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  • Gillard’s bizarre act of faith leaves vulnerable unprotected

    Gillard’s bizarre act of faith leaves vulnerable unprotected

    Date January 14, 2013 Category Opinion 423 reading now
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    David Marr

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    Julia Gillard and partner Tim Mathieson.

    I hesitate to say this but the Prime Minister is living in sin. I don’t give a damn. Nor do most Australians. But that sort of thing bothers religious leaders. So much that Labor’s Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill will renew their authority to bar anyone in Julia Gillard’s shoes from any job in any of their schools, hospitals and charities, even those they run with public money.

    It’s a curious spectacle, a prime minister legislating against herself.

    Only school funding is as heavily defended by bishops, orthodox rabbis and imams as the “freedom” to punish these sinners in the workplace.

    Should she wish to work some day as, say, a cleaner in an Anglican hostel, she could solve the problem by marrying. But the woman who will be shepherding the legislation through the Senate really hasn’t a hope. The new law will back any faith-based organisation that refuses to hire Penny Wong if having a lesbian on the payroll injures “the religious sensitivities of adherents of that religion”.

    Legislating against herself … Julia Gillard.

    This is not a summer spoof. Nor is it a distant symbolic issue like gay marriage. This is here and now. The bill is before a Senate inquiry. At present it will leave unprotected a long list of ordinary Australians working or wanting to work with some of the biggest employers in the country.

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    Most conservative faiths have most of the following on their lists of the sackable: gays and lesbians, single mothers, adulterers – yes, even adulterers! – bisexuals, transsexuals, the intersex and couples like Gillard and Tim Mathieson.

    Zealots call this a necessary exercise of their faith. Only school funding is as heavily defended by bishops, orthodox rabbis and imams as the “freedom” to punish these sinners in the workplace. Struggles over this are subterranean, largely unreported and almost always successful.

    The issue spooks politicians. They know even the faithful don’t enthusiastically back their leaders on this one. But grappling with bishops and rabbis complaining about threats to religious liberty is about the most unwanted contest that a government can imagine.

    Plucky little Tasmania stripped religious bodies of the “freedom” to sack sinners from schools, hospitals and charities more than a decade ago and there are no reports from the far side of Bass Strait that their Christian mission has suffered.

    Britain tried to do much the same in 2010 and was denounced by Pope Benedict – he claimed the Labour plan “violates natural law” – and wound back by Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. But under British law discrimination was already forbidden when religious bodies were spending public money. Secular function, secular rules.

    Not here. Labor has given up on all this without a fight. Other countries and other Australian states have sweated over legal formulae to balance the demands of the faiths and the needs of the vulnerable. But Labor’s Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill offers the religious open slather.

    It’s a bigots’ charter.

    Some faiths, denominations and dioceses want nothing to do with these privileges.

    The Anglican Bishop of Gippsland, John McIntyre, remarked a few years ago when they were being debated in Victoria: “How bizarre that the followers of Jesus Christ would oppose, and ask for exemptions from, a legal instrument that has at its heart a declaration of the dignity and value of every human life and the basic rights of every person.”

    But that’s not how Labor sees it in Canberra. As early as Kevin Rudd’s time, religious leaders were reassured they would lose none of their privileges when the Commonwealth tidied up its old anti-discrimination regime and brought gender identity, sexual orientation and same-sex relationships for the first time under Canberra’s protection.

    Labor is insisting on one tiny concession: the faiths will have to accept same sex couples in retirement villages and nursing homes that have Commonwealth funding. But those same homes and villages will still be able to refuse to employ gays and lesbians to look after them.

    It’s absurd but it works. The faiths know they have thousands of lesbians, gays, single mothers and the rest on their payroll and they know can’t do without them. Catholic and Anglican leaders know that any serious attempt to purge them from their hospitals, schools and charities would see the parishes rise up in revolt.

