Thread by @callapilla

There are TWENTY witnesses listed for the #BushfireRC today.

TWENTY.

naturaldisaster.royalcommission.gov.au/news-and-media…

Ok, I was doing something else but I'm back now.

Dominique Hogan-Doran began the session by pointing to a response from the Bushfire Natural Hazards CRC, identifying a "long historical transfer of responsibility" for hazard prevention from individuals to the government.

They said that "individuals are no longer taking sufficient responsibility for their own risk management and that governments over many years have allowed this risk transfer to continue"

Hogan-Doran says they sent 5 scenarios to each of the states and territories to "obtain an understanding of how easy or difficult and expensive it would be for individuals to take responsibility for their own risk management."

The Bushfire natural hazards CRC said that individuals not doing hazard reduction was akin to people not installing locks on their houses.

It said it may be more appropriate for individuals to do mechanical hazard reduction, (mowing, clearing). They were also asked about grazing

The first witness panel is VFF pesident David Jochinke, as well as LIsa Gervanosi from VFF and Ashley Manicaros from the NT Cattleman's association.

I had a bit of a chat to David Jochinke for this story: theguardian.com/australia-news…

Jochinke said farmers don't want to graze down their entire property, because they have to feed their stock through summer, but will often graze down a particular area so if there's a fire they can put their stock there.

He says farmers are bound by native vegetation laws from clearing the edges of their land that abut state forests. They can't remove for than 4m, total, across either side of the fence line, and there are restrictions on clearing on their own land.

Jochinke: "So thinning is not a very viable option, it is an option that takes a lot of work and requires and offset also on the property to be either put into a covenant or protected from future use."

Basically - you have to plant more trees to get permission to cut them down.

He says they hear from farmers that the intensity of the fire fronts they face has "changed over time" so "the ability for them to either dampen that risk before it reaches their property" is affected.

"These fires tend to be a lot more intense, they have ember drops a lot further than what they had previously, making some of the previous plannings negated by our current or even future fires"

Hogan-Doran asks Gervasoni about the issue of roadside clearing.

She says that there are exemptions to allow clearing on roads, but only the state has that exemption, "so it makes it a lot more difficult for a farmer to actually manage that risk on their own property."

Jochinke says most property owners have a fire plan that involves them having a fire trailer, or sometimes buying an old truck from the CFA (my pop had an old RFS truck).

They normally focus on trying to protect buildings - sheds, etc. Slash around them, move the hay out.

"One of the biggest issues our members have is the change in how those fires acted, especially in the 2020 fires have not acted as they had previously."

Commissioner Bennett asks what information farmers have access to, to figure out how a fire might behave.

Jochinke says "unfortunately it's a lot of experience, in the sense that we're taking about generational farms."

That's particularly the case in alpine regions, he says.

"In those extreme fire examples, your telecommunications is one of the first things to go, just slightly after your electricity, and your ability then to be self-reliant in those scenarios requires you to have your generator and UHF to talk to your neighbouring farmers."

"One fo the classic example waa this year fires moving at high speed at night time, where traditionally they might be a cool fire."

Fires are usually controlled/contained at night, but this year they were too hot and kept burning.

He said around the Buchan area (east Gippsland) you could see where the fuel management had "not necessarily checked up with that fuel loading, there was a significantly hotter burn to almost an incineration level"

Jochinke said roadside vegetation in densely forested areas meant that roads were not only blocked when the fire came through but also took a long time to clear.

He says the painted line track between Buccan and Orbost was "a really good example of how fire was stopped by good land management."

"What w're seeing is farmers becoming more frustrated that they're not seeing enough of that around their properties."

He said the laws have "saved every tree, but perversely... when we're trying to stop or reduce the spread of fires, we've actually had more trees burn, more of the landscape burning because of our pendulum swinging too far one way."

Manicaros said that in the NT pastoralists know that they are responsible for combatting bushfires with some limited assistance, "and that assistance is reducing year on year."

