A new phenomenon was launched recently on Australian Satellite/Cable TV

It’s an extra free channel that seems to be modeled on the USA’s C-SPAN. Usefully, will run some of the American C-SPAN content.

I stumbled on it by accident and watched a couple of times last week. Once I caught a Parliamentary debate; on another occasion, I saw what seemed to be a Climate Change conference.

American Australia Association: Triple-A rated friendship?

Last Saturday morning, Australia-time, A-Pac showed highlights from the Frank Lowy Tribute Dinner, organized by the American Australian Association. It featured an all-star cast.

I missed the first speaker, but switched on just in time to hear him thanked (“thanks Malcolm!”). From the context, I inferred it must have been Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s Federal Opposition leader.

Alan Jones, a leading shock jock of the Australian airwaves, was doing the thanking. A few years ago, Jones was embroiled in a grubby controversy over ‘Cash for Comments’ (CFCs), but weathered that storm remarkably well. Mr Jones has an extremely thick skin, possibly unequalled since the days of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Mr Jones, I realised, was compering the whole show. How appropriate.

Rupert Murdoch: as Aussie as A-PAC

He introduced Rupert Murdoch, who needs little introduction. Mr Murdoch gave a lengthy eulogy about Mr Lowy’s remarkable rags-to-riches life, starting in 1952 when he arrived ‘penniless’ in Australia.

It’s a pity Rupert didn’t discuss the 1940s. I was hoping to hear how the great spinner would decribe Frank Lowy’s activities in the 1940s, when he served the nascent Israeli State as a ‘commando’ in both the Haganah and the Golani Brigade.

Frank Lowy, man of the night, then took the stage to loud applause. Frank thanked the audience for honouring him, then delivered a homily about American leadership from World War Two to the War on Terror (oddly enough, he missed out The Nakba). He shared platitudes about the road to world economic recovery. Frank, we discovered, is an optimist.

Frank Lowy: Don't mention The Nakba

He was then given a 400 year old American pen.

The Vice Chancellor of Sydney University spoke next. His main role seemed to be gushing about US-Australian relations. He followed with equally lavish praise for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whom he described as a ‘Statesman’.

Mr Rudd’s speech followed. Sporting a huge black tie and black suit, Rudd looked like he might be speaking at a funeral. To be fair, his presentation did have substantive content. Alluding to FDR, he spoke of the need to create a rational basis for renewed confidence. That he said, is what his Government is doing. He praised Barak Obama, whom he described as a “great new US President”, for taking a similar approach.

“America remains a force for good in the world”,  said Mr Rudd. Then he said it again, word for word. “America remains a force for good in the world” I wondered if he’d go for the hat-trick. Is this a form of magic, based on wishful thinking? (Say it enough and it might turn out to be true.)

Rudd spoke with anticipation of the forthcoming G-20 conference in London. Then he gave a personal tribute to Frank Lowy: “To have emerged from the Horror, the Absolute Horror, of The Holocaust…” Again, not a word about The Nakba. Perhaps Mr Rudd was poorly briefed?

Back on stage came CFC Jones, to introduce the Royal Australian Navy Band who dished up an interlude of jaunty military music culminating in ‘God Bless America!’

After that, a number of recipients of the Sir Keith Murdoch Educational Fellowship received awards on stage. It’s an educational swap scheme that seems to be modelled on Rhodes Scholarships. A few of the scholars spoke briefly about their work, some of it very interesting.

American Australian Association: black ties and white lies

After nearly two hours, the show eventually drew to a close. As I reached for the off switch, I realized what was up next: the very same program… played all over again, rather like Mr Rudd’s ‘Force for Good’ mantra. Just in case we missed it the first time…

The entire performance illustrates why Australia’s media regulations are really a joke in bad taste.

Certainly we do need something like C-Span here – on at least one channel. It’s great this channel will carry some of the C-SPAN material direct from the USA. It’s reasonable this particular event was covered too. Why not?

