Roger Underwood is right on the money but others commenting have also pointed out the sheer indifference of people to doing the obvious and protecting themselves as far as they can.

I too have no wish to offend anyone in Victoria and respect the fact that the restoration is still going on. However, some of my own experiences as a bush firefighter leave me cold seeing the indifference and the attitude that someone else will be there to fix things.

Imagine this. Long steep dirt road, hills east of Perth, houses to the left, forest on the right, fire at bottom of hill, wind pushing the fire up the hill toward the houses, they might be at risk.

Given the order to back burn to protect the houses. People complained about the smoke whilst they were sitting in their gardens clearly oblivious and uncaring. It was their attitude that annoyed me the most. "The fire brigade will take care of it".

I learned a lot about fire behaviour when I was training and the sinister aspect of crown fires creating their own fire storms was covered of course. Seems that many people living in the Hills east of Perth have very limited or no knowledge of bush fire behaviour. Some elementary education would go a long way.

Roger Underwood makes some very valid points. And so does Bob Montgomery. I'd like to add another observation about these conditions.
On Black Saturday most people were shut up with fans / air conditioners and (probabnly the TV) on - I was on the computer. Ignorance of what was happening outside from minute to minute was probably (and reportedly) very high.
Many of the actual events / breakouts could only have been usefully detected by local patrols of good vantage points - the sky was so full of smoke that the usual fire spotting towers would have had limited visibility beyond the smoke edge closest to them.
Perhaps infra-red sensing that can penetrate to the ground through very high temperature smoke from high-flying aircraft can be made effective.
Alternatively, deploying local patrols with good (local) communications and alerting capabilities is, I think the ONLY other way of improving things reliably - But this will take a lot of careful planning and organising - a great many issues would need to be dealt with - safety especially.
Such volatile disasters can erupt pretty well anywhere - making forward evacuation of large numbers of people highly fraught - from where and to where will be impossible to guess in advance - and Roger mentioned the perils of congested roads once real action is under way.
It seems to me that days like Black Saturday are predictable, but the actual outcomes are not - requiring a new approach to local cooperation and survival that can operate independent of remote, centralised intelligence systems which can be rendered blind by the very conditions they are attempting to assess and communicate.
I hope this thread attracts a few more experienced players to comment.

I doubt the safety of a mobile phone based messaging system, because it relies on phone towers not being burnt down, assumes good mobile phone coverage - mountainous areas in north east Victoria have no coverage, and doesn't work if the phone battery is depleted or phone turned off. Telstra experimented with phone messaging in January and I received the South Australia extreme heat messgae but not a Victoria message, I was in Victoria on both days.

Its difficult for people who weren't in the bushfire area to understand the ferocity of the fires and the speed at which they moved.

After successfully defending property in 2006 bushfires and preparing the property by removing all gum trees, keeping the garden green - a luxury not afforded to Victorians on stage 3 water restrictions, we decided to pay our insurance and evacuate next high fire danger day because this fire was so ferocious that all sensible fire precautions were ineffective. The house that was built on a cleared block to withstand 1982 level fires would have burned in 2009 if it had been in the fire path. People who house was at the top of a slight gully died without knowing what hit them.

If you were in the fire path and the topography was against you your property burned regardless of vegetation