He says they are "put at risk by our neighbours, whether they be land trust land or whether they be national parks who are not as proactive in their environmental land management as our own members of the Northern Territory Cattlemen Association are"

Hogan-Doran asks Manicaros about Gamba grass, which is grown by pastoralists as fodder but escapes pastoral leases and gets into conservation area, where it creates a fuel risk.

He says it is used as fodder but it has to be grazed, because when it's long it burns hot.

"It can be uncontrollable when it does start a fire and it burns incredibly hot."

It's particularly an issue around regional towns where, he says, "it is not properly managed on an annual basis by either the land holder or the government agency."

Despite this it's considered an asset to the pastorali industry. Because you can easily control it by grazing.

Clearly, however, if it escapes to grow in a national park it is not being grazed by cattle.

View from Victoria is that farmers do not have the same rights to conduct hazard reduction as the govt. In the NT the concern is that there isa "heavy emphasis" on pastoralists to control their risk and "I'm not sure that the government... have the same emphasis placed on them".

Manicaros spruiks the benefit of the northern Australia fire indicator (NAFI), says a version of that should be available Australia-wide. Jochinke agrees.

That's it for that panel. Next panel is Ruth Ryan, from Hancock Victorian Plantations, Brad Barr, from the Forest Industries Federation (WA) Inc and Ross Hampton, from the Australian Forest Products Association.

Ryan gave evidence at an earlier hearing on aerial firefighting.

Ryan says the value of Hancock's Victorian plantations is $1.5bn, and the "processed value would be many billions more."

She says they support "a huge number of jobs"

Could do a whole different thread on the dispute on job numbers in the forestry industry.

Ryan is taken to an image on the prescribed burning impact on fire behaviour at the Rose Dale fire in Jan 2019. It's an infrared scan, and shows a shadow with no flame and no burning - which is an area that's been prescribed burned.

Ryan says Hancock uses Phoenix Rapid Fire modelling tool to evaluate the effectiveness of their prescribed burning.

In Gippsland they modelled 150,000 fires with 6 start times, 9 weather streams, 1,000 different ignition points, and 3 different strategies.

One of the strategies modelled is to have no fuel managment at all, the next is what happens with a bit of suppression, and the third takes into account the next three years worth of planned fuel management burning.

They then see what effects that has on plantation risk.

Hampton says the forest industry lost 100,000ha of plantations across Australia, and also about 1m ha from the native forest estate.

He says its' not clear how much of the burned area can be used in sawmills, "certainly the impacts are going to be large and long term and cost us quite a lot of jobs, and really set us back in terms of our forest industries for quite a few years."

The AFPA submission included a cost/benefit analysis by Deloitte on hazard reduction and prescribed burning.

It's looking to the "collaborative forest landscape restoration program" in the US. The difference is in the US "they're encouraged to use the biomass" that they remove.

Basically: mechanical fuel reduction (clearing) as a way to protect forests, and the forestry mob are then encouraged to use the biomass that's removed as a product.

There's a mechanical fuel reduction trial going on in WA at the moment, to remove mid-story fuel ladders in the northern Jarra forest. It's regrowth forest 5km east of Collie.

They were conscious not to use traditional harvesting equipment, which can't process small trees.

Basically they go through and pull out all the smaller trees and saplings. And all the other twiggy leafy bits. They then drag that out of the forest and chip it.

"Ultimately, we were able to sell the material." To a power station, which used it to supplement coal.

It cost about $1,200 or $1,500 per hectare to do it, which is why they tried to recover the cost by selling it.

And we're all caught up, ready for hearings to resume at 11.45am.

We're now looking at Indigenous land and fire management.

Hogan-Doran says that Indigenous fire management was both explicitly in the terms of reference and raised by a number of public submissions.

They have 15 witnesses across three panels across the rest of the day.

First panel is a bunch of researches. Second is state and territory agencies who have worked with traditional owners on burning practices. Final panel of the day is a panel of traditional owner groups who practice traditional fire management.

