It’s part of the modern political landscape that a noisy bunch of nobodies can capture politicians if the politicians think the noise makers actually represent something much larger with more votes. Which they rarely do.
Back in the early 1990s another lawyer and I nearly got a major change in law through the government on the basis of some clever lobbying by us under the umbrella of a then modest community law organisation. As it happened our proposal was something that almost everyone would support, but it could just as easily have been adoption rights for lesbian llama couples.
Which we are close to seeing, as Victoria now has laws allowing both mothers to be registered on the birth certificate where (somewhat surprisingly in view of a lack of corresponding advances in reproductive technology) there is allegedly no daddy of the male type.
Yup.
Got fire hazard notices a couple of months ago for the beach shack on Phillip Island and the vacant block we’re going to build on the outskirts of Melbourne.
So I dutifully slashed the grass down to nothing on both blocks.
But the fucking councils didn’t do anything about the huge fuel loads on their lands.
On the dunes at Phillip Island because that’s environmentally sensitive (with which I agree, but I figure that if they’re prepared to let their land burn to save a few mutton birds and copperhead snakes and which will be the source of the fires which will destroy lots of houses then I should be allowed to put my shack, which is only three houses back from the dunes, at risk from its own grass when the council land ignites it to get the insurance money and build something better. 
)
Or on council bush a few hundred yards from my new home site where the dumb pricks don’t even attempt to reduce the fine fuels on the ground which are the main source of intense fire which leads to the big fires. Meanwhile as a sensible bloke I’ll keep my vacant block cut as low as possible until the end of the fire season so that it doesn’t contribute to fires threatening surrounding houses, a good lot of which could be set alight by the embers which will come from the council land. As will mine be when it is built.
True, but the risk could be reduced substantially in many populated areas if we went back to the old principles and practices of controlled burns and other forms of fine fuel reduction.
When I was a kid people used to take a trailer up to Kinglake, which got burnt out at the start of 2009, and load up with firewood from fallen timber on the roadside and nearby forest, which helped create a firebreak. That practice got stopped because of idiotic greenie ideas, which ensured that the roadsides became hot spots to kill the poor bastards trying to flee the fires this year.
Same with the Dandeongs, which are about due to go up like they were hit by napalm.
Despite my anti-greenie comments, I’m all in favour of sensible conservation and am opposed to raping of the environment.
But as long as my state government gives licences to profit making corporations to log tens of thousands of acres of old growth forests for woodchips and other needless products, I’m buggered if I can see why I should be prevented from cutting down a tree on my own land and I’m opposed to anyone who wants to stop me.
They’re the same sort of smug hypocritial arseholes who used to drive Renaults and Peugeots with “Ban French nuclear testing in the Pacific” stickers and who now lecture the rest of us on not chopping down trees to stop climate change when they’re not flying around the planet to get wasted on marching powder in Peru or experiencing enlightment in Tibet and generally putting a carbon footprint on the planet about the size of Godzilla which doesn’t count because they’re flying economy. Stupid turds, the lot of them.
