Mr JOHN COBB (11:59 AM) —I wish to express my deepest sympathies to those families who have been affected by bushfires and to those who are still battling blazes in south-eastern New South Wales and northern Victoria. I say that as one who was for a long time the captain of our local fire brigade in one of the worst bushfire areas in New South Wales, the Cobar Shire. When a fire really goes, it goes. I can remember in 1984-85 in the worst fires we had, three times in one day the fire went clean over the top of us. You cannot fight a fire in that situation. `Firefighting' is the worst explanation of what brigades do that I have ever heard. You set up defences and when the fire dies down you try to control it. I think the crux of the issue that we are discussing is the defences and the preparations you make to control fire.

In New South Wales in particular, every year we wait with bated breath to see how the fire season will play out. This has been a particularly horrendous season, and it is far from over. In some areas the fire has been stifled by the drought. A lot of grassland has been eaten out and many areas will not carry fire at all. Luckily, in those circumstances there is insufficient fuel to be a danger to humans or to wildlife. But in forested areas the drought has provided fuel for the fires. The forest fuels are abnormally dry. The natural barriers like the moist swamps, the creeks, the rivers and the shallow lakes are simply not acting as they normally do.

Fuel is the most important element of a bushfire. Fuel determines the intensity, speed and heat of a bushfire. The important characteristics of a fuel that determine fire behaviour are the fineness of the fuel and the structure of the fuel bed. In actual fact, those things that lie on the forest floor or on the timbered country's floor are the things that will determine whether or not a fire gets going. Grass is obviously the simplest form of fuel. I have seen grassfires travel faster than human beings are able to get around them and, in mallee or timbered areas, far faster than the possibility of getting around in front of them were you so foolish as to try to do so. The forest litter bed is the part which is most important in determining how fast or where a forest fire will spread. Research has found that doubling the fuel in the forest will double the rate of spread and quadruple the fire intensity. Note that I am talking about what happens in forests, not on farmland and not on privately held land.

It is very easy to understand why people want to live in an idyllic forest-like area. They tend these days to want to build their homes in those areas. While I shudder when I see the danger that they put themselves in, it is easy to understand why they want to live in such areas. But it is the job of governments and authorities to protect people from that danger. For far too long, environmental correctness has been given precedence over safety, over human life and over the value of the assets that people in the community have and depend on. If the status quo continues, especially in New South Wales, we will simply see a repeat of this next year and the year after and so on. Systematically reducing ground fuel by prescribed burning—in other words, hazard reduction—is the only way to reduce the incidence and severity of bushfires.

It is impossible in a country like this to reduce bushfires to the extent that they are not going to happen. We live in a dry country; we accept the dangers that come with it, but there are limits. Reduction burning can obviously be unpleasant and it causes pollution to some extent, so there is a built-in political resistance to it—especially among those in the metropolitan areas. But simply standing around preserving aesthetic values comes at one heck of a cost. When the bushfires hit and homes in the outer regions suffer from them, very little resistance can be offered. It is too late to try to deal with a fire when it is on your doorstep. The only way we can deal with it is by prevention.

A senior principal research scientist with the CSIRO, Phil Cheney is one of Australia's foremost bushfire experts. He spent 40 years trying to convince Australians of the need for hazard reduction. In the last two summers, there has been an enormous loss of assets and an enormous loss of life. In New South Wales, even in the Goobang Valley in my own electorate, fires have led to incredible losses. They burned in the national park for a very long time and, as a result, we lost incredible amounts of farmland, stock and opportunities for people to earn their living.

So many people have been affected over the last 12 months. In October 2002, a lady was killed in Ballandean in south-east Queensland; also in October, a death occurred in Abernethy, near Cessnock in New South Wales; in December 2002, a man was killed north of Sydney; in January 2003, four people were killed in the Canberra fires; and, also in January, a man was killed north of Perth in Western Australia. The estimated cost of the Canberra fires alone now stands at nearly $300 million. Five hundred and thirty-odd houses have been destroyed, and 800 have been damaged. Twelve thousand hectares of pine plantations were destroyed. I could go on and on.