But more generally, what hope is there that the new channel will deliver more real diversity of viewpoints? It’s run by the Australian News Channel which owns and operates Sky News. In other words, it represents yet more media consolidation. It’s not a counter-balance to the News Corp Empire. It’s more of the Empire. Not good enough, Mr Rudd! No complaints from you Mr Turnbull, I presume? Why not?

Who will make decisions about what to cover and what gets left out on A-PAC? The same folk who already have excessive media power, presumably. That means we’ll have occasional servings of  Sarkozy and Gordon Brown – but Putin or Chavez will be a rarity. Same old bias.

I hope the new channel proves me wrong. But I doubt it. A quick look at the A-Pac Charter does nothing to dispel my concerns.

A-Pac: (AIPAC with a lying 'I')

This is the public interest channel Australia gets when we’re not getting a public interest channel. Vested interest, packaged as philanthropy. As usual.

Such a thing is all too predictable in a society where media emperors and senior politicians piss in each others pockets.

In Australia, they’re not even discrete about this type of behaviour any more. I just watched them do it on TV.

____________________________________

FOOTNOTE: No-one said a word about Gaza at Frank Lowy’s  Tribute Dinner – not on A-PAC, anyhow.

That’s not surprising. In the 1940s, as previously mentioned, Lowy was a commando with the Haganah and the Golani Brigade. He is, shall we say, rather biased on the issue of Palestine.

The Golani Brigade has a notorious history. Kawther Salam, an exiled Palestinian journalist based in Austria, did this less than flattering profile in 2006: The Golani Unit: Israels Finest Psychopaths

We can probably wait until hell freezes over before a perspective like that is aired on Fox News, Sky, The History Channel, A-PAC or any of Australia’s other conformist and heavily biased broadcast mass media.

As this chronology shows, both the Haganah and the Golani Brigade were very active during the Nakba. One wonders at which of these landmark events in the dispossession of the Palestinians was Frank Lowy present?

Heavily redacted, this material would make a good feature story for Mr Murdoch’s News Corp. Perhaps a blockbuster Hollywood movie will be next?

Zionist Bias: easy when you exclude other views

POSTCRIPT: When researching this article, I missed an important recent post by Margaret Simons on Crikey: A-pac hits the airwaves, beats ABC to the punch

Her article gives some inside insights I hadn’t known about before – in particular the counter-bid by the ABC to provide a similar service.

While two new public affairs channels would provide greater diversity of content than one channel alone, Australians may already have a view on the the amount of real diversity of viewpoint presented by the public broadcaster: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

I’d give it the same rating as the BBC: great for gardening shows, some fine comedy shows and reliable on the weather. But on Israel and Palestine?

I’ll just say that anyone hoping to hear the truth about President Ahmadinejad’s words when he reportedly said Israel should be “wiped off the map” might have to wait as long on when tuned into the ABC as they would on Sky News. (Forever?)

See the Following letter and subsequent correspondence in MediaLens:

• Mail to BBC re Ahmadinejad & Israel “wiped off the map”

Netanyahu: Palestine's next 'Partner for Peace'?

The following analyses were published in Middle East Online under the title Israeli election results analysed. The two commentators are Neve Gordon and Mustafa Barghouti.

From a distance, it seems to me heroic progressive Israelis and Palestinians would be better off working together in a new ANC-type of alliance for a united, unsegregated, single electorate, multicultural, demilitarized and non-Apartheid Holy Land. Pursuit of a more congenial Israeli state on the one hand and a viable Palestine (built out of diminishing fragments) on the other, separated by a permanent wall, is fast receding as a viable solution – and in truth, it never was.

It is precisely that approach which politicians such as Lieberman wish to criminalize within Israel – to an even greater extent than at present.

By leaving the ‘One State non-Apartheid Solution’ undefended ideological territory for so long, the demcratic resistance in the Holy Land and its outside supporters have allowed the Israeli State to outlaw by stealth the sane approach to real peace.

Absent outside pressure on a scale never seen before, nuclear-armed, expansionist Israel faces a dismal future of incessant war-fever, paranoia and xenophobia. The ‘Jewish State’ is a anachronistic monstrocity. It should be dismantled, allowing Jews and non-Jews to work out a common future as one.

