UPDATED: "Greenies" blamed for bushfire scale

A couple of articles that actually address the real problem, rather than the knee-jerk, Pavlov's Dog response of the environmentalists: "climate change." And guess who is at the root of the problem, none other than the greenies themselves, for opposing hazard reduction burns.

From The Australian today:

THE green movement was yesterday blamed for the severity of the Victorian fires that cost so many lives and ruined so much property.

David Packham, a former supervising meteorologist for fire weather nationwide at the Bureau of Meteorology, said environmentalists' politically successful campaign to stop controlled vegetation burning off allowed the Black Saturday fires to rage uncontrollably. "The green movement is directly responsible for the severity of these fires through their opposition to prescribed burning," Mr Packham said.

"Elements of the movement are behaving like eco-terrorists waging jihad against prescribed burning and fuel management. They believe fundamentally that if we keep all fire out of Australia's forests, the trees will grow, the canopies will close up, the ground will become moist and there will be no fires. This is absolute and total nonsense."

Read it here.

UPDATED: And Miranda Devine in The Sydney Morning Herald makes the same point:

Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of "prescribed burning". Also known as "hazard reduction", it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.
...
Teary politicians might pepper their talking points with opportunistic intimations of "climate change" and "unprecedented" weather, but they are only diverting the blame. With yes-minister fudging and craven inclusion of green lobbyists in decision-making, they have greatly exacerbated this tragedy.

Read it here.