Up now, we've got Vanessa Cavanagh from Wollongong Uni, Timothy Neale from Deakin Uni, Bhiamie Eckford-Williamson from ANU, and Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Melbourne Uni

Cavanagh is a Bundjalung and Wonnarua woman doing a PhD in Aboriginal women and cultural burning in NSW. She addresses the royal commission in language and is... possibly the most qualified witness in the commission to date. I am not sure I can go through her whole CV.

She worked for NSW parks and wildlife for 16 years, as a field officer, then a firefighter including a remote team are firefighter (they're the ones who get dropped in by helicopters).

She also worked on Aboriginal joint-management of national parks, managed a traineeship...

Oh and she also owns a property that was devastated by the Gospers Mountain bushfire. They're currently doing clean up.

In addition to her academic work she sits on a government committee and cultural burning working group.

Oh god everyone's really qualified I can't go through all of them.

Basically: three of these academics are Aboriginal people. They're ridiculously qualified. Michael Shawn-Fletcher is a paleo-ecologist, looking at the impact of fires on the landscape over thousands of years.

Eckford-Williamson is a Euahlayi Man from north-west New South Wales with family ties to north-west Queensland.

He's worked with Aboriginal ranger groups in the NT and the ACT, and also studied Indigenous land management in Canada and the US.

Eckford-Williamson said there are 3 main points about cultural burning.

He says fire is one tool Aboriginal land users may use. It might be carried out 2 months of the year, "the work carried out in the other 10 months is just as important as burning"

He also says it's only cultural burning if it is controlled by Aboriginal people. "Cultural land management is not an add-on or an enhancement, its' not a practice that can simply be grafted onto the regime of non-Indigenous land managers."

"Simply put, if Aboriginal people are not in control of the preparation [and] implementation of burning then it is not cultural burning."

Finally, he says the land has been transformed since colonisation so pre-colonisation practices may not always work now.

He's been involved in research on the 2019-2020 fires.

He said the fires directly affected 96,000 Indigenous peoples, or 29% of the combined Indigenous population of each state and territory, and 12% of the entire Indigenous population in Australia.

That's... huge.

In NSW, Vic and the ACT and the Jervis Bay territory Indigenous people are 2.3% of the total population, but in the areas where the fires happened the population doubles to 4.6%. "Meaning that Indigenous peoples were twice as likely to be impacted as non-Indigenous people"

He said that 9% of children in fire-affected regions, or 35,000 kids, are Indigenous. 12,000 are aged 0-4.

"It is clear that Indigenous people have been disproportionately impacted by the Black Summer bushfires and I believe its' very important to engage with those statistics."

He says that means acknowledging the disproportionate impact, and therefore making recommendations that directly engage with or target Aboriginal groups.

These are the recommendations he suggests.

He says the trauma felt by Aboriginal people had been ignored. There is, he says, an "extraordinary absence of Aboriginal people" in post-bushfire commissions and inquiries. "They are often relegated to an historic footnote."

"We really need to understand why it is that even as recent as 5 or 10 years ago, in post-disaster commissions, Aboriginal people were ignored and not listened to, and specific recommendations were not made to engage with Indigenous people."

Yikes. Fletcher says that in the geological record, there is no equivalent fire that stretches from Queensland to Victoria.

"In that sense these fires are unprecedented in the geological record."

He says that the ethnographic record - that is, settler records - shows that there was a "universal shift from an open to a woody or forested landscape following the British invasion and the removal of cultural burning from the landscape."

You can also track charcoal production, which shows an increase in charcoal production from forest fires where before it was mainly fine fuels, grasses and twigs.

That corroborates the ethnographic record, he says.

He says this change happened PRIOR to anthropogenic climate change.

"There is absolutely no doubt that anthropogenic climate change exacerbates a fire potential and this is a significant contributor to recent bushfires, but fires don't start with out fuel."

"Under the landscape now there is more fuel, there is demonstrably more fuel in the modern forested region... today than when they were under Indigenous cultural burning."