[Below is a summary of analyses on the Israeli election results given to 'Democracy Now!' by Neve Gordon, professor of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University and the author of 'Israel’s Occupation'; and by Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian lawmaker and democracy activist.]

Neve Gordon

NEVE GORDON: I think the Israeli political system has been for several years in a crisis mode, and we’ve seen that none of the governments in the past, I think, decade or even more, lasted their full term, because there’s a crisis of representation.And when a country is in a crisis, there can be change in basically two directions. There can be a renewal of politics for a more moral, a more accepting politics. And there can be another way, which is more a xenophobic, neo-fascist tendency, is a turn to the right, a blaming of the other for all your faults.I think what we see in these elections is that the whole political map has turned even further right than it was. We have to remember that Kadima, which basically won the elections by one point, most of its members were Likud members. And so, we have the Likud, and then we have the Likud II, and then we have Yisrael Beiteinu. Together, they form probably close to 80 percent of the electorate. And so, we have an extremely right-wing Knesset now. Some of the parties are with actually neo-fascist tendencies.

And I think the implications internally will be detrimental and even devastating. And I think the implications with Israel’s relations with its neighbors, and particularly the Palestinians, are going to be extremely harsh. And the likelihood that the Israeli government will lead any kind of peace initiative or agree to any kind of peace initiative is slim without external pressure.

Lieberman more dangerous to Israel than Hamas

This morning I taught my political theory class, and we were teaching John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. And what I think John Stuart Mill would say is that Lieberman is more dangerous to Israel than, say, Hamas, because Lieberman can destroy the Israeli political realm more easily than Hamas, because Lieberman does not want to allow any view that is other than his own, any criticism of the government, to enter the Israeli political realm, and that is an anti-democratic and an anti-political message that he’s giving the Israeli citizenship. So I think Lieberman is extremely dangerous. As I mentioned before, I think his party has strong neo-fascist tendencies, and I think that their rise is a manifestation of the direction Israel is going. And I would say it’s an anti-Israeli stance.

We cannot understand this as an island, as something totally new, but rather something that has been building up. We see that the younger generation is supporting these neo-fascist tendencies. And we cannot blame the schools for it, but we have to blame the whole atmosphere in Israel, which is indeed a racist atmosphere, an anti-Arab atmosphere, anti-Palestinian Arab atmosphere. And Lieberman, what he has learned to do well is to feed on the hatred and the fear of the Arabs, to use a xenophobic method. And this is extremely dangerous. And to tell you the truth, I fear for Israel. I fear for the citizenry in Israel. And I think we are in a watershed moment in Israeli politics.

Whoever is not loyal to the state, according to what Lieberman and his friends believe is loyal, their citizenship can be stripped. What people are saying is that he’s talking about Arabs that are supporting the Palestinian cause for a state and supporting maybe even Hezbollah. They’re not loyal, and therefore their citizenship should be stripped.

Now, history teaches us how these things go. You begin by stripping the loyalty of an Arab that supported the Hezbollah, and then you strip the citizenship of an Arab that supported the Palestinian Authority, and then you start stripping the citizens of certain lefty Jews, and that’s how things go.

And what is interesting about all of this is that Netanyahu, the leader of Likud, said that he supports the motion of stripping citizenship to those who are unloyal to the state. But he said the only—“My only problem with Lieberman’s proposal is that Lieberman doesn’t tell us exactly how to enforce it, and it’s very difficult to enforce.” So, conceptually, ideologically, it’s a much broader political spectrum that’s supporting this connection between loyalty and citizenship, and that is extremely dangerous.

Mustafa Barghouti

DR. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI

: This is a very serious shift, but not only to the right; this is a shift to racism. In my opinion, in these elections, Israel has completed the transformation into an apartheid state with an apartheid racist political system.