    But services can be denied to them, applications rebuffed, promotions blocked and individuals picked off. And because these men and women can be sacked at any time simply for being who they are, they have little to nil job security.

    So deals are done by the vulnerable that vary from faith to faith, diocese to diocese and employer to employer to stay on the payrolls of the faiths. They are expected to shut up, be discreet and hide who they are. The zealots of the faiths see this as God’s work to be done, it seems, with the aid and blessing of the Gillard government.

    David Marr is a former Fairfax journalist.

    Follow the National Times on Twitter

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/gillards-bizarre-act-of-faith-leaves-vulnerable-unprotected-20130113-2cnf0.html#ixzz2HvDcTLlU

  • Rising seas may put $300b of property at risk: scientists‏

    Rising seas may put $300b of property at risk: scientists‏

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    NEVILLE GILLMORE

    arthursleang@hotmail.com

    To Andrew Glikson, John James
    Rising seas may put $300b of property at risk: scientists

    Updated 20 minutes ago
    Map: Australia

    How is climate change expected to impact on different parts of Australia? This is the first of a five-part series in which environment reporter Sarah Clarke sets out to provide answers.
    Video: Animation reveals predicted sea level rises(ABC News)

    Climate scientists are urging Australian authorities – and residents – to prepare for rising sea levels that could put about $300 billion worth of commercial property, infrastructure and homes at risk.
    The United Nations’ chief science body will meet in Hobart tomorrow for the latest round of talks before the release of its fifth major climate paper in September.
    More than three-quarters of Australians live near the ocean, and Alan Stokes from the National Sea Change Taskforce says sea-level rises will challenge many Australians’ beachfront lifestyles.
    View sea-level rise maps

    The Federal Government has developed a series of initial sea-level rise maps to show climate change’s potential impact in key urban areas.

    You can explore maps for the following regions:

    Sydney, NSW
    South-east Queensland
    Newcastle and central coast, NSW
    Melbourne, Vic
    Adelaide, SA
    Perth-Mandurah, WA

    “We like to live as close to it [as we can], we like to spend our holidays there and we like to spend Christmas holidays there – as we are at the moment,” he said.
    Mr Stokes also lives near the water in a harbour-side, Sydney suburb, but he has concerns about the future of that kind of coastal living.
    “If the climate science is right – and that’s that we can expect a sea-level rise of somewhere between 80 centimetres and 1.1 metres by the year 2100 – that lifestyle is under threat,” he said.
    “Also under threat are the properties that are going to be developed in vulnerable areas along the coast which are being approved at the moment in states all around Australia.”
    Rising sea levels are a direct result of melting glaciers, and according to some of the most recent peer-reviewed reports, the melt is accelerating.

    Are you worried rising sea levels will affect your property – leave your comments here.

    John Church is from the CSIRO’s atmospheric research section and a lead author on sea-level rise for the UN’s chief science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
    “The Greenland ice sheet is increasing its surface melt … if we are to avoid some of the extreme scenarios, to avoid the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, it’s urgent that we start mitigating or reducing emissions significantly and in a sustained way into the future,” Dr Church said.
    Video: Alan Stokes says rising sea levels are a serious risk for coastal communities.(ABC News)

    Australia’s Climate Commission has done modelling on a rise above one metre, which it says could be devastating for all Australian coastal cities, as well as the 6 million people outside the main population centres.
    For example, in Sydney it forecasts that runways at the main domestic airport could be inundated and terminals flooded.
    In Brisbane, homes in inner-city suburbs such as Windsor and Albion may go under water.
    It is the same for other cities like Melbourne and Adelaide.
    Mr Stokes says that while some residents are not fussed by the new potential waterfront living, others are trying to sell.
    “I’ve heard people wanting to sell up and trying to sell up … finding that the market suddenly isn’t working with them, that the values of the property have dropped,” he said.
    Around the country up to 250,000 properties could be potentially exposed to inundation with a sea-level rise above one metre. The price tag on that is up to $63 billion.
    The Gold Coast is a key example of a major city centre that typifies oceanfront living. It has plans in place to guard against a 27-centimetre sea-level rise but councillor Lex Bell says the council is yet to go any higher.
    “We’re sitting back and monitoring the situation but we’re not panicking,” he said.
    As it stands, there is no national benchmark on a minimum sea-level rise that states must take into account.
    This is the first in a five-part series by Sarah Clarke on climate impacts. Still to come:

