The Victorian fires - and parallels with the global financial crisis

I haven't felt much like blogging the last week.  The horrible toll of the Victorian fires has been slowly emerging - along with an understanding that this has been way outside the range of expectations for most people.

Of course there are people who are saying 'I told you so'.  And you can't really blame them when the cost has been so severe - and they did point at what seems to be the main 'avoidable' factor in all this - that of fuel load.

Australian eucalypt forests shed substantial quantities of leaves, bark and branches.  And under-stories thicken in the absence of regular fire.  This creates fuel load - which together with air temperature, air humidity and wind speed determines a fair proportion of fire risk.  Last Saturday the 3 climatic factors were 'off the scale' - and the fuel load was there to create a disaster.

Fuel load was there because of the way we manage our forests and roadsides - the result of a whole raft of public policy choices.  I observe in sadness rather than the anger of some, but I can't see how we can avoid the conclusion that our policy choices have been seriously wrong in a range of areas and that an overt, covert and bureaucratic bias against regular fuel reduction burning has been the great avoidable error.

On Friday I spoke to a friend who has farmed near Kilmore for what must be 50 years or more.  The fires started just to the east of his property.  He expressed what I have also been feeling - a fear that the 'rules' by which he (and I) have minimised our own exposure to bushfire risk have changed and that we are not as safe as we think.

If you read back to my blogs last week, you can see that I felt a reasonable level of confidence in our safety at Moora.  I have to concede to being less sure now, and that I will be a careful observer of the Royal Commission proceedings, and that I will be reviewing precautions at Moora, and that I will be adjusting what I think is reasonable in considering any other properties we might buy.

It's actually all quite like the global financial crisis.  We don't really understand what is happening.  There are those who are seen to have 'predicted it' who are now enjoying public acclaim - even when what they predicted was some different form of disaster.

It seems to me that what we need to acknowledge is that we don't know exactly what has happened and why, that while the 'guilty' should probably be punished (when we understand exactly what they did wrong), the most important thing to do is to think clearly and realistically about the future - unshackled from constructs that have clearly failed.