Author: Mick Holton

Greg Mullins’ dad told him about 1939 when “the sky seemed to be on fire every night”. John Mulligan lived through the Black Friday fires that burnt two million hectares of Victoria and killed 71 people. There were hundreds of fires in East Gippsland at that same time, but no major problems because the bush was kept clean by burning and grazing. John’s family weren’t worried, even when his uncle’s car repeatedly stopped because of vapour locks in the fuel lines with the extreme heat. John has formed the East Gippsland Wildfire Taskforce to try and restore sanity. If we get fires under the same weather conditions today, they’ll destroy everything from Bairnsdale to Sydney.

In this video, the VFFA President and Shooters Fishers and Farmers candidate for Monaro, Mick Holton talks to Barry Aitchison about land management.

Mick says that the NSW Government has failed to provide appropriate land management. The costs of this failure are hard to calculate, they include huge expenditure on firefighting, increased insurance premiums and reactive rather than proactive expenditure to correct land management disasters such as weeds, feral animals, water yield problems.