Bush fires

I've been looking at submissions to the Bushfires Royal Commission.

There is one from the Australian Forest Growers that makes a lot of sense. The person who wrote it is measured and careful, but the recipe for disaster comes through:

Psuedo science + Politics + Bureaucratic caution = Disaster

This recipe for disaster afflicts us in multiple spheres. To avoid the charge that I'm either right wing - or left wing - let me use three examples side by side (and try to offend everyone equally).

Example disasters
Victorian bushfires	Industrial food	Global financial crisis
Underlying ‘pseudo’ science
Environmental sciences	High input, industrial agriculture	Modern finance and risk management theory
Politics
The green vote	Cheap food	Too big to fail
Bureaucratic failure
Inaction on fuel reduction	Skewing of the regulatory system in favour of industrial food	Deregulation and self regulation of financial sector
Result
Fuel build-up leading to catastrophic fires	Local food systems are disadvantaged by an excess of caution while industrial food systems are subsidised and their externalities socialised	The profits of excessive risk taking are ‘earned’ by the finance sector – while the inevitable losses are socialised

In each case there are alternatives to the psuedo science that has come to dominate the politics - but we've exercised our democratic choices or allowed stakeholder manipulation of our democratic choices - to the point of disaster. Bureaucrats follow the politics - as, to a degree, they must.

In each case the system turns out to be more complex than we though - ahhh - complex systems again.