While the flooding from ex Tropical Cyclone Alfred continues to impact northern NSW and southern Queensland and a long clean up gets underway, fire season drags on in much of the rest of the continent.
The AFAC Seasonal Bushfire Outlook for Autumn 2025 identifies a ‘heightened risk of fire for parts of WA, SA and Victoria’.
In WA, increased risk of fire is identified for ‘areas between Perth and Carnarvon, and stretching eastwards across much of the Australian mainland’s southern coastline through SA and reaching all the way to southwest Gippsland in Victoria’.
Long fire seasons demonstrate various things:
- They act as a reminder that climate change is making fire seasons longer and more intense – putting more pressure on firefighters
- They remind us that longer seasons have an impact on career and volunteer firefighters and their families – often exhausting firefighters through being forced to work longer hours and be away more
- They remind us that we rely on support from interstate and sometimes overseas to fight wild fire. For instance, during this summer NSW crews were sent to Victoria, and interstate crews were sent to Tasmania. During Australia’s Black Summer of 2019/20, around 1,000 personal arrived from North America to assist in our firefighting efforts. Is this sharing of resources still viable in a rapidly warming world?
There are, of course many practical things we can do to prepare for the reality of longer and more intense fire seasons.
Here are two ideas for governments to consider:
1/ The federal government should continue to invest in Large Air Tankers (LATs). At present we need 6 or 7 LATs each summer, yet most of these are leased in from North America. Leasing will become more difficult as the USA requires more aircraft for longer periods. The Royal Commission inquiry that happened after Black Summer recommended that Australia invest in a ‘modest, Australian-based sovereign’ fleet of LATs and Very Large Air Tankers (VLATs).
2/ all states and territories should continue to invest in early detection and rapid response systems to allow fire services to identify and respond to new starting fires quickly.
And here are two ideas that could be implemented quickly:
While firefighting is (and should remain) primarily the responsibility of individual states and territories, it is clear that Australia would benefit from a professional national firefighting team which can be deployed to assist firefighting efforts locally.
Background
We already share resources through sending aircraft and people to assist local efforts across state and territory borders. As fire seasons get longer, there will be ever greater demands on career and volunteer firefighters to travel to different regions, states and territories to assist local efforts. With fires now starting in Queensland in winter, and seasons in the south burning into the end of March, considerable thinking will need to be done to ensure volunteering can remain viable for individuals when they are being asked to allocate more than half of every year to firefighting.
One practical thing the federal government can do is to have additional, deployable firefighting teams who can be allocated to assist local firefighting efforts. Such teams could be allocated interstate ahead of volunteer strike teams, taking some burden off them, especially in the fire season shoulder period of winter/ early spring and autumn.
1/ We propose the creation of a national remote area firefighting team.
As fire increasingly threatens World Heritage Areas and high conservation areas within national parks across the country, it is time to establish a national remote area firefighting team, which would be tasked with supporting existing crews in the states and territories.
Long fire seasons stretch local resources, and sometimes remote areas need to be abandoned in order to focus on defending human assets. Having an additional, mobile national team that could be deployed quickly to areas of greatest need would help us protect the wonderful legacy of national parks and World Heritage Areas that exist across the country.
We know that increasingly remote area crews are being used to protect fire sensitive vegetation (for instance the Wollemi Pines in the Blue Mountains or Gondwanic vegetation in lutruwita/ Tasmania). During the 2020 fires, firefighters were deployed on the ground to defend the only known natural grove of the world-famous Wollemi pines, in a remote part of the Blue Mountains. Fire crews were dropped into the area to operate an irrigation system that was set up to protect the trees. Recently prominent researchers in lutruwita/ Tasmania argued that as wildfires increase in severity and frequency as a result of climate change, that Australian authorities will need to adopt a landscape scale plan to protect old trees in the way that land managers are doing in the USA. They note that fires in 2003, 2010, 2012, 2016 and 2019, mostly ‘ignited by lightning storms under drought conditions, destroyed 17 of the world’s largest eucalypts. In these circumstances, individual stands of important trees can be protected provided suitably trained personnel are available’.
And this summer, the devastating fires experienced in the centre and west of Tasmania highlighted the need to have remote area crews. Andrew Darby, writing in The Guardian, quotes Richard Dakin, the deputy incident controller with the National Parks and Wildlife Service:
‘NSW fire service large air tankers dropped a 2.5km fire-retardant line; water bombers campaigned from the lakes; and remote firefighters worked at arduous, grimy “old-school” firefighting, flailing and digging at the perimeter. “The combination of the three led to success.”