And this is the outcome of two processes. One is the implantation of fear and hatred in the Israeli society by the Israeli establishment. The army is a big part of that establishment, and the military-industrial complex is a second big part. And the second factor has been the complicity of the international community. The United States administration, previous administration, the European governments, the whole official international community has been complicit with Israeli crimes, war crimes in Gaza and in other places, and silent about forty-one years of occupation. So, basically, people in Israel think they can do what they want. If they violate human rights in such a terrible manner and nobody is objecting, I think they think they can move forward towards racism and an apartheid system, and that is unfortunately the case today.

Racism in all parties

In addition to what was said about practically the Likud racist approach dominating the whole scene, with Livni and Netanyahu—and here I would agree that there aren’t much differences between the two. Maybe you can say that both of them are racist. Only, Netanyahu is a blunt racist, and Livni is a racist with some makeup. But they both represent the same.Barak, on the other hand, who was supposed to represent what you call left-centrist party, shocked everybody, in my opinion, by being even more extreme and more racist. When he described Lieberman, who’s clearly a neo-fascist and a very dangerous element, he said—he accused him not of being a fascist, not of being an extreme, but he criticized him for not being tough enough. He said, “This is a lamb in hawk’s clothing. And when did he ever shoot anybody by himself?” So Barak was competing with Lieberman by saying, “I am the man who shot Palestinians. I am the man who executed Palestinians with my own hands.”And that gives you a very, very simple picture of how tragic the situation is in Israel today. And it puts us all, as Palestinians, in front of a very clear task: we have to struggle against this apartheid system, we have to break this apartheid system. But the challenge now is on the side of the whole international community, which has been either silent or complicit or trying to avoid the issue, when it is very clear. When Lieberman speaks about loyalty, he’s practically speaking about ethnic cleansing, to repeat some acts of ethnic cleansing that took place in Palestine in 1948. But it’s about getting rid of the Arabs who live in Israel and who have Israeli citizenship and who represent 20 percent of the population.And more than that, when he speaks about loyalty, just to make it clear, it would be anybody who is against war, for instance, that is conducted by Israel, on Gaza or anywhere else, would be considered as an illoyal or unloyal citizen. Anybody who is not supporting occupation would become not loyal to Israel. This is why it’s very dangerous and risky. It is putting the oppressed, which are the Palestinians and the Arabs, who are oppressed from racism and discrimination, in a situation where either they approve of their own oppression by the Israeli government or they become disloyal to the Israeli government and then entitled to losing their citizenship. That is the risk, and that’s why it looks like a very clear neo-fascist approach.

Jewish settlements

On the issue of settlements, I want to say that since 1967 there hasn’t been any period where there was a real freeze of settlement activities. On the contrary, they have been growing at a much faster rate, especially during the times of the so-called peace process. During Annapolis period, the rate at which settlement continued to expand was forty times more than before Annapolis. And now we are witnessing the creation of even new—whole new settlements. That was under Kadima. That was under the coalition of Labor and Kadima, Livni and Barak, and without Netanyahu. So you can imagine what would be the case.In my opinion, we have reached a very critical moment, and that’s why these elections are of great importance, because the bringing in of racist tendency in Israel and this whole extreme coalition into the Israeli government, which would be the case, is happening exactly at a moment when we are about to lose the last opportunity of two-state solution, because of the growth of settlements, because of the fragmentation of the West Bank, because of the consolidation of a situation where Palestinians practically live now in bantustans and ghettos. And they’re in a situation where, after fifteen years of the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the only road open for it by Israel is to become only a security sub-agent for occupation and something like Vichy government in a bantustan entity. That is the risk. And that’s why this is dangerous, not only because it is against peace, but also it is like the last hit in the direction of killing the final or the last opportunity of two-day solution.

Real ‘change’ in US?

