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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-09-08 Daily Xml
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Bills

Fire and Emergency Services (Bushfires) Amendment Bill

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY (16:31): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to amend the Fire and Emergency Services Act 2005 and to make related amendments to the Emergency Management Act 2004. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY (16:32): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This bill provides for the reporting of the planning and execution of prescribed burns and the placement and use of bushfire monitoring and detection cameras. The bill establishes a statewide plan for conducting prescribed burns in the State Bushfire Management Plan. The State Bushfire Coordination Committee will be reporting to parliament on an annual basis on the completion of planned prescribed burns on public and private land to meet community safety needs and environmental objectives. There is an emphasis on the human resources and physical assets required to carry out the prescribed burns.

The second item of this bill adds bushfire monitoring and detection cameras to the strategies contained in, and part of, the State Bushfire Management Plan. Smoke and heat detectors may form part of or be ancillary to the cameras. The State Bushfire Coordination Committee will declare specified areas at high bushfire risk for the location of bushfire monitoring and detection cameras. The State Bushfire Management Plan will set out each camera location, how each location area was determined, and how the cameras will be used including images and other data collected. The Sixth Assessment Report of the IPPC notes that, and I quote:

[The] Frequency of extreme fire weather days has increased, and the fire season has become longer…The intensity, frequency and duration of fire weather events are projected to increase throughout Australia (high confidence)…

The prescience of this projection is reflected in the first bushfire incident for the upcoming 2021-22 bushfire season. On Thursday 2 September, with a temperature of 31°C and strong northerly winds, 220 hectares burnt near Waitpinga Conservation Park on Southern Fleurieu Peninsula. In the Independent Review into South Australia's 2019-2020 Bushfire Season, reporting on 16 June 2020, it was noted that it has been, and I quote, 'the worst conditions on record' and that the 'loss of life and property could have been far more severe'.

Three lives were lost, 196 houses destroyed and a further 104 damaged. In addition, 892 non-residential buildings, 660 vehicles, and 68,000 livestock were lost. In all, 280,000 hectares were burnt, including 90,000 hectares of national parks, with 17 parks and the habitats of threatened species impacted. Some $200 million was lost from agricultural production. There were significant fires in many parts of the state including Duck Ponds, Port Lincoln, Yorketown, Yorke Peninsula, Cudlee Creek in the Adelaide Hills, Kangaroo Island, Miltalie in the Eastern Eyre Peninsula, and Keilira in the Lower South-East.

The first element of this bill is the use of prescribed burning, namely, 'the planned application of fire under prescribed environmental conditions and within defined boundaries to reduce fuel hazard immediately adjacent to assets and to strategically reduce fuel loads in zones across the landscape to impede the spread of large bushfires.'

The discussion around prescribed burns has always been complex. The planning and execution of a successful prescribed burning program requires a commitment of human resources, physical assets and associated expertise, which is costly. Of course, the alternative of uncontrolled widespread hot fires, in a more challenging climate future, is even more costly in lives, property, economic loss and environmental destruction. The review pointed to three limitations of prescribed burns:

1. Fuel reduction strategies, such as prescribed burns, tend to be short term and are incorrectly viewed as the panacea for reducing bushfire risks.

2. …reducing hazards is highly dependent on the location of the burn, the fuel type, the intensity of the burn, and the time since it was last burnt.

3. The effectiveness of most prescribed burning on stopping runs of large fires will be minimal on extreme days because medium and long-range spotting will see these large areas overrun.

However, the review noted that the areas burnt in the 2019-20 bushfires will be easier to manage and pointed to two advantages of prescribed burns:

1. …prescribed burning near houses is effective in reducing the intensity of the fire, thereby reducing house losses…

2. Strategically reducing fuel across the landscape…has an important role to play in minimising the spread of fire and helping to suppress it, particularly on days of lower fire danger...Low fuel areas created by prescribed burning are particularly important for campaign fires, fought over many days or weeks, where there may be opportunities to suppress the fire before the weather escalates.

The successful planning and execution of prescribed burns requires the proper allocation of human resources and physical assets to address the challenges identified in the review:

It can be difficult and risky for land management agencies to undertake prescribed burning in a controlled, effective and cost-efficient manner. Burns need to be undertaken in autumn and spring to reduce fuel hazards, and sometimes in early or late summer to meet ecological objectives. It is well documented that the changing climate is leaving a narrow window for safely conducting prescribed burning.

Prescribed burning becomes even more challenging in remote areas with minimal or no access to large continuous areas of vegetation...unbounded burning is required…requires lighting fire in elevated weather conditions and then relying on the ensuring weather to extinguish the fire or moderate its behaviour sufficiently to allow mop up…These operations are high risk.

