Mr HATTON (11:49 AM) —Once again, this summer we have seen enormous devastation wreaked not only here in Canberra but throughout the continent. A couple of years ago Sydney was absolutely ringed by bushfire. Our biggest city, with the largest population, had at its very core bushfires of an intensity and immensity that could hardly be imagined. People found it very difficult to comprehend just how significant a natural force this was. Year after year, some years more than others, this has come to the fore.

There have been responses to that over time. The latest response of significance was in 2002, when, after more than 100 years of this federal parliament, a specialist body was finally set up to have a look at the nature of bushfires from a federal perspective. In part, that is because responsibility for dealing with bushfires, controlling them and taking care of the environment locally has largely been put at the feet of state governments and of local council or shire bodies. What we do know is that it is fundamental that we have a Commonwealth research institute to look deeply into the very nature of the Australian landscape and how it has changed and that it come up with a better means of dealing with Australian bushfires.

I think the fundamental problem we face is very simple: we do not know very much at all about Australia's landscape and how it operates. Despite being surrounded by 600 different species of eucalypts, we do not understand their fundamental nature, we do not understand how they operate, we do not understand how to manage them and we do not understand how to live with them. And yet, at state and federal level, we have had public policy made that should be based on those fundamental understandings.

Looking at the early history of Australia, population from the West—from England—started here in 1788, after Cook's discovery 18 years earlier, after previous discoveries by other Europeans. From the evidence, it used to be thought that Aboriginal migration to and population of Australia occurred between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago. That was upped to probably about 60,000 years ago. There is some evidence that it could have occurred 100,000 years or so ago but, for most of the modern period—the period of homo sapiens—the Aboriginal people have been here and have managed the land. But, since 1788, the Australia that the Europeans came to has dramatically changed.

We know that there is far less forest here in Australia than when Captain Cook first sighted the shores of eastern Australia. We know that there is far less forest that is tropical rainforest based, because we know what was culled out of the northern part of New South Wales in the cedar-getting that was one of the first great industries in Australia. We also know that that has caused a dramatic change in the nature of the forests that are left, and it has in fact encouraged the takeover of those areas that were temperate or subtropical rainforest by eucalypts. We know also that, apart from the dramatic diminution in the extent of our forestation, it has probably changed.

Early on, when I was a history teacher dealing with the very early depiction of Sydney and the colony of New South Wales from 1788 to about 1810, there was a view prevalent that the Australia that Cook saw and that Phillip helped to establish a colony in was just the same as the Australia of today and that the bush then was the same as in the Australia we have today, except that there was more of it. It was thought by some historians, but certainly by art historians, that what was painted of early Australia—the depictions we got first from rough sketches by people on Cook's voyages and later in the works of Tench and others, and the very first representative pictures—emerged as being so different to what we know Australia to be because English people were doing the paintings.

The central idea was that you held within your head a certain view of what the environment was like. If you were Eugene von Guerard or one of the other early painters of Australia, the expectation was that you would paint a parklike depiction of Australia, with afforestation that had virtually no undergrowth but very short grass. That is an indication that these artists were prisoners of their ideas of what landscapes should look like because they came from England or the Continent. There is a very strong set of reasons why you would expect that to be true. But later evidence that was advanced helped, I think, to change the possibility in terms of that picture. The best expression of that was Robert Hughes's work—a major and monumental work on the foundation of the colony of New South Wales. That work provided the first information that there might be something more fundamental than that—that it was not just the way that Pieters saw the land. More importantly, in his work called the Future Eaters, Tim Flannery, an environmental biologist, put forward a different view not only of the operation of fire and the way in which the Australian landscape was managed and developed by the Australian Aborigines but also of the fundamental place of large marsupials in the control of that environment.

In an article a week or so ago titled `Bushfire of our vanities'—and I am indebted to the Parliamentary Library for finding this at very short notice—Flannery encapsulated the central argument that he put in the Future Eaters. He said that, instead of thinking of that environment, that parklike atmosphere of Sydney and its surrounds in 1788, as being an aberration, there is another explanation. The explanation is that, when the explorers—because it was not just the people drawing the pictures—said that they could walk through areas of Sydney that were virtual parkland, they meant it. They meant it because fire had been used to create an environment in which Aboriginals could hunt large and small marsupials through the grasslands. The dense nature of the eucalypt forest that we have around Sydney now was not the case in 1788. He makes the point in his article that Cook found a continent wreathed in fire from one end to the other. From Western Australia to the eastern seaboard, Australia was dominated by fire—probably not the raging fires that we see today but more controlled burns. It took most of our European history before we came to a fundamental understanding that we need to use Aboriginal methods of management to control the forest.

Based on the foregoing, I make this fundamental point: it is not wise of the government to rush forward and belt the daylights out of people who have argued for a green perspective on forest policy. No-one knows how we should properly manage Australia's forests. It is my inclination—I have argued it in the past—that we need to look extremely closely at this, because I do not think there is much sense in totally locking up all of our forested land and just letting it be. If we do, we would not be managing the land in the way it has been managed for millennia. That would allow a situation in which we would have the almost total devastation of our great forests and of our lands as a result of raging wildfires. The point that Flannery finally makes with regard to this is that it is not very smart not to take into account the fact that our settlements have moved directly into the path of our major bush areas.

We in opposition call upon the government to support the work of the Bushfire CRC in starting the fundamental steps to understanding the true nature of Australia's environment and the true nature of our bush. The government should not just run off in an ad hoc way and say, `Let's blame people because this stuff has been locked up.' It should look at different ways of managing our environment so that the inflammatory nature of the Australian bush and its eucalypts can be tamed to our purposes in much the same way that the Europeans tamed their environment in continental Europe itself.