Why Australia is Burning.......

Let's tell the burning truth about bushfires and the ALP-Greens coalition

Miranda Devine 
The Sunday Telegraph
January 13, 2013

WHENEVER a major bushfire catastrophe occurs in Australia, the victims are essentially told to shut up.

It happened after Victoria's Black Saturday fires in 2009. It happened after the Canberra bushfires, 10 years ago on Friday. And it's happening now in Tasmania.

"Now is not the time for that conversation," says the Tasmanian Minister for Emergency Management, David O'Byrne, avoiding questions about why adequate hazard reduction burns were not done in cooler months to remove fuel from the path of inevitable summer fires.

It's just too early, claims Premier Lara Giddings, presiding over Tasmania's ALP-Greens coalition.

But the residents of Dunalley, whose town was overrun, and the farmers whose properties and livestock have been wiped out, want that conversation right now.

Now is the time for farmers to complain that they could never get a permit to burn off excessive ground fuel on their properties.

Now, while public attention is focused, and before the truth can be buried for years.

Now is the time to point out, perhaps, that a fire which begins in a national park carrying negligently heavy loads of ground fuel can become an unstoppable inferno which will eventually burst out into the Canberra suburbs and kill four people and consume 500 homes.

Now is the time for people who understand the bush to tell the rest of Australia what fools we are.

"Fuel reduction burns make it possible to fight and control a fire; what happened here was uncontrollable," Dunalley farmer Leigh Arnold told The Australian.

Greenies who oppose such burnoffs, "care more about birds and wildlife than they do about people and farms," he said.

"But what's the point of that now when the hills and trees they told me I couldn't burn off, because there were protected eagles and swift parrots there, are now all burned and the fire it created was so hot we had dead swans dropping out of the sky?"

No, the only permissible comment on a bushfire catastrophe is to say it was caused by "climate change" - that convenient get-out-of-jail free card for greenies, governments and the obstructive bureaucracies they jointly create.

But we've heard it all before, and we're not buying it.

"It's really simple," says Brian Williams, captain of the Kurrajong Heights bushfire brigade, a veteran of 44 years of firefighting, in one of the most extreme fire risk areas of Australia, on a ridge surrounded by 0.75 million hectares of overgrown national park between the Blue Mountains and Wollemi.

"Fires run on fuel. Limited fuel means limited fire."

Green tape and heavy-handed bureaucracy has made his job harder today than in 28 years as captain. Rather than needing six people to perform a controlled burn in the cooler months, now 40 are involved, to oversee biodiversity and so on.

Williams managed to conduct just two of the five hazard reduction burns he planned before this fire season.

But don't blame greenies. All week they have been claiming they support hazard reduction. Really?

No matter what legalistic and linguistic ploys are now used to rewrite history, green hostility to proper bushfire management is on the record, from the light-green NIMBYs who object to smoke, to green lobbyists who infiltrate government decision-making, taxpayer-funded green activists who embed themselves in government agencies, the bureaucratic green tape which makes the job of volunteer firefighters so difficult, the green NGOs who strongarm politicians, right up to the political arm of green ideology, The Greens.

It is true The Greens have developed a new set of "aims" including a caveat-studded "effective and sustainable strategy for fuel-reduction management".

In practice, on the ground, it amounts to covert opposition. Williams scoffs at the Orwellian sophistry: "They publicly say they support it. The reality of how it pans out is nothing like that. Greens have two faces and underneath they are undermining everything."

While there have been improvements under a new state government, Williams says hazard reduction is still inadequate across NSW, reaching just 1 per cent rather than the 5 per cent minimum recommended by the Victorian bushfire inquiry.

At least in the hard-won patch of Volunteer Fire Fighter Association president Peter Cannon, around Dubbo, Parkes and Forbes, hazard reduction is complete this year and he is confident any fires will be controllable.

He says it is a credit to hard-working firefighters that Tasmania-scale destruction has not occurred in NSW despite extreme fire conditions.

Another bright spot is the latest Rural Fire Service annual report which says more than 80 per cent of planned hazard reduction was achieved, and the area treated should increase by 45 per cent over three years.

It's not enough but it's a welcome change from the dark days of 2003, eight months before the Canberra inferno, when former RFS Commissioner Phil Koperberg told a NSW parliamentary inquiry that widespread hazard reduction was "an exercise in futility".

Fast forward to last month and blame for that fire has finally been laid where it belongs, at the feet of Koperberg's RFS and the green-influenced National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Brinadabella farmer Wayne West, whose property was wiped out in the fires, sued the two agencies. Last month in the ACT Supreme Court, Chief Justice Terrence Higgins found them negligent.

The episode demonstrated how green pressure on decision-makers filters down into a cascade of subtle bureaucratic obstructions which disempower firefighters on the ground and disregard their expertise.

The result in 2003 was that a small fire at McIntyre's Hut in the Brindabella ranges was allowed to rage out of control through the national park to emerge 10 days later, and burn lethally through Canberra's suburbs.

Unfortunately for West and his insurance company, the government agencies are protected by statute and don't have to pay compensation.

But West won a moral victory. We all are in his debt because he fought for the truth and refused to shut up.

Bob Brown has it wrong - I do not advocate violence against greenies

Miranda Devine 
The Sunday Telegraph
January 13, 2013 12:00AM
  
I CAN'T say I was surprised when Bob Brown had a shot at me in The Sydney Morning Herald last week. Still, even though he is a Green, you'd think he'd have more integrity than to lie about me.