    Part 2: What effect will climate change have on agriculture and food production? (Coming Tuesday)
    Part 3: What effect will climate change have on health in the Pacific? (Coming Wednesday)
    Part 4: How will climate change affect biodiversity and ecosystems? (Coming Thursday)
    Part 5: How will climate change affect Australia’s oceans and reefs? (Coming Friday)

  • Climate issue reaches boiling point

    Climate issue reaches boiling point

    Date
    January 13, 2013
    Category
    Opinion

    John Birmingham

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    The scariest thing we saw all week – apart from that ”Monster” guy in that American gridiron final – had to be those interactive weather maps with huge swathes of the continent not just glowing a deep fire engine red but burnt black, as though all life had been scorched from the earth there. The weather nerds at the Bureau of Meteorology – creator of everyone’s go-to phone app for the storm season – went a little crazy there for a while, running around like overacting 1950s B-grade stars in a C-grade end-of-the-world film.

    ”It’s off the scale!” they babbled.

    ”Don’t you understand? Off. The. Scaaaale!”

    But luckily we snuck in just under the scale, apparently, and the promised hotpocalypse just turned out to be an unusually nasty heatwave and yet another bushfire catastrophe. No doubt the backtracking of the weather nerds will be pulled out at the next meeting of the Climate Change Denial Society and held up as yet another example of the need to ”move along, nothing to see here”.
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    After all, it’s not the first time rubber thongs have melted into the bitumen at Birdsville, a road surface which itself had already turned blistering hot and soupy soft in the terrible forge of high summer.

    It’s not the first time rail lines have buckled or the bush has exploded in flame. People have lost their homes before. And their lives. It will happen again. That’s how this place works.

    When the First Fleet crept up the east coast, the officers commented on the number of fires ashore, as though the whole land were ablaze.

    But if you listened to the weather nerds when they had calmed down from their initial Holy Crap moment, you had to wonder whether this was just the start of things getting really, really bad.

    Not next week, or even next year, but for the rest of our lives, as the relatively settled, sort of predictable weather we’ve been used to falls apart from all the damage done to the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

    Yeah, this week’s weather was extreme. Summer in the antipodes often is, to the European mind. But extremes repeated often enough become routine. How many years of extreme events and off-the-scale data does it take before even the most shell-backed climate change doubters begin to have doubts about their own position?

    Feeling the heat

    One of the doubters, the Honourable Tony Abbott, was out there on the front line of a climate change crisis he’s previously described as ”bullshit”, doing his bit as a volunteer firefighter. And good on him. He’s taking his burns and scrapes with the best of them and, in the world of unpaid firefighting, those are some high standards to live up to.

    It was kind of churlish and ill-advised, then, for the ALP’s Brendan O’Connor to have at him on Twitter, snarkily describing Abbott’s announcement that he was reporting to his local brigade as a stunt. O’Connor quickly apologised and withdrew the cheap shot. It will be interesting to know, however, whether a couple of years running of standing on a fireline feeling his skin tighten and burn might change the Opposition Leader’s views about climate change being ”bullshit”.

    The same sort of brutal re-education seems to be taking place in the US, where a couple of years of increasingly erratic and dangerous weather extremes such as hurricane Sandy are forcing some previously sceptical types to question whether we might have broken the planet. Well, OK, just my friend Murph from the great state of Missouri, but damn if he wasn’t the Grand Wizard of Sceptics just a few years back.

