The Harshest Lesson

Image by Neil Creek, used under Creative Commons Licence. Click for details.Originally published as an editorial in Planning News 36, No. 8 (September 2010), under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo.

The final report of the Bushfire Royal Commission, released at the end of July, is a challenging document for the planning profession. As intense as debate might sometime set within the profession, we normally have the luxury that our work is free of truly life or death consequences. The tragic events of February 2009 changed that, and chapter 6 of the Commission’s report, which discusses planning and building responses, is disquieting reading. It is unsettling to find so few easy answers in a situation where so much is at stake.

Bushfires are the ultimate no-win planning issue. From Black Saturday onwards, the government has found itself constrained by the intense emotions created by the loss of life, as well as the sheer weight of economic value, property rights, social capital, and emotional investment bound up in bushfire prone communities. In a political sense, this creates almost irresistible constraints on the government’s responses: there are things that, politically, simply can’t be said.

For example, it’s not an option to say “We can’t fix this.” In an increasingly urbanised and networked society, where we are rarely truly remote, there is no longer an acceptance that sometimes we are at the mercy of nature and there is little we can do about it. On balance, that will be a positive impulse, since our cultural unwillingness to accept the random element of tragedy continues to spur the search for every last system failure that also played a part. That will ultimately save lives in the future, even if at some level we are fleeing from the harsh truth that we can only minimise, not eliminate, the risk inherent in living in the bush.

In other cases, however, the constraints about what can be said are less productive. Faced with communities who had lost everything, denying them the right to rebuild was seemingly not an option, and the government committed early to “brick by brick” rebuild. This is a perfectly understandable response: these were communities that were emotionally shattered, and providing a strong expression of support is an instinctive and almost irresistible human reaction. Yet, as the Commission has now argued, planning scheme provisions allowing rebuilding in the Wildfire Management Overlay “allowed dwellings in a WMO that had been destroyed in the 2009 bushfires to be rebuilt in the same place, without any attention to the fire protection objectives set out in the WMO – namely, water supply, access, design and siting of buildings, and management of vegetation to achieve defendable space.”

That decision is already made. Yet there are many decisions still to be made in response to the Commission’s report, and the challenge will be to continue to use the seriousness of the consequences as a spur to confront difficult choices. One unfortunate aspect of the VPPs, on which we have commented before, is their tendency to devolve strategic planning into an exercise of listing competing imperatives, with the planning control devolving the resolution of any inherent contradictions to the final decision-maker. The Commission noted this tendency in its consideration of the WMO, noting it “does not provide strong and unequivocal guidance about the relative weight that should be given to bushfire risk when balancing complex and competing objectives.”

This puts the decision-maker (in this instance, most relevantly the Country Fire Authority as referral authority) in an unenviable position. It is not difficult to understand the position of the CFA in considering applications where an objection will likely create an intolerable planning blight that, not being a planning authority, it is then in no position to resolve. Faced with such a situation, it is not surprising that, as the Commission notes, the CFA objected to less than 1% of applications referred to it.

To devolve the resolution of these dilemmas to the CFA as referral authority (or Councils as responsible authority) is to duck the true task of planning. It is interesting to see the Commission, comprised of outsiders to the world of planning, assess a VPP control and remind us of how it should work: it should actually give clear guidance as to how the competing objectives are resolved. As the Commission’s findings make clear, that requires confronting the contradictions at a strategic level. If, when considering the application of the WMO (or the Commission’s proposed Bushfire-Prone Overlay), it becomes clear that land is too high risk to be adequately defensible, or if clearance of vegetation to make it adequately defensible will involve excessive habitat loss, then there needs to be clear direction that development not occur; for existing development, measures such as restructuring or acquisition need to be considered to resolve the problem.

That is a considerable planning challenge, and we don’t envy those who will have to undertake this work. It is easier for the Commission to throw down that challenge than it will be for planners to respond. Yet that doesn’t change the essential truth of the Commission’s findings, and we need to confront that truth. There are few, if any, issues confronting planners in which the stakes are higher.

Photo by Neil Creek, used under Creative Commons Licence. Click image for details.