they pack up and move back to town and the deaths of the more than 200 people who died on Black Saturday will be used as a means to end.

Even though of us who keep banging on about the dangers of the neglected bush play in the hands of green fanatics. We scare people too, even though it's not our intent.

We need to reassure people that our forests, managed as they should be, are a stable and safe environment.

There have long been fears that bushfire may become a weapon for terrorists and now it is though not in the way most would have expected. Fire has become the primary weapon of the environmental terrorists who have infiltrated our bureaucracies and control organisations such as the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA). These are the people who "stack the woodshed" and wait for a fortuitous lightning strike, a fallen powerline or even a mad pyromaniac to set our country alight.

It's interesting that the VNPA only last year recommended that native vegetation offsets on private land be doubled. What has farmland got to do with a national parks lobby group? In brief, offsets are a requirement to replace one tree with more. If you have a problem tree affecting power lines or a fence, for example, and you want to remove it then under present regulations you have to plant 30 to offset the loss of the one you removed.

In the 2008 Land Health and Biodiversity White Paper the VNPA proposed that offsets be substantially increased. These new offsets were apparently to be set by science. However, no scientific evidence was presented in support of the proposal and the cost, of course, was to be borne by landowners. That is compelling evidence of a scheme to import manufactured fire to farmland

Depending on the findings of the Royal Commission there could be a case for the laying of charges of criminal negligence and conspiracy against senior conservation bureaucrats and other leading green activists over the Black Saturday fires. I know for a fact that Melbourne lawyers have discussed the potential for the laying of such charges.

The wilderness aspirations of the green movement, the subsequent lack of fuel reduction burning and other fuel reduction strategies and the imposition of native vegetation laws on farmers and other landowners is all evidence that manufactured fire is the weapon the green movement is using to try and remove human presence from our bushland.