    The writer and freelance brainiac Warren Ellis divined the change in the ruins of New York, after Sandy. ”I can imagine,” he wrote, ”walking through an Old New York, looking at the dark, greedy smears left by floodwaters at high tide on the fronts of brownstones and banks, and divining from them the dates when Manhattan died by inches. Wondering which of these eroded tidal lines was the one where people realised that climate change wasn’t a joke or a trick, but the new future, a thousand miles wide and coming for them at a hundred miles an hour.”

    Things go wrong, they break, was Ellis’s point. Sometimes we die of it, and sometimes we just laugh.

    The lighter side

    I’d hate to lay such a bummer on your Sunday without making amends, so allow me to share a few moments from my personal blog this week, contributed by one of my regulars, Lord Bob, who was once not a thousand miles removed from the PR biz.

    We were discussing when things go horribly wrong, when Bob topped us all with a few tales from his salad days. There was the keynote to be delivered by the Important Chief Executive, who was scripted to ride in like a latter-day Visigoth on a Harley-Davidson, except nobody remembered to bring one to the show.

    There was the speedboat company with a stunt display that should have climaxed with one of its superboats bursting through a water screen onto which was projected a promo video. Sadly, the superboat didn’t have the horsepower to get up the jump ramp. And, my personal fave, the four-wheel-drive launch at which a small army of motoring writers were to drive though Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, then up a beach and across to Fraser Island for a massive blowout with a monster seafood buffet, dancing girls, a world-class MC and a steel drum band especially flown in.

    ”None made it,” Bob grinned. ”Let me repeat for effect, 0.0 made it. Because no one had thought to check the tide times. The show went on, to an empty venue.” Sometimes, disaster can be funny.
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    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/climate-issue-reaches-boiling-point-20130112-2cmc2.html#ixzz2HoK6yOYt

  • As Australia burns, attitudes are changing. But is it too late?

    As Australia burns, attitudes are changing. But is it too late?

    Raging wildfires are forcing many to rethink their stance on climate change. But there’s little time left to reduce emissions
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    Tim Flannery

    The Guardian, Friday 11 January 2013 18.59 GMT

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    ‘Large parts of the continent will be uninhabitable, not just by humans but by Australia’s spectacular biodiversity as well.’ Illustration: Phil Disley

    This summer, life in Australia resembles a compulsory and very unpleasant game of Russian roulette. A pool of hot air more than 1,000 miles wide has formed across the inland. It covers much of the continent, and has proved astonishingly persistent. Periodically, low pressure systems spill the heat towards the coast, where most Australians live. At Christmas it was Perth. Then the heat struck Adelaide, followed by Tasmania, Victoria, and southern New South Wales and Canberra. Over this weekend, it’s southern Queensland and northern New South Wales that look set to face the gun. And with every heatwave, the incidences of bushfires and heat-related deaths and injuries spike.

    Australians are used to hot summers. We normally love them. But the conditions prevailing now are something new. Temperature records are being broken everywhere. At Leonora, in the Western Australian interior, it reached 49C this week – the national high – and just one record temperature among many. The nation’s overall temperature record was set on 7 January. Then the following day that record was exceeded, by half a degree celsius.

    The breaking of so many temperature records indicates that Australia’s climate is shifting. This is supported by analysis of the long-term trend. Over the past 40 years we’ve seen a decline in the number of very cold days, and the occurrence of many more very hot days. All of this was predicted by climate scientists decades ago, and is consistent with the increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

    The new conditions have seen the Bureau of Meteorology add two new colour categories to Australia’s weather prediction maps. Temperatures of 48-50C used to be the highest, and where such extremes were anticipated, the weather map was marked black. Over the last week, purple patches have begun to appear on some maps. They mark temperatures above 50C. Pink, which is yet to be deployed, will denote temperatures above 52C.

