Bushfires.

[armpit]

I am praying we don't sell these burnt out lands to the Chinese.

 

[Power Raid]

I am praying we don't sell these burnt out lands to the Chinese.

why?

our nation has thrived on foreign investment for centuries

we shouldn't fear the yellow peril

 

[Scotland]

Buying up farmland isn't foreign investment.

 

[iluvparis]

Buying up farmland isn't foreign investment.

It is the very definition of it

 

[Scotland]

It is the very definition of it

I'm being facetious.

It's not much different to selling up residential real estate to overseas buyers. There's next to no benefit to Australia. Houses are more expensive and in scarcer supply, awesome...

The whole idea of investment is to generate a benefit. We have a FIRB for a reason. Just selling off farmland is shit and food security is important.

 

[iluvparis]

There is a benefit to existing homeowners in that their property is more valuable.

 

[Billy ray]

I'm being facetious.

It's not much different to selling up residential real estate to overseas buyers. There's next to no benefit to Australia. Houses are more expensive and in scarcer supply, awesome...

The whole idea of investment is to generate a benefit. We have a FIRB for a reason. Just selling off farmland is shit and food security is important.

what if, putting my karl pilkington hat on, what if so long as we own the ports, and airports, they cant send food away so its not an issue. we can charge them exhorbitant portage fees or take off fees to make it uneconomic to send the food to their own countries, or if they are silly enough to pay the high fees, profit?

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Mayors from fire-ravaged areas of New South Wales have said there is no doubt in their minds that the devastating blazes tearing through their communities are a result of climate change.

Ok, so the fires are a result of climate change? Not an arsonist nor a discarded cigarette butt nor a lightning strike nor machinery, but climate change?

Climate change just makes everything spontaneously combust?

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Ok boomer.

Ok Karen

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Saw this on facebook.
——-
Bruce Walker. Fire fighter. Survivor makes a comment...

hi everyone. my name is bruce walker, you might remember me from ABC TV yesterday, i'm one of the survivors of the wytaliba fires of last friday.

responding to this well informed ******* here - Anthony Goodwin

so mate - first up, i've been an RFS volunteer for close to 20 years, and am part of the highly regarded Wytaliba RFS - one of the most respected and hardened crews on the northern tablelands and beyond. our crew number over 50 and include decorated vets of ash wednesday and many other national distaster catastrophic level fires.

so - regarding hazzard reduction. let me fill you in.

for my time here, we used to do managed hazzard reduction whenever it was viable in winter.

however - sadly, the moment gina and ruper went halves and purchased the LNP wholesale, we saw a MASSIVE increase in wholesale industrial logging across the nation.

tell me, anthony - do you garden? do you use MULCH?

compare a mulched garden to a non-mulched garden. you'll see a near instant difference. if you're not schooled on how soil works, try standing all day in the sun with no hat on. what happens?

that's right, anthony. your head gets ******* hot.

that's what's happened to the planet. now. as anyone who's dabbled in, you know... physics, will spell out better than i can - an increase of just one degree is quite significant.

another neato thing physics talks about is the water cycle, anthony.

you see, part of the water cycle is this cool thing called "transpiration"

it's part 4 of this essential way in which trees send up moisture to meet clouds, creating low pressure troughs which draw rainfall inland.

in fact, it's physically impossible to get rain on the lee side of a mountain, without trees doing this very thing. impossible. ask the residents of the atacama desert in chile - who haven't had rain for one THOUSAND years. why? no ******* trees, anthony.

so anyway, back to the greens enacting a ban on burnoffs - that time we elected them to majority government and they had the final say.

when was that again, anthony? i'll wait.

nah. lets move on, since we ALL know this was never a thing . ever.

so anyway - here in wytaliba, we used to have an incredibly green lush valley - right up until industrial loggers finally broke in to compartments to our north. right about this time, there was a near instant and significant drop to our vital streamflow. this happened again after each and every highland logging operation - and with LNP slashing and burning every national park in sight, well... you know, lets' not go there. climate change is a hoax, right?

so wholesale burn quotas came in with LNP too. this... well.. i just want to pause here and say "wow" because this did indeed make us say wow.

