EDITORIAL

Homeowners must prepare for bushfire: A harsh reality of Australian bushland living. Photo: Wolter Peeters

It is the Australian dream for many. Within commuting distance to a city, pristine bushland at the back door.

But with that dream comes a serious risk for hundreds of thousands of people who live where fires burn.

Sydney’s fire threat is very real and we are paying for past mistakes. There is no doubt that if we were planning the city today, governments and planners would make different decisions about where to allow development.

It would be easy to point the blame at past poor planning decisions for the risk now facing Sydney.

But the reality is Sydney is surrounded by highly flammable bushland, the perfect environment for extreme fire zones, and there are many areas well away from bushland that are still vulnerable.

The fire risk to the Blue Mountains is well known but some of the city’s most popular areas are also some of the most bushfire prone.

Ku-ring-gai has the highest proportion of homes near bushland in metropolitan Sydney, while more than one in four homes in the Sutherland shire is built on bushfire-prone land.

The NSW Rural Fire Service’s latest figure show 200,000 homes are in the most dangerous areas of the city – that is they are built within 100 metres of bush. But past experience shows that distance is not a saviour.

Yet despite the widespread risk across Sydney, fire experts still despair that residents who make the decision to live in fire zones such as Ku-ring-gai, Hornsby or Pittwater are complacent and suffer ”bush blindness”.

Academics use the term bush blindness to describe people’s ignorance; they see the bush but ignore its risks.

This is one of the biggest fire threats facing Sydney. Repeated messages to prepare for a fire – physically and mentally – are often ignored. People do not have fire plans, they do not clear out gutters, they allow debris to build.

The Victorian government introduced no-go building zones in the wake of the Black Saturday fires of 2009 which prevent housing developments in certain bushfire-prone areas.

These exemptions do not exist in NSW, mainly because the damage has largely been done – we are already living in most of the dangerous areas.

Councils have been required to map bushfire-prone land since 2002 and new homes built in these areas must meet tight building controls.

But councils are not required to follow up on these measures once the approval is given.

The onus is on the home owner.

Living in bushland provides an idyllic existence to many that no government would want to restrict.

But with the decision to live in a bushfire-prone area comes a huge responsibility. Residents must acknowledge the risks and be prepared for the worst or else they put themselves and others in a potentially deadly posiition.

With nominations declared on Friday, eleven candidates are off and running for the Griffith by-election on 8 February.

The federal seat was vacated by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd following his party’s defeat at the 2013 election.

These eleven candidates include candidates from Labor, the Liberal National Party and the Greens, along with candidates for six other political parties, and two independents.

One surprising nomination comes from comedian Anthony Ackroyd, known for his Kevin Rudd impersonation. Ackroyd is running for the Bullet Train for Australia party.

1. Timothy Lawrence (Stable Population Party)
2. Geoff Ebbs (Greens)
3. Christopher David Williams (Family First)
4. Karel Boele (Independent)
5. Anthony Ackroyd (Bullet Train for Australia)
6. Anne Reid (Secular Party)
7. Terri Butler (Labor)
8. Melanie Rose Thomas (Pirate Party)
9. Travis James Windsor (Independent)
10. Ray Sawyer (Katter’s Australian Party)
11. Bill Glasson (Liberal National)

Click through to read the Tally Room guide to the Griffith by-election.

• Election Preview

  By Antony Green

  Antony Green maps out the election environment facing the major parties leading into the 2014 Tasmanian Election.

• Electorates

  Antony Green’s A to Z of facts, history and trivia about every electorate in Tasmania. Find out about each electorate’s political landscape in the 2014 Tasmanian Election.

  • Bass
  • Braddon
  • Denison
  • Franklin
  • Lyons

• Candidates

  A list of candidates running in the next Tasmanian Election.

• Past Premiers

  See all the Tasmania’s Premiers, dating back to 1856.

• Past Elections

  Results for Tasmanian elections, dating back to 1950

• Retiring MPs

  Antony profiles each retiring MP, revealing their pre-politics backgrounds and making his assessment of their political careers.

• Hare-Clark system

  By Antony Green

  Antony Green explains the Hare-Clark electoral system used in the 2014 Tasmanian Election.

• Antony Green’s Election Blog

  The weblog of the ABC’s Election analyst Antony Green.

In 2012 I attended the annual general meeting of the Clean Energy Council, a room full of heavy hitters, the heaviest strangely belonging to gas and coal generators.

