OP-ED ON THE CALIFORNIAN BUSHFIRES

January 15, 2025

The bushfire carnage being wrought on wealthy and “woke” Los Angeles is as ironic as it is devastating.

There’s no known cause yet but the series of fires, spurred on by high winds, dry conditions and uncontrolled forest fuel loads, has truly devastated California.

Politically-motivated and otherwise misguided pundits are already rushing to rationalise the fires on the basis of “climate change”, but this is intellectually lazy and dangerous.

It fails to address the fact northern California has always been a high-fire risk – the Los Angeles locale is not a desert but a grassland, and part of the natural cycle of the grassland ecosystem is fire.

This fact is not nullified by the building of multi-million-dollar mansions, or swathes of suburbs housing hundreds of thousands of people.

The climate change claims also do not account for the fact that fuel loads built up by recent (exceedingly) wet seasons had been under-controlled and that over recent decades the boundaries between urban areas and fuel loads (aka forest) have been blurred.

Additionally California’s fire-fighting capacity has been undermined by serious mis-steps and while I am not particularly qualified to comment on them, I’d suggest the fact that fire hydrants ran dry at the outset of the fire response might be the place to start a review.

The California fires have displaced celebrities and eradicated some of the most expensive homes in the world, and are long way away from the Blackbraes National Park north of Hughenden in North West Queensland

Most won’t know, but in 2023 fires burnt in the park for more than two weeks and were only managed by private landholders and volunteers desperate to save their bordering homes, stock and lands.

The Queensland Government’s ability to manage this fire, which I argue it was largely culpable for due to neglecting to manage fuel loads, was disastrously inadequate and marred by a lack of necessary resources and equipment.

It was the landowners themselves who had to do the lion’s-share of the work, and all this for a fire that started on government-owned land.

Ask anyone in outback Queensland, and they will tell you the worst neighbour to have is a state owned forest or national park.

They’ll also tell you every property owner must have their own fire-fighting arsenal on hand, as the ability and agility of our governmental resources are simply not good enough.

For example, Rural Fire Service volunteer numbers in Queensland are about half these days than what they were 20 years ago.

This state-of-affairs doesn’t scream of a government that is particularly concerned about fires or natural disasters at all.

Whether we’re talking about the rich hills of Los Angeles, or a locked-up bit of state land behind Hughenden, be discerning when governments and elites are quick to dismiss disasters as the inevitable result of “climate change” without looking at all the facts.

This convenient ploy absolves those in charge of any real responsibility and plays into the hopeless narrative that climate change is the start and end of any sophisticated political debate.

ENDS

Robbie Katter MP
Katter’s Australian Party Leader &
Member for Traeg