More complaints from the country
Again from the Border Mail, this time from
Lucyvale:
SINCE the fire holocaust, Premier Bracks has promised to provide more firefighters by sending them to university for four years to learn how to fight fires, but a better idea is to fully compensate the CFA volunteers, the real firefighters, as other states do.
Let the cattlemen back on the high plains; farmers are the greatest conservationists, keeping growth down, destroying weeds and getting rid of feral animals.
If too stubborn to do this, employ a great many more Department of Sustainability and Environment workers to work in national parks full-time, keeping rubbish down and tracks clear, not just two or three clearing walking tracks, as happens now.
The neighbour from hell fines landowners if all weeds are not obliterated, which are then re-sown by seed from locked-up land in national parks.
Why should it always be rural communities that suffer because of Premier Bracks’ city-centric government?
— LOUISE A. COULSTON
Labels: Emergency Services, Letter To Editor, Rural
Bracks should listen to country people on fires
A letter from BeechworthHERE we go again, another summer another terrifying round of bushfires.
What will it take for governments to realise that ordinary country folk know what they are talking about when they say, if you insist on having all public land tied up in irrational parks this is what will happen.
Will someone tell Premier Steve Bracks that if you don’t have enough resources to keep hazards down in and around inhabited areas, stop creating more national parks.
We must insist that larger zones around private land abutting the “neighbours from hell” be of sufficient size (100m) to get bulldozers in to at least allow private owners to have a chance to save fences and assets.
The other advice would be to stop shutting up fire tracks; I have been told by firefighters that this is a great hindrance when trying to access fires.
The resources used to close fire tracks and put in huge humps and logs should be used for hazard reduction.
How much of our private land must be destroyed before the powers that be wake up that we can help save more assets by larger divisions between private and public land?
Perhaps if the surrounds of the Thompson Dam were to burn and the resultant silt were to invade the Melbourne water people would wake up and realise what country people go through after such huge fires and be a bit more wary of what and who they vote for.
WIN MORGAN
UPDATE- Mark Webster, also from Beechworth, writes about the changes that have occured over time with regards to fighting the fires.
Labels: Emergency Services, Letter To Editor, Rural