    Climate extremes have a way of stacking up to produce unpleasant consequences. Two years ago, the ocean temperature off northwestern Australia reached a record high, and evaporation of the warm seawater led to Australia’s wettest year on record. This was followed, in central Australia, by the longest period without rain on record. The vegetation that had thrived in the wet now lies dried and curing, a perfect fuel for fires.

    With abundant fuel and increased temperatures, the nature of bushfires is changing. Australians have long rated fire risk on the MacArthur index. On it, a rating of 100 – the conditions that prevailed in the lead-up to the devastating 1939 bushfires – represents “extreme” risk. But after the 2009 fires a new level of risk was required. “Catastrophic” represents a risk rating above 100. Under such conditions fires behave very differently. The Black Saturday fires of 2009, which killed 173 people, were rated at between 120 and 190. They spread so fast, and burned so hot, that the communities they advanced upon were utterly helpless.

    The superheated air currently monstering the continent is fickle. This week, Sydneysiders watched in relative thermal comfort as those living just 100km to the south endured scorching heat, blustering winds, and unstoppable fires. The forecast for coming days indicates that Sydney might once again be lucky, with the worst fire conditions striking 50km to the north of the city. But, of course, things might work out differently.

    The unprecedented conditions of recent weeks have seen many Australians rethinking their attitude to climate change. A good friend of mine farms just outside Canberra. A few years ago the drought was so severe that his 300 year-old gum trees died of thirst. Then the rains came on so violently that they stripped the precious topsoil, filling his dams with mud and sheep droppings. This week he watched as his cousin’s property at Yass was reduced to ashes. When I called he was trying to secure his own historic homestead and outbuildings from fire. He asked me if I thought the family would still be farming the area 50 years from now. All I could say was that it depended upon how quickly Australia, and the world, reduced their greenhouse gas emissions.

    Australia’s average temperature has increased by just 0.9 of a degree celsius over the past century. Within the next 90 years we’re on track to warm by at least another three degrees. Having seen what 0.9 of a degree has done to heatwaves and fire extremes, I dread to think about the kind of country my grandchildren will live in. Even our best agricultural land will be under threat if that future is realised. And large parts of the continent will be uninhabitable, not just by humans, but by Australia’s spectacular biodiversity as well.

    This week’s extreme conditions have once again raised the political heat around climate change. The Greens party condoned an anti-coal activist who created a false press release claiming that the ANZ bank had withdrawn support for a major coal project, causing its share price to plunge. Meanwhile the acting leader of the (conservative) opposition, Warren Truss, said it was simplistic to link the hot spell to climate change, and “utterly simplistic to suggest that we have these fires because of climate change”.

    Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter, and the mining lobby is exceptionally strong. As calls to combat climate change have increased, the miners have argued that “mum and dad investors” will lose out if any effort is made to reduce the export or use of fossil fuels. But the smart money is no longer backing fossil fuels. In South Australia, wind energy has gone from 1% to 26% of the mix in just seven years, and nationally solar panel installations are 13 years ahead of official projections. Last year, in fact, Australia led the world in terms of number of individual solar installations.

    And finally, with a carbon price in place, Australia’s emissions curve is beginning to flatten out. Despite these efforts, Australians are already enduring the kind of conditions they’d hoped to avoid if strong, early action had been taken. Now, more than ever, we’re in a race against time to avoid a truly catastrophic outcome.

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    More on this story

    As Australia heatwave hits new high, warning that bushfires will continue

    Fire chiefs say that better ways to predict outbreaks have saved lives, writes Alison Rourke

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    Pictured: the family fleeing Australia’s wildfires in the water

    Australian wildfires: clinging to life, a family defies wall of flame

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    Australian wildfires: interactive map

    Australia braces for more potentially dangerous fires, with temperatures on Friday predicted to soar close to 50C

    Australia bushfires continue to rage as temperatures drop – video

    Australian family shelters in water as fire rages – video

    Comment

    Jonathan Jones: an astonishing photograph of survivors in an age of catastrophe

    It is such a flame-seared image, we might be seeing the end of civilisation – and an Australian family tough enough to outlive it

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  • Community spirit

    Community spirit

    As the massive blaze threatened the district, the community banded together.

