courtneyeastgippsland.com

When the Bushfires Royal Commission releases its report, the focus of the media will be on who gets the blame, and journalists will be intent on providing the most sensational headlines to sell the most newspapers or TV and radio advertising.

Christine Nixon has already been branded as a villain as has CFA Chief Russell Rees. Both have their reputations severely tarnished if not destroyed as a result of the efforts of many individuals including the media.

Whilst everyone was/is shocked by the tragic deaths of so many people and the destruction of so many livestock and so much property, as usual in the case of disaster, the next objective is to look for scapegoats to blame rather than focus on the basic reasons.

Simply put, most of the losses were due to people living in an environment of their choosing, where with climatic conditions as has been experience many times in the past, the results were inevitable. On many occasions, the coming together of persistent dry weather, fire prone vegetation, an exceptionally hot day and strong winds has lead to catastrophic conditions with the resultant loss of life and property.

In 1926 in Gippsland, the 1939 fires, Mt Dandenong around 1962, 1968, 1983 and 1997, Tasmania 1967, Lara fire in 1969, Ash Wednesday 1983, Canberra 2003  and Eyre Peninsula 2005 are but some such events where many lives and property were lost. In 2003 and 2007 there were major bush fires which burnt for days and in each of those years burnt approximately 1,100,000 ha of bush.

Isn’t the past, warning enough?

Why choose to live in an environment where , in the event of extreme conditions, death becomes a distinct possibility?

Guess what? It will happen again.

When are we going to take responsibility for our own decisions and actions?

People who decide to build in an environment where they are vulnerable, have the responsibility to themselves and their families to plan for the worst and be prepared to act appropriately.

Now I may have an advantage, having been in the CFA from 1955 to 1958 (aged 16-19) and fighting as a volunteer in the 1962 Mt Dandenong fires. Those were the days when we had an army disposal fire truck with maybe 1000 gallons and a small pump. We also has sticks or broom handles with bags nailed on the end. And of course the back mounted knapsack spray, better suited for killing blackberries. We never saved a house or a haystack, nor did we do anything other than mop up the dying embers that the bush fires left behind. Not a lot has changed, simply because nothing can stop a raging bushfire and most of the efforts are token in nature. When nature chooses to take the foot off the accelerator, only then can humans put out the remains.

On Black Saturday, no one could have prevented the fires from sweeping through the areas which they did. The best that could have been hoped for was the earliest possible warning. We all knew the forecast the day before. The forecasts were particularly accurate. We all had opportunity to plan.

Every time we have a flood, the houses which get flooded are the same houses which were flooded last time and the time before that and the time before that. If people choose to live on a flood prone property, that’s their choice and their responsibility.

Rather than look for scapegoats,  the basic answer lies in individual personal responsibility for our own decisions and actions or inaction.

It is  time for the political parties of both persuasions to move away from the ‘granny state’ philosophy and concentrate on educating the community that they are responsible for their own decisions and shouldn’t look for someone else to blame when they get it wrong.