Maybe a hamstung government and beaurecracy is worse than none at all.
Armchair Critic,
Even with 95% of the public Service being Labor, the LNP still performs better than Labor with their support base.
Imagine what the Coalition could achieve if fewer Public Service bureaucrats could get themselves to work with the Govt for the the nation instead of against it ?

Let's do the counter factual. If you took all the arsonists out of the equation, would the fires keep happening. You be the judge.
Steve S,
It is beside the point how a fire starts, it's what it feeds on that counts ! You could start a thousand fires if you want to but if the fuel is not there it won't burn ! That's how the Aborigines either by design or otherwise treated the bush & it worked ! Looks as though common sense was bred out of many !

Bluebottle,
I wouldn't've directed my response to the author if I hadn't read the article. And if you had read the link instead of choosing to remain ignorant, you'd have known that most of the arrests had nothing to do with arson or the starting of bushfires.

Of course facts are facts, but spin is not. People are very often misled about the implications of facts.

I never implied police were wasting their time. I don't think they should ignore it when people breach firebans or toss cigarettes. But you've been wasting my time! In future please try thinking before responding.

What a telling post, "The overpaid, News Corp/Murdoch muppets (who dominate the thoughts of so many OLO commenters and authors) hype Arson all the time. see http://youtu.be/s23q9DkCaVY?t=10m" from plantagenet.

I guess we can see where he gets his opinions formed.

Then we have Aidan berating someone for not reading his link to the worst greenie propaganda sheet in the nation, the ABC. Aidan linking to the ABC is like referring someone to James Cook University, & suggesting you would find anything like the truth there. No self respecting person will ever follow such a link, so why put them in there, & to suggest one would find truth there is simply laughable.

If you want to use links folks, do try to make them to somewhere at least moderately trustworthy, where there may be some chance of finding something believable. Linking to propaganda sheets simply prove that your opinions are based on such propaganda, & of no value.

Hasbeen,
I guess to those who treat the environment with contempt, any source that doesn't do likewise counts as "green propaganda". But by any objective standards, the ABC is not a propaganda outlet. It doesn't have an official line it's trying to push. It does always try to be unbiased, which is more than can be said for News Corp. And when it fails, the bias is not in a consistent direction.

But hypothetically, even if the ABC were "the worst greenie propaganda sheet in the nation", that doesn't prevent the criticism on Media Watch from being correct. People and institutions (yes, including James Cook University) can often identify the truth on one issue even when they're not doing so overall. And though a track record of bias should make anyone wary of taking claims at face value, you shouldn't just instantly reject everything; you should read the counterclaims and look at the evidence before coming to a decision.

>No self respecting person will ever follow such a link
It may surprise you to learn that even on this board, there are at least a sizeable minority of people who aren't complete idiots!
And make no mistake, anyone whose self respect is based on not knowing what the ABC are saying is a complete idiot. Doubly so if they blindly accept what News Corp is saying.

And BTW, what I was berating Bluebottle for wasn't merely his failure to follow my link, but his lazily berating me without following the link, based on his erroneous assumption that I hadn't read the article. The link was mainly for the benefit of Geoff Ellis, though there are many others here who would benefit from seeing it.

It does always try to be unbiased,
Aidan,
are you for real ??