And this has been a subject that I’ve been discussing here with many people in the United States administration. At the Senate yesterday, I had a very, very good meeting with John Kerry, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I hope. I hope. The only thing that can stop this wave of extremism, this wave against peace, is only a strong United States stance. I don’t know if it will happen. But I can tell you, this is the time of challenge. If the United States does not immediately take steps to stop settlement expansion and if the United States does not immediately take steps to tell Israel enough is enough, I think the two-states option will be lost forever.From what I have seen from the people I have met with, you can feel the breeze of change in Washington. You can feel it’s a totally different Washington from what we had, for instance, three months ago or two months ago.And I would like to emphasize here that I believe that the last war on Gaza, plus other things that the Israeli government did jointly with the Bush administration, was nothing but an effort to create a preemptive strike against the Barack Obama administration. That was clear in the Resolution 1850, which tried to restrict the peace process only to the failing Annapolis process. And that was clear in the war and intensification of tension in the region, to prevent, in my opinion, peaceful dialogue with Syria and Iran that Barack Obama wants to have and to obstruct a fast and quick withdrawal from Iraq. But finally, that agreement that was concluded between Livni and Rice, in the very last hours before Rice left her position, was also a preemptive strike against this administration.

Occupied protecting occupiers?

That agreement was that the United States and NATO will be providing guarantees to Israel and provide protection to the occupying force, being Israel, and to prevent the resistance of the Palestinian people who are under occupation. So this is the first time in human history where, from one side, the people under occupation in West Bank are supposed, through this huge security apparatus, which is consuming 34 percent of our budget, depriving us from healthcare and education—the Palestinian Authority is supposed to provide protection to its occupiers, and the world community has to provide protection to the occupying force of Gaza, in this case the Israeli occupying force.

Appointment of Senator Mitchell

I think the appointment of Senator Mitchell was perceived in the Middle East as a very positive step. I consider it very positive. I know Mitchell. We’ve met before. I know that his stand on settlements was very clear.And now is the change. I think after coming to the area one or two—two or three times more, it will be clear whether he—that the only recommendation can—he should make immediately is to stop settlement activities. And if that does not happen, then, unfortunately, I think the whole area would go into a complete collapse of the peace process.I think I feel here in Washington some new trends. First of all, there is more sensitivity to the issue of settlements. I think there is more inclination to accept our view, our point of view, that Palestinians are—should be allowed to have a national unity government, and thirdly, that we should allow Palestinian democracy to be revived. You know that Israel has slaughtered the democratic transformation in Palestine by arresting our members of parliament. And if Israel is entitled to democratic elections, then I think we, as Palestinians, are entitled to that.

I believe this is just a beginning. I hope we will go in the right direction. And maybe these results of elections in Israel will show everybody the time has come for a real change in the American policy. Every value that President Obama spoke about—values of respect of human rights, of democracy, of respect for Geneva Convention, avoiding torture, justice, equality, equal opportunity—every value of those are violated by Israel.

Victoria Bushfires, February 2009; photo by Andrew Brownbill, EPA

The tragedy of the 2009 Victorian bushfires – the deadliest in Australia’s recorded history – is something one watches, from a distance, in sadness and horror.

It was a small natural disaster by global standards. But Australia is not the world. It’s population is approximately 20 million. An equivalent per capita death toll in the USA would be around 3,000 – or many more than 10,000 in China.

Australia is a large continent, very scantily populated throughout most of the typically dry land mass, with some large urban centers and a rural area – perhaps 20% of the continent depending on how one draws the boundaries – that’s been lightly settled by modern Australians.

Googlemap of Australian Terrain: remaining forests shown in dark green

At the risk of GROSS oversimplification, one could say there are three Australias: the cities (c. 1%), the desert (c. 80%) and the rural areas (c. 20%).

In desert, there are no forests or even woodlands capable of sustaining large-scale bushfires. Fires occur there – but by far the biggest concerns about major life-threatening bushfires are in the higher-rainfall, more wooded parts of the continent, which I’ll call ‘rural’.

The ancestral forests of Australia were rainforests, which were very widespread tens of millions of years ago. Today, rainforests occupy a tiny area (around 0.25%) of the total land mass. They are not fire-adapted. A massive fire destroys rainforest – or at least triggers a lengthy succession process that would require many hundreds of years for mature rainforests to return.