He also mentions that we're in an extinction crisis, which accelerated post-colonisation.

He says respecting cultural land management would contribute to "resilient landscapes and resilient communities".

He supports that by bolstering the national working on country program.

Cavanagh says that Aboriginal women need the ability to access country, support to bring their children along to teach them cultural burning and cultural land management, and a system that supports that work but "doesn't expect us to moult into a western framework or methodology"

She says it has to be local people caring for their own country.

She says cultural burning is not just an environmental or hazard reduction activity, "it's science, it's education, its' health and wellbeing, it's technology as well as that cultural strength."

Neale says there are "multiple ecological social and economic benefits for cultural land management and fuel load reduction is only one."

He says it can enhance the resilience of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in natural disasters, provided there's collaboration.

He sys that there are national statements affirming support for cultural land management in a general sense, but there's a policy gap around implementation and funding.

So usually that collaboration with cultural burning happens without ongoing funding or appropriate KPIs.

He said there should be transparent and appropriate reporting and funding for Indigenous-led research, and national coordination of "partnership approaches" including funding for Indigenous led cultural burning initiatives and enterprises.

Everyone else agrees with this. There should be national coordination, and strong government support.

Basically an AFAC but for cultural burnings, a national framework that allows local experiences to connect with national resources/research.

He reiterates that cultural land management is not just about burning — Eckford-Williamson and Cavanagh made that point earlier — so performance indicators should not be limited to burning.

Everybody is vigorously agreeing with each other, which is nice.

Eckford-Williams is making a very good point about short-term funding cycles.

[everybody nods]

"It is not possible for groups to develop, to recruit, train and retain staff to maintain that corporate memory, to build relationships with non-Indigenous land management agencies over time if their funding is not secure."

"We cannot continue to fund ranger groups or other Indigenous land management groups on these one or two or three year cycles. They need permanently committed funding."

He says another issue is education of non-Indigenous land holders.

"Where there are non-Indigenous land managers who refuse to engage, who do not want to listen to Aboriginal groups and do not want to engage with Aboriginal groups, they will not be as successful as they can be."

No questions from the commissioners to this panel. All witnesses thanked for their time and excused. The hearing will resume (to hear from 11 witnesses!) at 1.45pm.

Ok I stopped tweeting a bit in order to actually write something but I'm back for the final panel, which is a bunch of Indigenous fire managers including Ty Garstone from the @KLC1978, who I haven't seen in about three years so I'm pretending this is a catch up. (Hi, Ty!)

The panel is: Victor Steffensen from the Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation, Tyrone Garstone from the KLC, Shaun Ansell and Dean Munuggullumurr Yibarbuk from Warddeken Land Management Ltd, and Russell Mullett from the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation.

A lot of non-Indigenous butchering of the pronunciation of "Gunaikurnai," which as someone who has been trying to learn to pronounce Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura for the past three weeks I should sympathise with.

But I don't, because we all need to be better at this.

Garstone is speaking first. The KLC employs between 70 to 100 full-time ranges across 450sq kms of native title land in the Kimberley.

They do a mix of fire walks on country to shooting incendiaries from helicopters. Trying to reduce the fuel load avoid high intensity fires.

He says they burn because "fire has been a part of our tradition for centuries, and it's always been a part of life. Fire rekindles life, rekindles birth, rekindles generation in the actual landscape."

But they're a modern organisation, so they're now selling carbon credits.

Garstone: "We're now generating those credits which we are selling to corporate entities for reasonable money, which is then put back into the landscape and put back into managing country."

He says there's a lot of transfer of knowledge happening now, senior people, elders, are able to talk about country to the younger generation. "They're being able to walk with the country together."

Mr Yibarbuk, from Warddeken in western Arnhem land, says they have about 150 casual workers every year. "They come in every early dry season and enjoy working in our landscape, an opportunity for a lot of traditional owners that haven't been on that landscape, on that country."

