Bushfire and climate resilience

On the afternoon of 18 January 2003, smoke that had been settled over Canberra's western hills for more than a week — smouldering since dry lightning strikes ignited it in the Brindabella and Namadgi ranges nine days earlier — turned, within a few hours, into a firestorm. In the suburb of Duffy, in Canberra's Weston Creek district, residents watched the sky turn copper and then black in the middle of the day before embers began landing on roofs and the power failed. By nightfall the suburbs of Duffy, Chapman, Rivett and parts of Kambah and Holder had lost close to 500 homes between them (approx.), four people were dead, and Mount Stromlo Observatory — a national research facility operating since the 1920s (approx.) — was a ruin. It was, as it is still widely described, the first time a bushfire had struck directly into the streets of an Australian capital city, and it happened not on some abstract urban fringe but inside a city built, by design, to feel like it backed onto the bush.

More than two decades on, Canberra is still a bush capital by design — hills, nature reserves and Namadgi National Park run into and around its suburbs rather than sitting at a safe remove from them. The 2003 firestorm forced the territory to rebuild how it prepares for that fact; the Orroral Valley fire of January–February 2020, which burned through most of Namadgi itself during the Black Summer bushfire season, tested what had been rebuilt. Whether that preparation is keeping pace with a hotter, drier fire climate, and with a growing city pushing new suburbs closer to grassland and woodland, is the question this piece puts to the ACT's Barr Labor-Greens government.

What the government did

The immediate cause of the 2003 failure was not the Barr government's to own — Jon Stanhope's Labor government, elected in 2001, was around 15 months old when the fires hit — but every ACT government since, Labor-led throughout, has owned and funded what came after it. An independent inquiry into the operational response, led by former Commonwealth Ombudsman Ron McLeod AM and reporting to the ACT Government in 2003, found the pre-2003 ACT Emergency Services Bureau had operated with poor situational awareness, thin hazard-reduction burning in the years before the fire, and weak coordination both between its own units and with New South Wales agencies fighting the same fire complex across the border. A separate, multi-year ACT Coroner's inquest into the four deaths, with findings delivered by Coroner Maria Doogan in 2006, was similarly critical of the timeliness and clarity of the warnings issued to residents on the day.

The structural fix was the Emergencies Act 2004, which created the ACT Emergency Services Agency (ESA) as a single agency under one Commissioner, bringing ACT Fire & Rescue, the ACT Rural Fire Service, the State Emergency Service and ACT Ambulance Service under common command for the first time. The same Act requires the ESA Commissioner to maintain a Strategic Bushfire Management Plan — a standing, periodically updated statutory plan, most recently revised in 2019 (approx.) — that sets out fuel-reduction targets, asset protection zones around Canberra's urban-bushland interface, and the annual Bushfire Operational Plan that schedules hazard-reduction burning across Canberra Nature Park, Namadgi National Park and the pine-plantation and grassland buffers ringing the city. On the planning side, land classified as bushfire-prone under the Building Act triggers ESA referral and stricter construction standards, and new estates approved on the urban edge — including the still-expanding Molonglo Valley and the Ginninderry development on the ACT's north-western border — are required to carry defined asset protection zones between the built form and adjoining bushland or grassland.

On climate, the government's central document is the ACT Climate Change Strategy 2019-25, which sits alongside the territory's legislated target of net zero emissions by 2045 and its move to 100% renewable electricity from July 2020 — a claim examined in more depth elsewhere on this site — and which includes a standing commitment to help the community adapt to worsening heat and fire risk, not only to cut emissions. That framework was tested in real time by the Orroral Valley fire, ignited on 27 January 2020 when the landing light of an Australian Defence Force helicopter set alight dry grass at the Orroral Valley tracking station inside Namadgi National Park. The fire burned for more than a week through steep, largely inaccessible terrain, prompted the ACT government to declare a state of emergency on 31 January 2020, and forced evacuations in the rural south of the territory before it was brought under control without loss of life or a single home — a result the government and the ESA both credit substantially to the asset-protection and suppression capability built up since 2003.

The evidence

Judged only against its own worst day, the ACT's emergency architecture has clearly improved. But the record the government wants credit for is best read as a story about the last generation's failure, not a guarantee about the next one: the reforms were emergency repairs, made under a coronial and administrative spotlight, to a system that had let a fire become a firestorm inside a capital city.