However, most of Australia’s forests are fire-adapted. They evolved out of the rainforests and are dominated by two large plant families: the eucalypts (gums) and the acacias (wattles).

These forests range from dry woodlands, with scrubby stunted trees and no connected canopy, to luxurious wet eucalypt forests that include the largest trees found in the southern hemisphere. Fire plays a role in each of the many forest types. But the role it plays is not the same in all cases. The natural fire regime for a wet eucalypt forest might be in the order of hundreds of years. On the other hand, woodlands and the drier eucalypt forests typically experience much more frequent fires – in the order of once every decade or so.

Fire itself is a major cause of change. Until approximately 50,000 years ago, the patchwork of dry and wet eucalypt forests and rainforests was in constant change (rainforests were typically along gullies and riverbanks, but in some areas were more extensive). Long-term, climate change was the dominant factor (glacial v inter-glacial). Shorter term, minor climatic fluctuations and chance events such as bushfires would cause subtle local changes in this vast – and largely inter-connected – quilt of forest types.

Aboriginal occupation of Australia undoubtably changed the vegetation and fauna in some places, while in other, less habitable areas, is probably left it unchanged.

One of the ways Aboriginal people controlled the landscape for their own survival and benefit was by judicious and skilled use of fire, in specific places at certain times. Controlled burning was used in some woodland areas to stimulate growth of fresh grass, boosting wallaby and kangaroo populations. In this way, Aboriginal people practiced land management that helped regenerate foods they liked, without adopting settled agriculture. Given Australia’s massive short-term climatic fluctuations (the El Nino-La Nina cycle influences climate as much if not more than the seasons), these mobile, flexible practices made good sense.

Wallaby in tall grass: good tucker all round

There is no evidence that Aboriginals burnt all the landscape regularly – and compelling evidence they didn’t. If they had, there would be no rainforests left. As it was, some 1% of the landmass was rainforest prior to European invasion.

It would even be an exaggeration to suggest that Aboriginal people regularly burnt all of the much more extensive eucalypt forests and woodlands. We can only guess the true extent and sophistication of Aboriginal burning practices. Like so much indigenous cultural wisdom and lore, most of this information was lost when British colonists so brutally and suddenly disrupted the traditional way of life that had evolved over tens of millennia.

Regrowth Wet Eucalypt; densely packed thin trees

When outsiders arrived a couple of hundred years ago, as well as decimating Aboriginal culture, they also made huge changes to much of the landscape. By now, almost all the country’s ‘old growth’ forest have been logged. Overall, there has been a massive reduction in forest cover. The amount of ‘missing’ forest varies from place to place.

Old Growth Mountain Ash: most of these giants are gone - a major ecological change

The nature of the remaining  forests has also been modified in most places – not irreversibly, but in a significant and long-lasting way. Most forests are now regenerating, immature forests with smaller trees than old growth. They are typically less biodiverse than the original forest. Forest areas have also been fragmented – by roads, farmlands and urban development.

The overall consequence has been a rapid extinction rate. Most forests have been so poorly studied for very small creatures that vast numbers of species have probably been driven to extinction without Australia’s new settlers ever knowing of their existence. We have better statistics for vertebrates such as mammals and birds. Suffice it to say that, over the last two centuries, Australia has the worst extinction rate for native mammals of all continents on earth.

Even if deforestation and land modification stopped now (it hasn’t, of course), many additional species are already on their way to extinction. An active program of re-establishing forest corridors would go some way to lessening this risk… but such programs remain the exception rather than the rule.

On top of this, the highly fragmented and stressed forest and woodland area may be about to undergo climate change at an historically unprecedented pace. If that occurs – on top of everything else – a second major wave of extinctions is inevitable. Indeed, if the climate changed along the lines suggested by the IPCC’s median scenario, the very existence of forests in many currently forested areas will be at risk by the end of the century, if not before.