The newly settled CEO David Green offered an optimistic, albeit challenging, view of his new post and went to great lengths to point out the need to have allies in the government and opposition, the most significant issue on the day was the then recent decision of Greg Combet to slash the STC multiplier, ultimately pulling two years out of the life of the program.

To this end Green referred to our guest speaker, Ian Macfarlane, at that time holding an opposition position as shadow minister for energy and resources. What we heard from Macfarlane took many of us by complete surprise. Essentially he told us that the early closure of the STC multiplier was contrived and delivered via a bi-partisan deal between he and his Labor opposites, Greg Combet, Martin Ferguson and Mark Dreyfus, the justification for this was to ensure that the RET retained its integrity.

We, who sat there rather surprised, listened on to learn that whilst it may have upset the solar incumbents, it was imperative for the future of the RET. It was a convincing argument. He then continued to go into detail about the RET and the threats made to alter the legislation on which it was based.

The issues were these. Firstly, those who oppose the RET were insisting that the RET legislation, currently dictating 41,000 GWh (gigawatt hours) of renewable generation by 2020, be changed to reflect an actual twenty percent figure at 2020. Macfarlane went on to say that the forecast electricity demand at 2020 was set to be much lower than even 1997 levels and 41,000 GWh would actually take the renewables contribution to more than 25%.

Wouldn’t that be great! The other interesting note was that it would only take one more aluminum smelter to shut down to shoot this figure to around 35 per cent!

It should be noted at the time that the market indicators showed a sharp decline in energy consumption going forward. Current forecast data shows the figure to be reasonably stable at 200-250,000GWh by 2020, a perfect fit for the RET as is.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott is insisting that in getting to this milestone, Australians will be pillaged when it comes to energy costs, but it is important to why he is taking this stance. The runaway success of renewables in Australia, helped along by six years of Labor has taken all of the incumbent generators by complete surprise, and they are calling foul.

Somehow they seem to have managed to convince Abbott that the economy depends on burning coal to produce electricity, because it’s cheap. The problem with this assertion is that it is no longer cheap. Thanks to falling component prices and the initial government assistance renewables can now compete with new build coal fired power.

It goes without saying that the RET is critical to investment in renewables. A project we have explored recently is a 60MW project for the Gold Coast flood plain. We have been able to demonstrate that a combination of solar and storage can enable us to achieve N-2, possibly N-1 reliability and because of storage, earn $80 per megawatt hour minimum.

This is because we can exclude Powerlink transmission inputs from our dispatch costs. Ex RET this achieves a  7% return on investment, with the RET it’s more viable at 11 per cent. Used as a peaking plant, the RET gets us into no brainer territory of around 15 per cent ROI.

To derail this type of investment when it is just gaining momentum just doesn’t make sense. The reality is that removing the RET will provide minimal and short term relief only, whilst paralyzing the development of a cost competitive energy solution for Australia, not to mention a clean solution.

All of the experts have a handle on this phenomena, why doesn’t the prime minister?

Greg Hunt and Ian Macfarlane, purely as result of their collective inertia from years in opposition, appear to have become the only voices making sense in the current government. All we can do is hope for our last remaining allies in government prevail over Abbott’s haphazard agenda, right now it’s totally messed up.

Lyons covers the centre of Tasmania, and is the largest electorate in the state.

The electorate of Wilmot was renamed to Lyons at the 1986 election, which saw a 4-3 split in favour of the Liberal Party.

In 1989, Christine Milne won a seat in Lyons for the Greens, producing a 4-2-1 split in favour of the Liberal Party. This was maintained in 1992, and a 3-3-1 split in 1996.

The reduction in numbers in 1998 saw Milne, by then the Greens leader in the Assembly, lose her seat along with a Liberal MP, producing a 3-2 split for the ALP.

The Greens returned to Lyons in 2002, producing a 3-1-1 split that was repeated in 2006. In 2010, the ALP lost a seat to the Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party will require a large swing to gain a seat off either the ALP or the Greens – but Lyons saw a huge swing at the 2013 federal election which could indicate potential for such a large shift.

Lyons is represented by Rene Hidding (LIB), Tim Morris (GRN), Michael Polley (ALP), Mark Shelton (LIB) and Rebecca White (ALP).

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External Link: Interactive animation shows temperatures around Australia over the past week