The scale gap in the chart is not proof the more recent fire was easier to fight; if anything it burned longer, and it stayed largely within Namadgi because Namadgi is mostly national park and forest, not because the fire itself was smaller or slower-moving. What differed was exposure: in 2003 the fire reached suburbs with only hours of warning after a wind change; in 2020, asset protection zones, aircraft and a unified command held a much larger fire away from the built edge of the city. The Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services shows the ACT's real spending on fire and emergency services sitting toward the higher end of Australian jurisdictions on a per-person basis (approx.), broadly what would be expected of a small population carrying the fixed cost of a full urban and rural fire, ambulance and SES capability, rather than evidence of unusual generosity. Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO State of the Climate reporting, meanwhile, finds the fire-weather season across south-eastern Australia — the ACT included — has lengthened and produced more dangerous fire-weather days since the mid-20th century, narrowing the safe windows in which the ESA's own Bushfire Operational Plans can actually deliver their scheduled hazard-reduction burns; ESA and ACT Parks and Conservation Service annual reporting has repeatedly recorded burns deferred, or annual hectare targets not fully met, because conditions on the available days were either too wet to carry a burn or too dangerous to safely control one (approx.).

Canberra rebuilt its fire agency after 2003; it has not yet rebuilt its way out of living beside the fuel.

The critique

The government's strongest case rests on 2020 holding. It is a fair point, but it is also the easier case: Orroral Valley burned almost entirely within a national park with very few structures in its path. The harder test — a fast-moving grass or forest fire that starts, or arrives, on the actual urban-bushland interface on a total fire ban day — has not recurred since 2003, and the interface itself has grown substantially in the intervening two decades. Molonglo Valley, approved and built out under Labor-Greens government since the late 2000s, sits directly across the Murrumbidgee corridor from the pine and grassy woodland country that burned in 2003; Ginninderry, a joint ACT-NSW estate on the territory's north-western edge, is built against grassland reserve that both governments' own planning documents identify as bushfire-prone and that also carries habitat constraints — including for the endangered grassland earless dragon — limiting how aggressively fuel can be cleared or burned nearby. Each individual development has gone through ESA referral and carries a mapped asset protection zone, but the cumulative effect of approving one interface suburb after another is more houses sitting closer to more grass and bush than the city carried in 2003 — precisely the exposure that turned a bushfire into a firestorm the last time.

The second weakness is that the hazard-reduction program is only as good as the weather windows it gets, and both the ESA's own operational reporting and the wider CSIRO/BOM climate evidence say those windows are narrowing, yet nothing in the public record shows the territory has significantly re-scaled its prescribed-burning capacity, aerial suppression assets or Rural Fire Service volunteer numbers to compensate for fewer safe days to do the work. A statutory plan that assumes a certain number of burnable days each season is worth less every year that assumption fails to hold, and the government has not published a clear account of how it is closing that specific gap rather than simply re-committing to the same targets.

The third weakness is that the ACT's climate strategy is markedly more developed on mitigation than on adaptation. The territory can point to a genuinely fast decarbonisation record — net zero emissions by 2045 legislated, 100% renewable electricity since 2020 — but its adaptation commitments are framed at a much higher level of generality, without the kind of measurable, dated targets (hectares treated, kilometres of fire trail maintained, number of interface properties brought up to a defined ember-attack standard) that would let an outside auditor, rather than the government itself, judge whether resilience is actually improving. Growth is also making the affordability side of this worse: interface suburbs carry higher home-insurance costs tied to bushfire risk ratings, a burden that lands hardest on newer, more heavily mortgaged households in exactly the estates the government has spent the past decade approving.

What they got right

None of that critique should erase the genuine reform. Merging four emergency services into one ESA command, writing a statutory bushfire management plan with real teeth in the planning system, and holding a fire the size of Orroral Valley away from a single home in 2020 are not small achievements, and they were built and sustained across three different Chief Ministers of the same governing party rather than abandoned once the immediate crisis passed. The territory's fast, credible progress on emissions also means its climate strategy starts from a stronger position than most Australian jurisdictions when it turns to the harder, less politically rewarding work of adaptation.