The public service association of NSW has said that National Parks and Wildlife Service has been gutted of staff by the Coalition, especially of experienced fire managers. The number of experienced staff was cut from 289 to 193. The government appears to have assumed, as neoliberals do, that all workers are interchangeable, and replaced knowledge and experience with basic entry level people, and they have pretended this makes no difference.
The chief of the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, told their staff this month that Treasury (actually the government hiding under another name as usual) had ordered savings of $81.4 million by July 2020, and that despite their best efforts this would result in further cuts to the National Parks service and to the Energy and Science division.
The government has tried to blame previous governments of many years ago for a perceived lack of hazard reduction fires in the present, but the National parks service actually exceeded the Government’s own targets, despite the shorter season in which is safe to do hazard reduction (due to climate change)…. So as usual the only people to blame are the Coalition themselves.
The government also claims that the number of trained fire fighting staff as been increased, but it has actually fallen from 1349 to 1060. The Coalition’s own “Labour Expense Cap” means that $20m a year has to be cut from wages budgets by the fire service, which means even fewer experienced fire fighters.
The problem here needs to emphasised, because the volunteer fire services have been stretched to exhaustion already and summer is yet to come. Firefighters will die. I guess the neoliberal attitude is that you can always buy another.
Former NSW Fire Chief, Greg Mullins tried to organize a meeting of fire chiefs with the Federal Coalition to discuss responses to climate change earlier in the year, and was rejected twice.
Structurally, we would like to actually go back to being retired and not to have to speak out. We would like the doors to be open to the current chiefs, and allow them to utter the words “climate change”. They are not allowed to, at the moment.
The Guardian 14 Nov 2019 11:17
On a slightly different note, workers from the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment who were attending an AdaptNSW forum on showcasing best practice in reducing the impacts of climate change on communities, received an email stating “Public Affairs has issued advice [to you] not to discuss the link between climate change and bushfires.” The next day, the minister said this was a mistake, but it was a mistake entirely in keeping with Coalition policy, and it had its effect.
The government does not appear to recognise that Climate change, and increased ecological destruction causes any problems for NSW that cannot be solved by taxcuts, taxpayer funded gifts to developers, destruction of knowledge, misinformation, suppression of disagreement, denial of responsibility, silence and sacking workers.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
Leave a comment