in recent years, we've seen hazzard reduction burns take place completely surrounding our once green, lush valley. so much so, that after the last july burn - of an area once supplying most of our water - well... 27 years of no burn had left a healthy and regenerating semi-arid rainforest. now it's simply arid nothing.

despite this burn and 3 more last year, we got the following result - fires flared up in this dry mulchless wasteland and burned for 6 weeks, destroying 2 more former rainforest areas, leaving them also tinder dry and unable to transpire - hasn't actually rained a drop since then. weird. almost like cause and effect took place.

clouds pass over, for sure. they get rain on the tablelands even - but - as physics reminds us, when air drops, it warms, expands, and rather than raining, sucks even more moisture from trees and soil.

oh well.

i mean, this is normal for australia, isn't it? watching 200 or more year old trees slowly wither and die right in front of you. that's normal. happens all the time. rivers dry up too, even though ours is home to platypi - who aren't known for travelling much - and hasn't dried up in probably 100,000 years minimum. until last summer, and it's been bone dry since august. this has never happened in my entire 25 or so years here. no local elders remember such a thing. wow.

now, we all know about the bees nest and kingsgate fires and the hundreds more around the state. my crew and many other heroic RFS volunteers have been fighting them for months on end. yet another backburn actually got lit up about a month ago, on our south side, just half an hour before high southerly winds were due. the responsible paid agency, then ran out of paid hours, packed up and left it to spot onto our property and threaten 80 homes.

we're like the muja hadeen though, so we got it after about 10 days nonstop hectic battle.

this... brings us up to date, andrew. we've got bare, blacked out dust for 50km in all directions. right up to the actual eaves of half the homes here.

which is why, friday's hellstorm caught all of us by surprise, andrew.

a mushroom cloud went up at 3pm, 20 or so km away. within 30 minutes, high winds turned that into a 20km long front - strangely, this front was on ground burnt black as recently as 3 weeks ago - crown fires too, since every tree was literally a giant matchstick with dead leaves and nothing else.

this then switch to 80km/h southerlies and rained hell on 3500 acres of already blacked out ground.

well... you can't say we didn't prep or do hazzard reduction redneck style, can you andrew? or can you?

curiously, within 1 hour we'd lost 20 homes, a school, a fireshed, and a contrete ******* bridge - meaning only 2 outside units even got in to help.

falling trees in the hundreds blocked the old grafton road, so no one could even help neighbours.

by dawn, of 80 homes in our community, 52 were lost, 2 dead (one a sex party voter, the other aplotical - this one is for you, barnaby ******* joyce) we had many injured, thousands of local animals died, and.. it' looks like a warzone here. which it did almost before, except we had homes.

so, Anthony Goodwin and ALL you ******* armchair experts out there, tell me. how again, was this the greens fault?

thanks.

bruce walker, wytaliba RFS member and survivor.

Written and endorsed by and for the Greens.

I'm sure Bruce the Firey wrote this.

 

[Gigantic]

I just don't know what goes on in a child's head for them to intentionally light a bush fire

 

[Caesar]

bruce walker, wytaliba RFS member and survivor.

If that’s the Bruce Walker from Diehard, he is a massive hippie and former muso who spends his time running bush doofs.

Not saying that invalidates his experience or that he doesn’t make some good points (albeit amongst numerous factual errors... pretty much everything he said about the Atacama Desert is just plain wrong). But he’s not your typical country bloke, and I’m not exactly shocked that he has a lot to say about logging and nothing on the Greens-led Glen Innes council’s land management practices.

 

[Cuzz09]

I just don't know what goes on in a child's head for them to intentionally light a bush fire

Ive heard sometimes its the firefighters that light them because of the rush to put them out or something

On SM-G925I using BigFooty.com mobile app

 

[craigos]

Imagine if we had better land care management techniques rather than doing nothing, clearing or burning back. Imagine if we started to replicate natures way of controlling how much fuel we had on the land.

Hopefully this is the event that starts people thinking about biological solutions the manage the environment and introduced animals to control fuel and at the same time contribute to capturing and storing carbon in the soil.

Unfortunately all we are getting so far "it's climate change". Given we have had bushfires before the industrial revolution and the fact climate will change even if we remove any human caused climate change, what is the value of arm waiving? When will we start implementing solutions that work.


oh and while I am at it, why are we giving farmers $1b just after some of the best years they've ever had? why are we giving them $1b no strings attached? why not give farms that are change their land management techniques that reduce CO2, increase soil quality and become more water efficient?

