Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 25 October 2013

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Green fascism, not global warming, is fuelling deadly bushfires

Like Nero burning Rome and blaming the Christians, green fascists intent on reducing Australia’s population are to blame for the deadly intensity of the bushfires that they are now trying to blame on humans causing “global warming”.

The fires are still raging in NSW, but it has been four years since the single worst natural disaster in Australian history, the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria which claimed 173 lives and directly traumatised 10,000 people. The role of green fascism in creating that scale of disaster and mass-death is clear.

And were it not for a freak change of wind, the Black Saturday death toll would have been far worse—in the thousands.

Experienced experts know that the only factor of bushfire risk that people can mitigate is fuel load. Black Saturday occurred on a day of extreme temperature, low humidity and high wind conditions, which combined to push up the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) to 200. “However, even with an extreme FFDI, there is no fire without fuel,” stated Monash University’s David Packham and his co-author Tim Malseed in their 2013 pamphlet Bushfire Death Trap. “On the day, the landscape-wide high fuel resulted in the fire’s extreme intensity, spread and size, creating convention-driven hurricane strength wind that at times swirled like a tornado.”

The rise of the green movement in the 1960s—which in Australia Prince Philip personally directed through his Australian Conservation Foundation—saw the demonisation of the fuel reduction techniques for the responsible management and mitigation of bushfire risk, and a fanatical shift to the widespread planting of “native” vegetation, which, incidentally sheds flammable leaves, bark and twigs. Under well-funded green pressure, the state governments and local councils became the enforcers of green fascism, and mandated such native vegetation policies, which massively increased the fuel load and the risk of uncontrollable bushfires.

Greenies patronisingly use Aborigines to further their agenda, but only when it suits them. The green fascists’ opposition to fuel reduction management is at odds with the centuries of Aboriginal maintenance of the landscape with “cool” burns. The first recorded observations by European settlers in the 1830s, of the area affected on Black Saturday, reveal that the Aboriginal practices had created large areas of grasslands interspersed with lightly forested areas. Those same areas are now either housing developments surrounded by thick vegetation, or densely forested. Packham et al. cited Bill Gammage, an adjunct professor at ANU and an expert on Aboriginal practices. When he visited the Eltham Gateway region in April 2012 and was asked how the risk under present green-dictated practices compared to pre-European times, Gammage replied, “It’s as though you are trying to set fires rather than prevent them.”

At higher fuel loads fires can get out of control even on days that rank much lower than Black Saturday on the Fire Danger Index. A fuel load of 15 tonnes/hectare can make a fire uncontrollable when the FFDI is 20. This increases the risk of unseasonable fires. In 2003, independent experts David Packham and Rod Incoll forecast the East Kilmore bushfire—the deadliest of the Black Saturday bushfires—and advised a Victorian Government hearing that fuel should be reduced to 10 t/ha. Their advice was ignored. On the day of Black Saturday, the East Kilmore bushfire was on a path directly into the much more populated Eltham Gateway. Only the wind change saved thousands of people from death.

Plenty of residents in the areas of the Black Saturday bushfires fought hard for years against the green ideology they knew was putting lives at risk. In 2001 a former Fire Prevention Officer of 30 years experience wrote in a letter to the Nillumbik Mail that the Nillumbik Council’s Indigenous Vegetation Policy was a “burn your own house down kit”. On Black Saturday, Nillumbik Shire suffered the greatest loss of life and property of all of the affected regions. Eleven days after Black Saturday, the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) under the authority of the State Government warned the Nillumbik Councillors in writing that “Council’s insurance cover may be at risk if any employee (or Councillor) suggests that this Nillumbik Council or any previous Nillumbik Council has in any way been at fault in relation to the bushfires.”

The Black Saturday case is so clear, that every region in Australia should examine its own situation, to ascertain how much they are at risk due to green restrictions and directives. Adam Bandt, Christine Milne and Al Gore are putting up global warming as a smokescreen to cover the more immediate danger that green policies have put people in. They and Prince Philip may be keen to reduce the population, but normal human beings have a vested interest in preserving life. The Citizens Electoral Council has relentlessly exposed the origins and murderous ideology of the green fascist movement—join the CEC to fight for the right of people to protect their lives.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s Oct./Nov. 2011 New Citizen “Defeat the British Crown’s Green Fascist Dictatorship”.

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