    At Bookham, about 29 kilometres west of Yass, 30 volunteers have been making sandwiches, slicing fruit and putting together meals for about 350 hungry and weary firefighters.

    A call out on social media for donations saw boxes of biscuits, bread and fruit delivered and local children helped bake food for the firefighters.

    Gail Butt from nearby Young has been coordinating the feeding of fire crews for 49 years.

    “It’s so overwhelming the comradeship around this little area, around Yass and Bookham is just heartbreaking. They’re all there for each other, it’s just so beautiful, you can’t thank them enough,” she said.

    She says this is one of the worst fires in years.

    “You go out and give them a cuddle, they are very weary, they are very pooped and you give them a bit of watermelon and they have a wash and in half an hour or so they look a bit different men,” she said.

    “It’s satisfaction to me to see how they come in and how they go back out.”

    It’s so overwhelming the comradeship around this little area. They’re all there for each other, it’s just so beautiful.

    Gail Butt

    Requests for feed for livestock have also been answered after more than 14,000 hectares were burnt out and about 7,000 sheep were lost in the fire

    Yass Valley Mayor Rowena Abbey says the support has been amazing.

    “Generosity of people – donations of water, food, hay, there’s a lot of fodder donations going on and it’s not just from this community. There’s hay coming from all over New South Wales for the feeding of the livestock,” she said.

    Ms Abbey’s own land has also been threatened by the blaze.

    “You get as prepared as you can be and then you wait. You try to support other people who have been affected and hope that you don’t become one of them,” she said.

    A total fire ban is in place in New South Wales today.

    On the state’s coast conditions are expected to ease but some towns can still expect warm and gusty conditions.

    Assistant Commissioner Rob Rogers says communities in the west should remain vigilant.

    “[It will be] quite hot west of the divide, around the Dubbo, Mudgee areas and a fairly large band of area there, we’re expecting quite warm and gusty conditions, so the focus will probably shift to the inland,” he said.

    Meanwhile the main highway through Tasmania’s bushfire-stricken south-east will re-open today, allowing more residents return to their devastated communities.

    Authorities in the state have been keeping a close eye on a bushfire at Lake Repulse that has burnt more than 11,500 hectares.

    In the state’s south-east crews will continue back-burning near a bushfire that has destroyed 24,000 hectares and 170 properties on the Tasman Peninsula.

    In Victoria, cooler conditions are allowing firefighters to extinguish hotspots from fires that have been contained in the past few days.

    In Central Australia, Bushfires NT has begun relieving firefighters as the threat to property fades.

  • New $300 fire tax set to hit all houses

    New $300 fire tax set to hit all houses

    LINDA SILMALIS
    The Sunday Telegraph
    January 13, 201312:00AM

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    NSW Rural Fire Service fire fighters hold the line of the Shoalhaven fire at Princess Highway near Sussex Inlet. Picture: Craig Greenhill Source: News Limited

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    Heroes risking it all to save us

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    Fighter charges in with one arm

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    Turn off the air con, we’ve cooled down

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    HOMEOWNERS will be forced to fork out up to $300 a year under a new fire tax with the O’Farrell government set to overhaul the funding of the state’s emergency services.

    Volunteer firefighters are already preparing to up their campaign to fight the move, which they claim will lead to a reduction of their budget and loss of identity.

    Under the plan, each household and landowner will have to pay a yearly bill of around $300 a year to pay for the estimated $1 billion cost of funding the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS), NSW Fire and Rescue and the State Emergency Services.

    How do you feel about being charged a fire tax? Tell us below

    The scheme would replace the existing system where households who take out insurance pay via a levy added into their premium.

    The state government has argued that the system is unfair as only households with insurance contribute.