He says the process now has changed and has evolved in combination with western land management techniques and research and modern technologies. "In the future we want to see our children able to use that technology... it changes our practices."

Mr Yibarbuk: "We've come a long way from traditional practises now, and now we are using modern technology. So two ways of appreciation, using our traditional knowledges and combining with the western scientific knowledge as well."

Ansell explains that the modern technology used includes using helicopters or GPS to guide burning. Those are tools that are used on top of traditional knowledge about how, where and when to burn country.

Steffensen says that firesticks is just a support mechanism for the community that wants to undertake cultural burning. It doesn't speak for those communities it supports and assists them.

He says it helps the environment and also communities.

"The fire is a medicine, not just for the land, it's a medicine for healing for the mobs and it also gives non-Indigenous people a great understanding of Aboriginal culture and to feel part of that landscape and culture."

The royal commission is now getting the panel to define key terms like "healthy country" versus "sick country" (look for ecosystem-wide indicators, like the presence of key species such as koalas).

They were also asked to define "cultural authority" (an individual who has rights, responsibilities and knowledge of a place)

Mullett says they try to take a landscape approach to managing country in Gippsland, but adds that "down the south here... we've lost what's intrinsic to our landscape, to our country, through colonisation."

So they start by building that knowledge back up.

Garstone says that the acknowledgement of traditional knowledge should be the foundation going forward.

Senior people walk on country first and "talk to it like its a relative, sing out to it, looking for certain species, certain fauna, seeing which way the winds are blowing that enables them to determine whether it's the right time to burn..[if] country is healthy enough to burn."

He says that what they do in the Kimberley won't necessarily work down south, but there are principles that can be applied across different landscapes.

The first is the principle that country comes first. That's the foundation, you can't work at the expense of that.

Another thing they do is burn more frequently, more mosaic burning, and try to stop introduced species coming in because "we don't know how they burn, how they interact with the landscape, how they interact with the waterways"

Mr Yibarbuk says it's a "very broad thing, talking about healthy country. Healthy country for our plants and animals, healthy country for our humans, for our land, for our people to remain and live on... it's a metaphor that has been carried out for thousands of years until today

"... and we want to express that for our generations coming on, and their generations to go."

Garstone says the a successful fire management program requires constant communication, early engagement with TOs, and finding good partnership ,as well as support from government stakeholders.

Because 80% of the Kimberley is under native title, "a lot of the anthropological work has been done with regard to mapping who speaks to what part of the country, so we've been able to identify who are the key people for parts of those different areas."

Oooh this is really good and important. Garstone says that the ranger program should be supported as full time jobs.

"These are part time CDP jobs they do, and the work that they do are not only beneficial towards the community and to the Kimberley region."

He says the work is of national importance.

"Australia is signing up to the Kyoto protocols and all our ranges across all of AUstralia are playing a lead role in Australia meeting those targets."

He says the ranger program is "like a beacon, they are a shining light, and most of the community rely on them. They're seen as role models, so I don't think you can really put a measure just around burning itself. It goes far beyond that."

Commissioner Bennett asks who funds the rangers.

Garstone says in the KLC it's funded through the federal Indigenous ranger program. They fund 70 full-time positions, and about 100 more part time.

Garstone says there's a push to get more rangers on using the CDP program, "and we're sort of against that because the CDP program only pays for about 15 to 20 hours a week and I think that's counterproductive... it's not really acknowledging the skill sets these people have."

Mr Yibarbuk says the Warddeken ranges are independently funded, not-for-profit company.

He says there's a "lot of interest working over the years, seeing young fellows coming in, trying out, working and doing the fire work... you know, they keep coming back... they enjoying it"

Daniel Miller from Gunaikurnai says they have a settlement area of about 1.3m ha. They also have a ranger program, but burning is usually undertaken by field staff. They want to scale that up to include more of the community.

Forgot to cap off this thread: that's it for the royal commission until Monday, when it will look at issues around local government.