Sustainable Development is Not Working

The forest fires currently ravaging our land, while not avoidable, have been made far worse by a perverted approach to sustainable development.  The cost of these policies goes beyond life and limb, to the long-term viability of the rural economy.

The problem does not lie with the CFA and other forest fighters -- they are, as usual, doing a magnificent, indeed heroic, job on a shoe-string budget.

When the term sustainable development was first coined in the 1980s, it was meant to signify the marrying of market-driven economic growth and nurturing of the environment.  Over time and in application, the concept has been perverted.  Under the banner of sustainable development, resource industries have been garrotted, the environment has been nationalised, bureaucracy and politics have replaced markets, sources of funding have been lost and hands-off and preservation policy has replaced nurturing.

The polices have arguably been most perverse in the management of State forests, but they affect all rural and resource industries.

Since the 1980s, logging has been steadily squeezed off State land.  State forests have been converted to National Parks -- which have quadrupled in size -- and logging has been banned in an ever-increasing proportion of State forests.  As a result, logging is currently allowed on only 7 per cent of State-owned forested land and is set to decline further with the recently announced logging bans in the Otways.

The closure of logging has not only removed scarce jobs and investment from hundreds of rural communities, it has undermined these communities' capacity to manage and protect the environment.  The fact is that loggers have been the backbone of the fire-prevention and fire-fighting system.  They have provided most of the skilled personnel, the equipment and the access roads.  For example, logging contractors have typically provided 80 per cent of bulldozers essential to fighting fires.  With the demise of logging, these skills and equipment are waning.

The cessation of logging, along with the shift of forest to National Parks, has led to a sharp decline in the fire prevention.  Since the 1950s and, following the catastrophic fires of the 1930s and 1940s, controlled burning has been widely used in State forests.  These actions led not only to a substantial reduction in serious fires, but were proven to be advantageous to the forest environment.  While controlled burning does take place in National Parks, it does so at a very much reduced rate.  Further, over at least the last eight years, National Parks have consistently achieved less than half their planned level of controlled burning.  The result has been a dangerous expansion in combustible material in the forest.

The failure of the National Parks to adequately control the fire risk arises from a number of factors.  First, while Governments have been willing to ban logging and open new parks, they have failed to fund the consequences of their decision.  Second, the parks have been captured by political activists who demand a hands-off approach to mother earth.  Third, the parks are caught up in bureaucracy, slow to make decisions and fearful of taking politically risky actions.

Having cost lives and hundreds of millions of dollars damage, it is time to revisit land management.  A royal commission into the current fires would be a good start.

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