Unfortunately governments swing with the breeze, along with public opinion. Even when the public opinion is problem focused rather than solution focused.

Did you see the ABC investigation about the handouts to farmers to make their properties more "water efficient". Basically ended up with every farmer (and big business farms) who asked getting a huge grant for earth-moving works that on the face of it didn't seem to do much.

 

[Caesar]

The understanding of what makes a bushfire arsonist is pretty patchy, mostly because the cops don't arrest very many of them. Somewhere between 7,000 and 27,000 bushfires a year are deliberately lit, but only a couple of dozen people are caught and charged.

 

[SM]

Ok Karen

Anyone who, with a straight face, says the fires we are experiencing at this time of year is totally normal, is kidding themselves.

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Anyone who, with a straight face, says the fires we are experiencing at this time of year is totally normal, is kidding themselves.

Why? Don't things burn in the month of November. Have I missed something? Spring as far as I know in Australia is always windy and with summer officially starting in 10 days, it's generally warm this time of year too.

Community Safety

Our natural hazard capability forms part of the backbone behind the most important decisions made by governments, emergency services, and the industry sector.

www.ga.gov.au

Where do bushfires occur?
The Australian climate is generally hot, dry and prone to drought. At any time of the year, some parts of Australia are prone to bushfires. The widely varied fire seasons are reflected in the continent's different weather patterns. For most of southern Australia, the danger period is summer and autumn. For New South Wales and southern Queensland, the peak risk usually occurs in spring and early summer. The Northern Territory experiences most of its fires in winter and spring.

 

[Cuzz09]

I feel like bushfires in Australia at any time of the year are a possibility.

On SM-G925I using BigFooty.com mobile app

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Ive heard sometimes its the firefighters that light them because of the rush to put them out or something

On SM-G925I using BigFooty.com mobile app

There's plenty of examples, at least in Victoria and Western Australia, of volunteer firefighters lighting fires and then being first responders so they can get the accolades.

All the ones that I've seen that have been to court are the younger ones. I think a theory was they saw the hero worship of firefighters in the States following 9 / 11 and thought they'd get some of it for themselves here.

 

[Power Raid]

Did you see the ABC investigation about the handouts to farmers to make their properties more "water efficient". Basically ended up with every farmer (and big business farms) who asked getting a huge grant for earth-moving works that on the face of it didn't seem to do much.

exactly

My opinion is, no grant to be given to farmers unless they:
1) demonstrate a plan to 100% ween themselves from all fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide and pesticide
2) commit to maintain live root systems 100% of the year
3) introducing livestock
4) a measurable commitment to water management

Rebuilding soil quality to the levels pre WW2 is a must.

also any grant should be a loan until the achievement of deliverables

 

[SM]

Why? Don't things burn in the month of November. Have I missed something? Spring as far as I know in Australia is always windy and with summer officially starting in 10 days, it's generally warm this time of year too.

Community Safety

Our natural hazard capability forms part of the backbone behind the most important decisions made by governments, emergency services, and the industry sector.

www.ga.gov.au

Where do bushfires occur?
The Australian climate is generally hot, dry and prone to drought. At any time of the year, some parts of Australia are prone to bushfires. The widely varied fire seasons are reflected in the continent's different weather patterns. For most of southern Australia, the danger period is summer and autumn. For New South Wales and southern Queensland, the peak risk usually occurs in spring and early summer. The Northern Territory experiences most of its fires in winter and spring.

Jesus christ.

You're a pillock.

 

[SM]

I feel like bushfires in Australia at any time of the year are a possibility.

On SM-G925I using BigFooty.com mobile app

Possibility is different from normal.

This amount of smoke over the cbd is also not normal.

 

[Herne Hill Hammer]

Jesus christ.

You're a pillock.

....and you're a drama queen. Oh, no, the wind is blowing the wrong way, my washing out on the line will smell of smoke here in Sydney town.

 

[Caesar]

exactly

My opinion is, no grant to be given to farmers unless they:
1) demonstrate a plan to 100% ween themselves from all fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide and pesticide

A patently absurd proposal.

 

[Bomberboyokay]