It is clear that we will need more specialist remote area crews who are able to carry out this sort of protection work as well as first strike response when lightning strikes cause fires across large areas of land. While the states and territories are responsible for funding local remote area teams and volunteer teams, there is a role for the federal government in establishing a national team.
Teams could be allocated to staging points in specific areas at high risk of fire and deployed alongside local strike teams and brigades, with a specific focus on protecting significant ecological assets such as fire se3nsitive vegetation.
This was recommended by a Senate inquiry after the devastating fires in Tasmania of 2016.
Take action
It would be great if you could show your support for this idea by emailing the federal Minister for Emergency Management, Jenny McAllister, and urge her to act on the 2016 senate inquiry into fires in Tasmania which recommended that Australia establish a national remote area firefighting team.
Senator the Hon Jenny McAllister
Minister for Emergency Management
Parliament office (Canberra): (02) 6277 7290
2/ We propose the creation of volunteer firefighting teams open to people living in urban areas
Australia has always relied on volunteer firefighters to do a large proportion of fire response. But many local brigades, especially in farming areas, are aging, and struggling to attract new members. At present, most people living in urban areas can’t contribute to volunteer firefighting efforts because they live too far from a volunteer station, which means that the burden of fire fighting continues to fall on rural and regional communities, while the benefits of effective firefighting are experienced by all Australians.
Volunteer brigades on the urban fringe of large cities are increasingly important in providing capacity, especially 'surge capacity' of extra crews in bad fire seasons. However, a rapid response to call outs is required for firefighting efforts to be effective. Most people who live in large cities are well beyond the expected call out time of volunteer brigades (for instance in Victoria there is an 8 minute call out time expected of brigades in 'medium urban' areas).
The states and territories could be assisted by the federal government to establish volunteer firefighting teams which are not attached to specific existing brigades. These could offer opportunities to people living in urban areas to sign on, be trained, and then be deployed at times of urgent need. This would mean we skill up new trained firefighters rather than draining the existing volunteer base or relying on the ADF to be active in fire zones. This is more complicated than attracting people who already have fire qualifications and experience but would allow urban people to play a role through committing time to firefighting efforts.
Such volunteer teams could be required to do pre summer refresher training prior to fire season to be available for deployment. Creating a template to develop these teams (eg uniform national training programs so people can stay as members even if they move cities) could create an entire new firefighting capacity at a low cost to the tax payer. If the federal government establishes the framework for urban based crews, then guidelines, training and equipment could be uniform across the country, rather than if individual states or territories develop their own teams.
These groups could also be specifically trained in remote area firefighting to be able to assist state, territory and a potential professional national firefighting team.
Further information available here.
Take action
Victoria does not as yet have a volunteer remote area firefighting team as most other states do. Its time for Victoria to establish such a team. The Ministers who can make this happen are Vicki Ward, who is the Minister for Emergency Services, and Steve Dimopoulos, who is the Minister for Environment.
Please tell them that you support the proposal to establish a remote area volunteer firefighting team to compliment the great work that is carried out by our career firefighters in FFMV. This proposal will compliment the work of FFMV and does not seek to replace it. Tell them this will allow many new people to join firefighting efforts, especially people from Melbourne and that it will help build diversity among the membership of the CFA and hence assist in meeting the goals of the CFA's Diversity and Inclusion Strategy which are to 'achieve our vision of a diverse, inclusive, and respectful organisation that embraces difference'. Tell them that it will be a cost effective way to increase our ability to protect the parks and reserves that we love.
A simple polite message to that effect will have impact.
You can email them: [email protected], [email protected]
Or mention them on social media.
Twitter and Facebook > @vickiwardMP @Steve_Dimo
A simple message is fine:
I support the proposal for a volunteer remote area firefighting team for Victoria @vickiwardMP @Steve_Dimo. It will help protect our national parks and wild places. #climatefire
If you are a member of an organisation with an interest in the outdoors, please consider signing this letter.
If you are an individual who would like to express your interest in becoming involved in these teams should they be established, please add your name here. This does not bind you to anything - but it will be useful for us to be able to demonstrate interest from the community when lobbying government about the need to establish these teams.