Michael Usher: Burning Question

Have you smelt the first bush smoke of the season yet? Caught sight of a few crackles of fire in the nature strip near home?

Some Australians have already, especially in Queensland and north-west Western Australia. Fires have begun lighting up our bushland and forests, and the debate's begun about how to make our bush safer and prevent the mega-fires that devastated Victoria earlier this year.

I've just been back to the Kinglake area, and especially the small town of Strathewen. This tiny hamlet copped the worst of the Black Saturday fires. They lost a quarter of their population, and every building.

Nine months later, there's still terrible sorrow as you'd expect, but I also found incredible resilience and determination, mixed with a fair bit of anger. They feel forgotten in Strathewen, and long before they're ready to rebuild or heal or properly grieve, they have to get ready for another hot, dry bushfire season.

I was there just days after that firestorm obliterated Strathewen. I met up with two remarkable men, David McGahy and Michael Chapman. They're the local fire volunteers who saw too much, and had to do too much during and after the inferno.

In parts of their district, there's nothing left to burn. It's dead. But in other parts, there's still plenty of bush and dry fuel piled up on the ground. They haven't been able to burn off in cooler months around these parts for decades.

The 'green' pressure has been pretty strong in this area of Victoria. Conservationists say species will die if the bush is burned off. Green activists say the bush has to remain pristine and shouldn't be touched. Other's argue we've taken the fire out of the bush, and applied European standards to an environment that was once regularly burned by Aborigines.

What we're talking about is hazard reduction burning, or prescribed burning. In the 70's and 80's in south-eastern Australia, they'd burn up to 10 percent of our bush annually. Now it's down to two of three percent.

But not in Western Australia. Last year that state burned about 8% of their bush and forests and have done so for decades. It's a policy they stick to, and proudly claim they haven't lost a life to bushfire since 1961.

That's when terrible fires wiped out the town of Dwellingup. It was W.A's Black Saturday. Ever since, they haven't let fuel loads build up — that's all the bark, leaves, twigs and natural rubbish that litters the bush floor.

Rick Sneeuwjagt — you pronounce it 'Sneejack' — runs W.A's hazard reduction program for the Department of Environment and Conservation. He's been bashed about by green groups and conservationists for years about the level of deliberate burning in W.A., but says they've held the line, made the bush safer and saved lives. He took us along to a burn-off just outside of Perth at Jarrahdale. It's quite an operation using aerial fire-bombing from helicopters.

Elsewhere in Australia, the issue is just too contentious. Conservationists argue habitats are threatened by too much fire, and that these mega-fires are the result of climate change, and not entirely the fault of excessive fuel loads.

It's a subject that lights a few political fires, there's no doubt about that. And it's become a central issue being examined by the Commission into the Black Saturday fires in Victoria. Its findings are many months away. And a lot of people, especially those survivors in Strathewen, will be waiting to see what the commission's recommendation is on this burning question.

Even there, after all they've been through, many are divided about what's right for them and the bush.

Watch 60 Minutes this Sunday for Michael Usher's full report about how governments have ignored the compelling evidence that will prevent catastrophic bushfires.