What a horrendous 10 days it's been for eastern Australia. As if the relentless drought weren't calamitous enough, it's now compounded by an early-season explosion of lethal bushfires.
'Pelion piled on Ossa', as the Ancient Greeks would have put it - or 'That's not a disaster; THIS is a disaster', to borrow a line from Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee.
Inevitably, the eruption of deadly bushfires along the NSW North Coast hinterland and elsewhere has led to the usual finger-pointing, and searches for blame.
The list of likely suspects ranges from arsonists (for whom the existing penalties are vastly inadequate) to flawed local government zoning, to inadequate resourcing of national parks, to climate change.
All of these factors probably play a part, but another element that must be taken into account surely is the locking-up of so much highly flammable forest country in national parks and nature reserves by Bob Carr's Labor government in the late 1990s.
Before that "greening" frenzy began, soon after Carr came to office in 1995, national parks and reserves accounted for some 4.8 per cent of NSW. Today the total area of the state controlled by the National Parks and Wildlife Service is more than 9pc.
In less than 20 years, therefore, the area of national parks and related reserves has virtually doubled, but the resources deployed to manage this vastly expanding empire have not doubled with it.
On the contrary, it was revealed last week that even since 2011, successive budget cuts have resulted in the NPWS slashing its staffing of rangers by one-third, thereby impairing its capacity to conduct hazard reduction burns.
But before Carr took over, much of the coastal bushland now locked up in national park was prudently managed state forest, where fuel loads were kept down by logging programs, regular thinning and cattle grazing.
In a letter published in The Australian last week, the former executive director of the NSW Forest Products Association, Col Dorber told how the association had repeatedly and publicly warned the then Labor government throughout the 1990s that the lock-up of state forests and associated lack of attention to fire prevention would one day result in 'catastrophic fires'.
Perhaps in this new era of climate-change awareness it's time for a rethink of how we manage our vast forests of combustible eucalypts, and where (for their own good) people should be allowed to build houses.
Meanwhile the drought rolls on, providing ongoing ammunition (as do the bushfires) for those demanding action on climate change.
The drastic actions being proposed by these climate alarmists, such as shutting down our coal industry, would cripple our economy, leaving us less able to prepare for the future, and without making a jot of difference to global climate.
