During the Covid pandaemic, I have watched and read much of the " evidence" of the commission. Its all climate and saving rare species, with little mention of fuel loads and the lack of action from the Fire Commanders to deal with this due to pandering to political and Green interference. .

Instead I have seen pointless presentations on how 6 birds were transported by helicopter, while the Commissioners queried how the transport boxes were made and designed to assist the birds survival!!I seriously could not belief that this was being seriously considered by three commissioners and their band of expensive lawyers.

I fear you are correct and we will face another Black summer when the next inevitable dry spell arrives. the 2019/20 fires were not a natural disaster, they were manmade by mismanagement and naïve ideology of Green pollies, academics and bureacrats....This "natural disaster" RC was aptly named, as it aims to blame in in climate ( which is natural), rather than the shameful mismanagement of fuel loads and settlement planning.

You are spot on re the High Command promoting Climate change to hide their accountability. The Commission gave a special opening day of time to allow climate advocates set the scene for this whole charade. Frankly, I fear their report will not only be useless, but in fact damaging as it will blame Climate Change, do nothing about fuel load and end up commending the Fire High Commands for their brave 'leadership'.

Yep, again it's the stupidity of the over-educated ! They're reliable as clockwork in mismanaging just about everything !
No village idiot would do what they did & would not cause the mayhem they caused !

Disagree! This situation is a disaster made into our reality by green opposition to herd grazing in national parks etc. Short term intensive cell grazing does not leave enough stuff to burn and if the grazed animals are goats, they also reduce/eliminate woody weeds.

Fires that get out of control have been known to wipe out millions of hectares and all who dwell therein. And there have been countless examples of, loosely titled, tradiional cool burns?

Last summer's bushfires wiped out one billion plus native animals, left others so badly burned, they needed to be euthanized.

Among the hundreds of human casualties, were 44 who died of smoke inhalation!

Fires that are repeated season after season invaribly destroy irreplaceable trace elements that go up with the smoke. And progessively harden the top soil layer. That then sees rain runoff to flash flood and erosion where previously, it would have soaked in.

[See sustainable soil management!] And fire always come with CO2! Often as tonnage!

If management teaches just one thing? It teaches us there is always a better way! Grazed animals and selective logging, is that better way!

Another of those better ways is to refuse to kowtow to (flat earthers) diabolically disingenuous urban activists, just to garner a fire firebug votes!
Alan B.

I concur with the author's concerns about a likely 'no-change' outcome of the current Royal Commission. The fact that Victoria and NSW are doing their own inquiries seems to have led the RC to reduce its focus on the causes of the fires. Unfortunately, at least in Victoria, an inquiry being led by a state-employed bureaucrat is very unlikely to be allowed to unearth anything that might reflect badly on the Government. This is typical behaviour for the Andrews Government.

However, while I agree that lack of fuel management is a major factor in the fires, the other equally major factor is that fire-fighting has become mired in risk-averse protocols which, when combined with reduced forest accessibility and loss of bush-experienced machinery operators, makes it far more difficult to contain fires when they are still small and most controllable.

In Victoria's East Gippsland, the fire which burnt most of the forest east of the Snowy River was allowed to burn slowly for weeks in a national park because the responsible authorities believed that there was already "too much fire in the landscape" to warrant undertaking the back-burning needed to contain it. As a result, when dangerous weather arrived, the uncontained fire simply took-off to severely burn huge areas. This wouldn't have been allowed to happen in the past, so to ascribe the huge burnt area to climate change is to obscure the human impact of changed fire-fighting strategies.

In the Northern Cape York area, the locals are burning after every wet season before the scrub becomes too dry. In my many years there I have not heard of any fires getting out of control & not once have I heard of a Fire brigade needing to attend.
The islands however, which are dictated to by Brisbane & Canberra bureaudroids now have so much fuel accumulated due to burning bans that the first fire that gets out of hand will be nothing short of a disaster !
Even local Councils have their hands tied by LGQ, EPA & Heritage etc.

Who will rid us of these meddling academics!