    The insurance industry, which has been lobbying for a new funding regime, calculates that almost 40 per cent of households do not have home contents insurance.

    Under one of the proposed funding models, the state government calculates each household with a land value of $250,000 would be charged $267 annually.

    NSW Fire Service Association president Brian McKinley said he believed each household would have to be charged around $360 per year to meet the fire and emergency services budget.

    The fire volunteer movement is just as concerned at its loss of identity if it is funded via a tax-based system, claiming the community would stop donating to the organisation.

    “We raise around $3-4 million from the community and we are concerned that people will stop donating like they did in South Australia because they think they are already paying via their taxes.

    “Moving to a centralised system of funding will also mean a loss of autonomy on how the money is spent.”

    The association also doubts transferring to a property-based tax would result in lower insurance premiums.

    Other states to have moved to a property-based fire tax include Queensland and Western Australia, where both use councils to collect the levy.

    The Victorian government is to introduce a property-based levy in July, with households paying about $100 each and commercial and large farms paying more. As a sweetener, it promised a $20m concession scheme for pensioners and veterans.

    In a discussion paper released under the consultation process, the government argued the existing funding regime was inefficient and unfair.

    “The tax on insurers increases the price of insurance, leading to some people to under-insure and others not to insure at all.”

    The paper said “a wide range” of revenue sources had been considered, but it was clear “a property-based levy” was the best alternative.

    LINDA SILMALIS
    The Sunday Telegraph
    January 13, 201312:00AM

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    NSW Rural Fire Service fire fighters hold the line of the Shoalhaven fire at Princess Highway near Sussex Inlet. Picture: Craig Greenhill Source: News Limited

    Related Coverage

    .

    Heroes risking it all to save us

    .

    .

    Fighter charges in with one arm

    .

    .

    Turn off the air con, we’ve cooled down

    .

    HOMEOWNERS will be forced to fork out up to $300 a year under a new fire tax with the O’Farrell government set to overhaul the funding of the state’s emergency services.

    Volunteer firefighters are already preparing to up their campaign to fight the move, which they claim will lead to a reduction of their budget and loss of identity.

    Under the plan, each household and landowner will have to pay a yearly bill of around $300 a year to pay for the estimated $1 billion cost of funding the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS), NSW Fire and Rescue and the State Emergency Services.

    How do you feel about being charged a fire tax? Tell us below

    The scheme would replace the existing system where households who take out insurance pay via a levy added into their premium.

    The state government has argued that the system is unfair as only households with insurance contribute.

    The insurance industry, which has been lobbying for a new funding regime, calculates that almost 40 per cent of households do not have home contents insurance.

    Under one of the proposed funding models, the state government calculates each household with a land value of $250,000 would be charged $267 annually.

    NSW Fire Service Association president Brian McKinley said he believed each household would have to be charged around $360 per year to meet the fire and emergency services budget.

    The fire volunteer movement is just as concerned at its loss of identity if it is funded via a tax-based system, claiming the community would stop donating to the organisation.

    “We raise around $3-4 million from the community and we are concerned that people will stop donating like they did in South Australia because they think they are already paying via their taxes.

    “Moving to a centralised system of funding will also mean a loss of autonomy on how the money is spent.”

    The association also doubts transferring to a property-based tax would result in lower insurance premiums.

    Other states to have moved to a property-based fire tax include Queensland and Western Australia, where both use councils to collect the levy.

    The Victorian government is to introduce a property-based levy in July, with households paying about $100 each and commercial and large farms paying more. As a sweetener, it promised a $20m concession scheme for pensioners and veterans.

    In a discussion paper released under the consultation process, the government argued the existing funding regime was inefficient and unfair.

    “The tax on insurers increases the price of insurance, leading to some people to under-insure and others not to insure at all.”

    The paper said “a wide range” of revenue sources had been considered, but it was clear “a property-based levy” was the best alternative.