PRINCIPLES
1. Fire is an integral part of many Australian landscapes but varies in its behaviour, intensity and frequency. Weather plays a critical role in fire behaviour. Climate change is amplifying weather extremes which greatly exacerbates fire behaviour.
2. All aspects of bushfire prevention, management, mitigation and control must:
- be based on independent evidence-based research; and
- prioritise human safety.
3. A defensible and responsible fire policy maximises the protection of human life while minimising environmental damage.
4. Ongoing, well-funded education and training programs for the community are essential to be adequately prepared.
5. Early detection, attack and warning systems are essential for the effective containment of bushfires.
6. The effect of disturbances, such as previous fire, logging, grazing, weed infestation and feral animals on bushfire incidence and severity needs to be much better understood to mitigate risks and impacts.
7. Land use planning and building regulations have important roles to play in minimising both the risks and impacts of bushfires.
AIMS
Safer Communities
1. Mandate underground power lines in all new developments where fire risk is high.
2. Proper maintenance of all power lines by power distribution companies, with independent oversight.
3. Evidence-based measures to reduce risks associated with existing power distribution infrastructure, for example aerial bundling of cables.
4. Prohibit the use of machinery with the potential to ignite fires on total fire ban days, including, but not limited to, harvesters and logging machinery, unless involved in life-saving services.
5. Improvements in public understanding of how to use landscape features and fire retardant vegetation for residential fire protection.
6. For reports and information prepared by governments which relate to managing and responding to bushfires to be publicly and easily accessible to the community at large.
7. Communities becoming ‘fire smart’ through incentives, education and training.
8. The development of greater choices for sheltering from bushfires.
9. Ensuring more effective and active partnerships between communities and emergency services.
10. Comprehensive local warning systems.
11. Funding for:
- firefighters and equipment
- early detection systems for rapid early attack capabilities in all regions at risk; and
- local weather and smoke monitoring stations.
12. Comprehensive and effective bushfire response planning for the vulnerable people in the community.
13. Evidence-based ecologically sympathetic methods of creating safer, more defensible zones around houses and townships.
14. Ongoing efforts to ensure that the latest research into fire management be put into practice.
15. Encouraging and utilising locally developed best practice for warning and communication systems and fire safety planning.
16. Ensuring ongoing maintenance of places of last resort (neighbourhood safer places and community fire refuges).
17. Providing rebates for installation of residential fire safety systems.
18. Reviewing and improving emergency warning systems including fire weather warnings.
Wildlife
19. Resources to increase the rate of survival and rehabilitation of affected wildlife.
20. Trained wildlife volunteers to be allowed access to areas immediately after a fire to rescue, feed or humanely destroy suffering wildlife.
21. Properly resourced and evidence-based planned burning regimes that
- ensure thorough surveys for, and protection of, threatened species and habitats, particularly hollow-bearing trees, before and after undertaking prescribed burns
- involve Traditional Owners and local communities with local biodiversity knowledge
- exclude long unburnt representative areas
- require fuel hazard re-assessment with on-site inspection immediately prior to burning
- consider an area as ‘treated’ if fuel levels are below the designated threshold
- protection of mature trees and long-unburnt forests unless genuinely necessary to protect nearby built environments ; and
- reduce the number of large old trees cut down after the fire – unless they are a credible threat to the public – and cease blanket salvage logging.
22. Significantly greater resourcing for biodiversity assessment of fire operation plans (FOPs).
23. Fire agencies to minimise the use of back burns, given their destruction of fleeing wildlife and vulnerable habitats, doubts regarding their effectiveness, and their impact on the safety of firefighters.
24. Cease the practice of burning out unburnt ‘islands’ within burnt areas as standard post-fire management practice.
25. The impact on wildlife to be included in ecological assessments undertaken before any fuel reduction burn.
26. Advance public understanding of bushfires and work towards Victoria developing world’s best practice in fire prevention, management and control.
27. Bushfire research and fire suppression techniques taking into account the need to halt biodiversity decline.
28. Increasing research funding to advance fire agencies’ understanding of fire and the environment, and fire risk minimisation.
29. Further research and review into the ever-increasing impact of climate change on bushfire behaviour.
30. Increasing research and understanding of the many ways people react in times of extreme emergency.
31. Minimise, and where possible phase out, the use of toxic chemicals in the control of planned burns and bushfires.
32. Encouraging the scientific community to use plain language to bring bushfire information and expertise to the broader community, ensuring evidence-based justification and risk assessment of all prescribed burns.
33. Improving the scientific accountability of fire management and mitigation measures.
Planning
34. Planning schemes that site houses and subdivisions such that fire mitigation work is not required on public land.
35. Incorporating bushfire risks regulations for the location and maintenance of plantations.
36. Changing government plans for logging state forests adjacent to residential interface to reduce flammable regeneration.
37. Reconciling ‘fire zones’ with ‘planning zones’ and identifying high fire risk zones to limit subdivision in dangerous interface areas.
38. Increased funding for fire risk and land management practices undertaken by First Nations peoples.
39. Support cultural burning being practiced by First Nations peoples.
Fire Emergency Services
40. The provision of well-resourced fire emergency services.
41. The provision of technologically up-to-date rapid fire-detection systems and equipment.
42. Continued development and deployment of emergency community alert systems to ensure the most effective, broad ranging alert systems are in place.
43. Streamlined fire services administration to ensure more immediate and direct responses to emergency situations.
44. Providing integrated state fire services.
45. Review of staffing and stations in new peri-urban areas and regional interface areas.
46. Ensuring emergency telephone systems are adequate for the task and are properly staffed to prevent excessive delay (or failure) in times of fire disaster, in conjunction with full radio coverage.
47. Measures to address fragility of modern telecommunications systems during bushfires.
These state policies were last amended by members at a policy forum held on 14 June 2025.