This has profound implications for the long-term habitability of large areas of rural Australia. It has implications for future food production. From the perspective of someone who cares about wildlife as well as people, it’s a grim prospect indeed. But even if one only cares about people, such a loss of natural assets should be cause for serious concern. The driest continent on earth may be about to get a whole lot drier…

Add to this the frequency of major bushfire events. Australia has suffered occasional ferocious bushfires since European settlement (and presumably before as well – although there are no historical records before British colonization). Catastrophic fires don’t occur every year. They do happen every decade or so, in different parts of the forested and semi-forested landscape. Various factors contribute to the cycle. Human management is one of those factors.

It’s more than a shame that some people use the tragedy of bushfires to push an anti-conservation agenda – but it’s as predictable as night following day. Every time there’s a major bushfire tragedy, after a period of a few days, the media-driven hunt for culprits begins. Arsonists, who amazingly enough seem to start a significant proportion of these fires, are infrequently caught. But one sector of society is a sitting duck: the conservation movement.

Andrew Bolt: conformist hack who obeys Walker's Law

I’ll call it Walker’s Law and claim the credit for officially naming this phenomenon, although I’m by no means the first to notice it. Within a few days of any major bushfire disaster in Australia, there will be grumblings, sometimes leading to a full-blown assault, in Australia’s mass media – usually led by the same set of repeat offenders. It’s open season again on greenie bashing… Then, as the horror fades, reality slowly intercedes once again and we get back to normal life.

There is, of course, a case for ‘fuel reduction control burns’ in areas close to habitation – and more generally in some forest areas and types. That’s as long as it’s done intelligently and with a well-planned, widely agreed, and ecologically-informed management strategy.

There is zero case for the kind of ‘burn everywhere often’ argument that’s bandied around in the crasser sectors of our society at these tragic times.

Fire management is an appropriate and necessary ecological tool in the management of the Australian continent. But it’s not a panacea. It’s not a matter of ‘the more the merrier’. Like most medicines, too much can be lethal.

NCC: Intelligent engagement in bushfire issues

This complex policy area requires input from various interest groups and areas of expertise. Ideally fire management planning should be done at a regional and local level. In New South Wales, pioneering work by a small number of dedicated conservationists after the disastrous 1994 bushfires lead by Dr Judy Messer, Chair of the Nature Conservation Council, met an intelligent and welcoming response form the Carr Government. As a result, interested conservationists were assisted at a State level to participate effectively in the development of bushfire strategies at more local level. The result has been more dialogue and understanding between all interested people and better plans.

Conservationists have a vital role to play in achieving the best and most balanced overall policy. Fire management strategies should themselves be embedded within a broader land management strategy encompassing all aspects of land use. The idea of this type of ecological planning without conservationists is like banning the most enthusiastic fans from sports games.

Of course, one doesn’t want a noisy bunch of enthusiasts arrogating to themselves all the decision-making power. But when does that ever happen, in real life? Show me one green dictatorship and I’ll take the ‘threat’ seriously. Until then, I maintain that the scare of ‘excessive green influence’ – especially when it’s implied that conservationists are in some way responsible for large-scale human deaths – is dishonest and ugly.

Miranda Devine: Judgement first, Inquiry later

I hope no conservationists used this bushfire tragedy to say ‘I told you so’ about climate change. It would be as silly to do that as to claim that Europe’s cold winter is a sign that climate change is not happening. No single, localized catastrophic climatic event is proof of long-term global change. However, it is reasonable to note that the frequency of disastrous bushfires seems to be increasing. That’s at least consistent with the hypothesis of human-induced climate change.

Managing this planet so our way of life becomes sustainable rapidly is a highly complex business. Fortunately, we have a lot of people with a lot of skills to do the job.

In Australia, it would help if a significant part of that mix of necessary skills and enthusiasm is not denigrated, in the most banal way, every time there’s a natural bushfire disaster.

One thing is for sure. Just as this wasn’t the first horrific bushfire in Australia, it won’t be the last. We need to help those who’ve suffered and have an intelligent debate about the best way forward to achieve complex multiple objectives. Intelligence is the key – tempered with a little humility and wisdom.

Real life is not University Challenge. We should not be trying to out-smart each other, whenever we can.

We need to put our heads together – not bang them together.