Bob Brown (l) and "Partner" Paul Thomas

In tepee dwelling eco-terrorist Jonathan Moylan, who admitted creating a false ANZ press release which briefly carved $340 million off the value of Whitehaven Coal, Bob likened the young man to himself. And Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King and Jesus Christ.

Jonathan, like Bob, is Saving the Planet. "Business as usual in COALMINING is a high crime against humanity." The only real crime alleged here, is Moylan's.

Which brings us to me. Australian eco-activists are "committed to non-violence", Bob wrote. But no such commitment exists on "the other side".

"Just read Miranda Devine's advocacy of violence against environmentalists in The Daily Telegraph."

It's not true, Bob. I have never advocated violence.

Bob did try to get me sacked for a column I wrote in the Herald in 2009, a week after Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people.

It wasn't climate change or arsonists which killed those people, I wrote. "It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.

"So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies."

At the time, a lynch mob against arsonists was being egged on by politicians and the media. When a "fragile loner" was charged with arson, vigilantes called for him to be burned at the stake.

No reasonable person would have read my column as advocating violence, or hanging greenies from lamp-posts. Of 330 responses, not one reader mentioned lamp-posts.

It took 10 days for Bob's misrepresentation to gain traction.

Four months later the Press Council dismissed the complaint brought by his supporters. Bob persists because shooting the messenger is his only answer.

Telling little Green lies makes a media darling

Tim Blair 
The Daily Telegraph 
January 14, 2013 12:00AM

Anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan is admired by The Greens and some on the left. Source: The Daily Telegraph

A FEW days before the 2007 federal election, several Liberal Party members met in Penrith to carry out a dirty trick.

Led by Gary Clark, husband of retiring member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly, the group composed a bogus document claiming to be from "The Islamic Australia Foundation". The crudely manufactured work, complete with misspellings and outdated logos, indicated extremist Islamic support for the Labor party.

As they attempted to distribute copies of the slur in suburban letterboxes, the hoaxers were photographed by members of the ALP who'd been tipped off from within the Liberal Party. Media outrage, police charges and party expulsions followed.

Then prime minister John Howard, along with just about everybody from all sides of politics, slammed the dishonest tactic. "I have condemned it," said Howard. "I've dissociated myself from it. I think it's stupid, it's offensive, it's wrong, it's untrue."

Last week anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan, who describes himself as a "Christian anarchist", attempted a similar stunt. He produced a press release claiming to be from the ANZ that announced the bank's withdrawal from funding a new coal mine. Contacted by journalists, Moylan presented himself as an ANZ representative.

Several media outlets, among them the Australian Financial Review, fell for the trick, which quickly led to Whitehaven Coal losing some $300 million in share value. Compared to the bungling Liberal gang of 2007, Moylan was rather more successful.

There's another significant difference between these otherwise similar incidents. Instead of being condemned for his lies, 24-year-old Moylan has become a hero to the Greens and many others on the left, who now endorse outright fraud as a legitimate political device.

Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon took to Twitter one day after Moylan's scam: "Congrats to Jonathan Moylan, Frontline Action on Coal, for exposing ANZ investment in coalmines."

Greens leader Christine Milne said that Moylan's lies were "part of a long and proud history of civil disobedience, potentially breaking the law, to highlight something wrong". Former Greens candidate Clive Hamilton: "Often those who engage in civil disobedience are otherwise the most law-abiding citizens. They are those who have most regard for the social interest and the keenest understanding of the democratic process."

Ex-Greens leader Bob Brown topped them all. "History is full of this," wrote the great earthian, who is full of something himself.

"Gandhi and Mandela went to jail. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Jesus Christ turned up at the businessmen's tables and look what happened to him. Anti-slavery campaigner John Brown's 'body lies mouldering in the grave' and suffragette Emily Davidson was killed when she ran in front of the horses at the 1913 Epsom Derby." All it takes to become a modern Jesus/Gandhi/Mandela for the Greens is one fake press release. The martyr bar isn't set very high these days.

Naturally, the ABC also leapt to Moylan's defence. Here's the opening paragraph from an ABC piece published last Thursday: "The activist who caused a $314 million temporary plunge in Whitehaven Coal's share price could face 10 years in jail, despite having no intention of personally profiting from his fake press release."

Note the concluding excuse-making sentence, which - as some web commentators observed - the ABC really ought to include in other reports. For example: "The arsonists who caused widespread destruction could face years in prison, despite having no intention of personally profiting from their fires."

If lack of a profit motive mitigates against jail sentences, a great many rapists and murderers are currently imprisoned unjustly.

Fairfax, too, were hot for Moylan. "If letters pages and social media are any indication, there is widespread support for Moylan's hoax," wrote academic Katherine Wilson. "To charge him with a criminal offence would be utterly immoral."

So, now that we've all moved on from 2007 and are now accepting lies for political causes, I've been having some online fun myself by whipping up a few bogus Greens press releases. It's only fair, seeing as they so strongly endorse this kind of thing.

Creating these mock media statements is a simple matter of photoshopping new words into the Greens' media announcement website. So far they've called for a minute's silence in parliament to honour the memory of "intergeneration intimacy pioneer" Dennis Ferguson, demanded that asylum seekers be billeted throughout western suburban bedrooms and sought an increase in abortions to provide NVHP ("non-viable human protein") fuel for sustainable, coal-free power generators.

Some readers have fallen for the fake media statements, which I guess shows just how many AFR journalists are out there. Of course, Greens supporters aren't impressed. "Wow. Disgraceful," wrote one Twitter identity. "My God," gasped another.

Get used to it, babies. The Greens have set this standard. It's just "part of a long and proud history of civil disobedience". And, just to reassure the ABC, no profit motive is involved.