It is interesting to look at what has happened over the past few years—since 1997, in particular, when the Rural Fire Service legislation was introduced into New South Wales. Fire hazard laws were recently introduced by the Carr government subsequent to that, to give the New South Wales government or the Rural Fire Service greater powers to force landowners to clear their fire hazards. The only problem is that Premier Bob Carr did not introduce this until 1 August, and that is little use when the bushfire season started before that. I make the point now—and I will make it again later—that it was introduced only for landowners on private land.

Bob Carr conceded that there were problems with it addressing only private land-holders but failed to recognise the extreme shortfalls posed by the timing of his legislation. Even more, he failed to admit what the real danger is. The real danger to homes and to farmland is what comes out of national parks. To simply give power over all private land but not public land defies the laws of commonsense. Why do you give authorities power over those who have the most interest in safeguarding their assets, their families and loved ones and not give those authorities power to deal with those who have the least interest in the lives of others and their private assets and homes? It defies commonsense and it flies in the face of what has happened since 1997 in three bushfire seasons.

It is time to stop bowing to environmental correctness. Everyone wants to look after the environment and have a decent place to live, myself included. But preserving the status quo will cause more environmental destruction and actually go against what it is that Bob Carr is trying to do. What he is trying to do is preserve the vote of those in the cafe set in the metropolitan areas, who mostly do not have to deal with the issue; the rest of us do.

When you think of the number of lives lost, the houses destroyed and the thousands of hectares of good farmland burnt around national parks since 1997, it defies imagination. I would like to go back to 1997 briefly, because that was when the Rural Fire Service legislation was introduced. I was involved in trying to get some sense out of the legislation, which was not designed to give the ordinary person input into what should be done.

At that time, we tried to give ordinary people who live with and deal with fires an input and the ability to go to the minister to say when the processes of the ministerial advisory council were not working. But because the government and the commissioner—who is still the commissioner today—in New South Wales were terrified of anybody else having a direct link to the minister on fire procedural matters in New South Wales, they did a deal with the environment lobby in the upper house to prevent an alteration to that legislation which would have allowed those involved in the rural fire situation greater transparency and access to the minister. They did a deal with the environmental lobby, which meant that the threatened species legislation had to be taken into account by private land-holders, national parks and everybody who—if any law of commonsense applied—would do hazard reduction burning.

The result is what we have had—and what we told them we would have—since 1997: lives lost, incredible amounts of farmland lost and incredible numbers of houses lost around Sydney and Canberra. If you do not give those who are charged with looking after fire regulations or the practical aspects and processes of them—in the case of New South Wales, the Rural Fire Service—the power to control government, public or crown land as well as private land, you are not going to approach a solution to the dilemma of losing lives and property to fire.

Bob Carr catered to the votes of the extreme green environmental lobby and refused to give power over national parks to those who must have it. National Parks and Wildlife Service's job as they see it is to preserve the status quo. Not only do they block off entries; they fill in dams and do everything they possibly can to make national parks, in a sense, unattractive to humans. That obviously makes it a lot harder to go in there to travel around and find water when it has to be used. In the same way, they try to discourage animals from watering in parks but have them watering in the farmland outside. It is not conducive to public safety, nor to the assets of the rest of us.

I believe that those in charge of national parks are certainly very decent human beings. But until those who understand and are charged with the fire prevention safety of the state—and other states as well—are forced to do those things that have to be done to set up barriers against future fires, there is going to be no sense in it. I have had National Parks in New South Wales say to me, `We simply couldn't do fire prevention burning—it was too green.' Any farmer in Australia could tell them how to spray and burn within a week in any situation where it is too green—it is not hard to do. We need to have the willingness, the foresight and the long-term vision to do it in order to save lives and assets.