After the latest tragedies in the Eastern Australia fires with deaths and hundreds of homes lost, we need to address our tree planting policy.
Composer, Bob Brown's "Give me a home among the gum trees" is dangerous thinking.
We have an urban population that seems infatuated by the Australian Aborigines and their lifestyle.
The First Peoples used fire for centuries to hunt.
The practise altered the species of tree on the Australian landscape - Antarctic beech, gingko, pine etc were destroyed as bushfires hurried the spread of eucalyptus trees and the degradation of Australia's soil.
The First People saw an estimated top population of 750,000 people yet we are being persuaded to recreate their environment.
We now have 25 million people and it is time for some thought on adaption to a more sustainable environment.
My annual property insurance premiums include more than $900 in fire levies to fund the Rural Fire Service.
The NSW government was to have phased this out but it seems to have forgotten.
I can't understand the stance of the insurance companies.
How they say nothing as Landcare's compulsory planting of lethal, highly inflammable indigenous species - particularly eucalypt, continues on their watch is beyond me.
Do they really want their annual fire claims to continue to soar?
Since one quarter of Victoria was burnt in the Black Thursday bushfire in 1851, Wikipedia records over 800 lives lost and 16,000 homes destroyed by bushfire.
Why doesn't the NSW RFS point out the absurdity of the almost religious planting of eucalypts?
Les Murray referred to them as "vertical explosives", with the huge increase in risk to its firefighters?
The West Australian Fire Commission has done so on its website, pointing out how the water-filled leaves of poplars, oaks etc have shielded and saved houses while oil-filled eucalypts have produced infernos and deaths.
Portugal is the largest wood pulp producer in Europe, one quarter of its forest land is under introduced eucalypts.
However, Portugal's terrible fires of 2017 has its government considering the future of planting such flammable species.
An Indian state (Karnataka) has legislated against Eucalypt planting.
California also has moves to ban their planting - because of the wildfires and soil degradation that follows.
Yet Australia's Landcare fencing grants make their use mandatory!
One would have thought that the 173 deaths and 414 injured, 182,108 hectares burnt on Victoria's Black Friday in 2009 would have changed policy.
But no, the insurance companies Bushfire CRC and the Rural Fire Service remain mute.
Poplars, Plane trees, and oaks, as well as native figs, are fire resistant.
Oaks are great hydraulic lifters. They bring water up from deep below and survive drought far better than shallow rooted eucalypts, which have a short lifespan on the tablelands.
Oaks provide wonderful shade for livestock and in autumn stock feed on their leaves and acorns.
They are long term, sustainable investments.
It is time for insurance companies and the RFS to tell the Landcare fanatics and gardeners to revise their lethal "Indigenous species" religion.