Feb 5, 2019
Avoiding extreme bushfires means talking about climate change
This week, most Victorians will think back to exactly where they were on Black Saturday.
For many, the memories are still incredibly raw and traumatic.
I was among the lucky ones who didn’t experience the horror directly. On 7th February 2009, sitting at the kitchen table in a rented holiday house in South Australia, my family turned on the radio to hear the devastating news that our home state was burning out of control.
While the rest of us sat shocked, my dad, who spent almost his entire career working in fire management with the Department of Sustainability and Environment and Parks Victoria, calmly picked up the phone and called his boss.
The previous day, dad had told us the Fire Danger Rating was going to be over 200 on a scale that was never meant to exceed 100. He knew that meant likely disaster, but initially his boss told him he wasn’t needed. They had it under control. Within a matter of hours they rang him back and changed their minds, and he was on the first flight back to Victoria.
Feeling helpless, we stayed in South Australia, waiting for daily updates. We were lucky that this time around, dad wasn’t on the frontlines in a truck or at the end of a hose, but in a incident control centre on one of the biggest fires, working night shift. Hundreds of brave firefighters risked their lives and health to save others and protect our towns and communities that week. One, David Balfour, was among the 180 people who didn’t make it home.
In 2010, before he passed away, dad was awarded a prestigious Australian Fire Services Medal for his work.
This week, no doubt dinner table conversations across our country will be focused on remembering those who lost their lives, fought the fires, or had their lives changed forever on those fateful days.
But while we’re having these conversations, I know that if my dad were still here, he would remind me that we have a duty not just to remember Black Saturday, but to do everything we can to prevent devastation like this happening again in the future.
This means we must also talk about climate change.
Often when someone brings up climate change in relation to a deadly bushfire or natural disaster, conservative commentators or politicians try to change the subject, or say it’s disrespectful to talk about climate at a time like this. But it would be disrespectful not to.
Climate change was a key factor in the horrendous hot and dry conditions that led to the severity of Black Saturday, and scientists consistently tell us that conditions like this are only going to get worse if we continue down this path. Even unlikely voices, such as former NSW fire chief Greg Mullins, have joined the call for politicians to step up and do better on climate change.
When we talk about reducing deaths from lung cancer — we don’t just talk about new drugs, we also talk about how to reduce smoking. When we talk about reducing deaths from heart disease, we don’t just talk about better heart surgery techniques, we also talk about how to promote exercise and healthy eating.
So when we talk about wanting to prevent devastating bushfires, we must not just turn our mind to immediate recovery, future warning systems or evacuation procedures, but also to climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that we have just 12 years to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Governments around the world are stepping up to the scientists’ and citizens’ call to action. Germany has announced they’ll close their remaining 84 coal-fired power stations within 19 years.
But in the face of this warning, the majority of politicians across all levels of government in Australia continue to deny or delay necessary action.
In Victoria we have a Labor Government, led by Daniel Andrews, who has done some good things when it comes to renewable energy, but who just last year extended the operating licence for Yallourn, Australia’s dirtiest power station. He also gave $50 million in public money to the coal industry and opened up our western coastline to gas drilling. Federally, we have MPs who have proposed building new coal-fired power stations, and both Labor and the Liberals refuse to intervene to stop new mega coal mines like Adani.
In the face of so much evidence that tells us climate change will make fire risk worse, surely we must do better than this?
While the trauma of Black Saturday is still fresh in our minds, we’re now also facing new threats every year.
Right now, people in Victoria are still on high alert as bushfires burn.
In Tasmania, one-thousand-year-old forests burn when they’ve never burnt before.
January was Australia’s hottest month on record.
These events cannot be seen in isolation.
We need to treat them as the climate emergency that they are.
This Thursday is not going to be easy for Victoria.
Victorians will be mourning those we lost, remembering those who worked so hard to save others, and we’ll also be hoping and praying that we never, ever see another event like this.
My sincere hope is that politicians hear these prayers and not only give them lip service, but face up to reality and take action on climate change to help prevent more disasters in future.
Ellen Sandell MP is the Deputy Leader of the Victorian Greens
