The fact we haven't had a Blue Mountains bushfire this time around is mainly attributable to heavy surveillance of known arsonists, and luck. A bushwalker cooking dinner is indistinguishable from an arsonist, in the governmental model, since both have the effect of kicking off a chain reaction we are unable to control. Since arson surveillance has worked to prevent the blue mountains sparking up (and it has, make no mistake,) of course the government will extend the ban to anyone with the ability to make fire.
SITREP: NSW, all of it, is tinder-dry after an historically dry summer. The fuel load is very high as a consequence of the drought breaking a couple of years back. The National Parks and Wildlife Service [NPWS] has (for some reason I don't understand(*)) stopped preventative/mosaic burning to reduce fuel load. Canberra went up recently, Victoria went up recently. The fire service is completely focused on preventing damage to property (with consequent loss of life.) The Lib-NP coalition are only fairly recently in government - they don't want a disaster. They don't really care much about bushwalkers, they care a lot about adverse media coverage and property owners, hence any argument based on risk to bushwalkers will have no impact.
NPWS is consequently, and quite understandably, highly risk-averse. For example: NPWS fire policy for Royal NP was to 'prevent' wildfires for 15-20 years after the last major fire ... how they're going to achieve that is beyond my ken, but that was the policy last time I looked. The decision makers are operating under the delusion that they can stop the bush burning indefinitely if they can just keep flame away from it, and this is the fundamental reason they've closed the parks.
Seems to me quite likely that there's going to be a conflagration sometime soon (this summer, next summer) and that there's nothing anyone can do, now, to prevent it (or even, really, to ameliorate it.) The current light rain doesn't really put out the fires currently burning, it just means the RFS can't backburn.
It's pure luck that the weather happens to have been favourable. A pure fluke has delayed the inevitable. Sometime in the next little while we will have a week of extremely hot weather, and then an afternoon of strong winds, and there will be another series of wildfires. Property will be destroyed, people will die. The NPWS decision makers are keen that it not happen on their watch.
I could be completely wrong, but to the extent that I understand the issue: Australia's dominant flora has evolved to cause fire. For millenia aboriginal and (for centuries) historical pastoral practice was to selectively burn to keep the understories clear, and to generate feed for native and then introduced grazing animals. If I understand it correctly, it is necessary to burn selectively over cooler months to avoid conflagrations (although the art of doing this effectively has been lost.)
We, for some reason(*), have chosen not to maintain the country, and we will (as a direct consequence of this) suffer the consequences.
As far as National Parks go, I blame the Wilderness Act which militates against burning because it pretends that something called Wilderness can exist without any human interaction or intervention. It is apparent to me that this model of the bush is a damaging fantasy based on 19th century romantic notions.
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* Actually, it might have something to do with cuts to Rural Fire Service and NPWS funding.
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