Hmm…

The people who lit the fires are immediately responsible. But a measure of responsibility also lies with environmental activists who pressured local councils and other governement agencies to reduce or disallow prescribed (that is controlled protective) burning and other clearing of highly flammable scrub from residential areas. 

‘The green movement is directly responsible for the severity of these fires through their opposition to prescribed burning,’ said David Packham, former supervising meteorologist for fire weather nationwide at the Bureau of Meteorology.

At a community meeting in Victoria yesterday, Warwick Spooner, whose mother and brother were killed in the fires, told council members ‘We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down.’

Meanwhile, another family who disobeyed government regulations, cleared bush from around their home, and were fined $50,000 for doing so, said that their home and lives were saved because of the action they had taken – action which is simply reponsible in high fire risk areas.

The argument is that clearing of bush around residential areas reduces bio-diversity and increases the risk of extinctions of native animals through loss of habitat. This is nonsense. The areas cleared in prescribed burning are very small – just enough to prevent fires jumping to buildings. The real risk to native wildlife is massive uncontrolled fires like those which have just occurred.

Even though Victoria has cooled a little, there are still about twenty fires still out of control.

A fifth of the residents of the town of Maryville may be dead. Many bodies are still in burnt homes. Many of the fires are thought to have been deliberately lit. That means some of those homes  are crime scenes. Investigations will take time, which adds to the pain for families.

But the investigations have to be done. Lighting fires in the Australian bush when there are high fuel loads and hot windy conditions is something any rational person would know is likely to cause widespread destruction and or death. The people who did these terrible things must not be allowed to get away with them.

I can understand this guy being annoyed: along the trails through his property used by illegal immigrants are piles of litter including human faeces, diapers, chewing gum and drug wrappers. Immigrants have destroyed fences, killed cattle, and stolen property.

Over the last ten years he has handed over 12,000 illegal immigrants to authorities. That’s 1200 per year, over three every day, and that’s just the ones he’s caught. He put a tap (faucet) in a tank so that trespassers could access water without damaging his property. None have been injured while in his care. Now he’s being sued because some of them felt threatened.

I can’t help wondering how the lawyers behind this litigation would feel if a constant stream of trespassers wandered through their home, leaving filth and litter behind them, destroying property as they went.

I think the guy is a hero.

I am glad that the Sea Shepherd (which might be more appropriately named the Sea Wolf) has stopped harrassing Japanese whaling vessels. Even if you feel strongly about ending whaling, that is no excuse to ram other vessels in the Southern Ocean.

Amusingly, Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd, claims his reason for ending the terror tactics aginst Japanese vessels is that they are concerned about being stopped and searched by a Japanese ship. If recent events are anything to judge by, the Japanese ships have far more reason to be concerned about Paul Watson than the reverse.

Dr Andrew Wakefield must have known the likelihood that his faked research would reduce vaccination rates and and lead to increased levels of preventable infectious childhood diseases. That is, he must have known than faking data so as to suggest a link between MMR vaccinations and autism would lead to increased child deaths.

But obviously getting his name in the papers was more important.

I don’t see any moral difference between this faking of medical research with foreseeably lethal consequences, and adding Melamine to milk with foreseeably lethal consequences.