The review supported fuel hazard reduction on private land, including prescribed burning for ecological management, noting that 39 per cent of the subject land in the Mount Lofty Ranges is privately owned. Prescribed burns are needed on both public and private land to reduce risk. The review noted that private landholders who want to undertake prescribed burning on their own properties are often unaware that the option for burning on private land exists under existing regulations; however, private landholders often lack understanding and capacity. The application process is unclear, patchy and confusing, with applicants required to develop an operational burn plan involving some level of skills.

The resources of local government, diminished in recent years, need to be rebuilt with the Department for Environment and Water and the CFS needing to expand their operations into rural areas by building operational capability of CFS volunteers and landholders. The CFS also needs greater capacity to support native vegetation management.

The South Australian state government in 2016 commenced the Burning on Private Land Project to enable the Department for Environment and Water, in partnership with the CFS, to extend its prescribed burning to include strategic locations on privately owned lands. This program has been well received. The review noted that without professional support landowners are unlikely to conduct strategic burns and opt for mechanical land clearance, compromising environmental assets, or undertake no hazard reduction activities.

The report by the Australian government in March 2015, the National Burning Project, concludes that:

…it needs to be appreciated that fire regimes that can fully optimise outcomes for the community, its safety and for the environment will be uncommon. If prescribed burning is to be effective in helping to manage the bushfire threat, then compromises will need to be made based on the best available science and the likelihood that prescribed burning in appropriate ecosystems and under cooler conditions—even if less than fully scientifically-informed—is less damaging to the environment than the alternative of allowing heavy fuel accumulations to build and inevitably burn in severe summer bushfires.

In the aftermath of the 2019-20 bushfire season and the subsequent review, the State Bushfire Management Plan, prepared by the State Bushfire Coordination Committee, was finally completed in accordance with the requirements of the Fire and Emergency Services Act 2005. Governance in this act was also changed so that the SBCC reported annually through the minister to parliament on its activities.

Whilst it is accepted that prescribed burning is not a panacea for bushfires, it is still a very valuable tool for bushfire management. A final word from the government report 'Prescribed burning in South Australia: review of operational prescriptions':

…although prescribed burning can be enhanced through the strategic placement of prescribed burning blocks, under catastrophic bushfire conditions the maximum reduction in the level of impact that is possible is about 70%...if fuel reduction is not performed immediately adjacent to social and economic assets and/or ignition sources, at best only moderate levels of fire protection can be achieved through prescribed burning.

The second item in the bill is the use of bushfire monitoring and detection cameras. The purpose of the cameras is twofold. Firstly, they add to the certainty of detection of bushfire arsonists, acting as a powerful deterrence. Research has revealed that certainty in detection acts as a powerful disincentive to deter undesirable behaviours, hence speed cameras, RBT, road blitzes and cameras to detect mobile phone use are all used to moderate poor performance or poor behaviour on our roads.

Secondly, response time in responding to bushfires is crucial. The State Bushfire Management Plan notes that:

The impact of bushfires can be reduced by minimising the chance that they occur, lessening the potential for fire spread, reducing the size of fires by early detection and responding rapidly to supressed fires when they are small.

Additional to the aerial surveillance and fire spotting from towers, research examining the use of cameras to provide early detection and warning has been undertaken. In late 2016, New South Wales installed cameras in remote fire-prone areas to pinpoint bushfires for a rapid response. The Minderoo Foundation has been working with the ACT Rural Fire Service, Optus and ANU to trial ground-sensing cameras to improve detection and monitoring of bushfires.

Also, in the forestry region of the South-East in late 2020, there was trialling of fire detection systems to cover a reduction of surveillance from state government fire spotting towers. Evaluation of various technologies and their utility, vis-a-vis more traditional spotting, is still open. However, the value of the technologies at night to warn residents of smoke and approaching fire does have merit in the peri-urban areas of the Adelaide Hills and other vulnerable urban settlements around the state.

During an identified major incident, major emergency, disaster or recovery operations, cameras may be used to assist the SEMC in reaching decisions specified in their act. Provisions of the bill cover appropriate locations for cameras, their installation, maintenance and use, and will be contained in the annual report to the minister by the SBCC and forwarded to parliament. The SEMC will also report on such matters.

Unfortunately, the certainty of another bad bushfire season and the outlook from the IPCC, require all possible measures to be pursued to protect the citizens of South Australia in high bushfire risk areas. Accordingly, I commend the bill to the house and welcome any amendments that will improve the bill.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. I. K. Hunter.

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