Today in Sydney a hand-selected assembly of no more than 150 'stakeholders' will be letting the koalas of NSW know that they are government experts and are here to help. If koala policy is a mess, which it is, expect the Koala Summit and its foregone conclusions to make a bad and cruel situation a good deal worse

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Few images are more effective in opening wallets than pictures of distressed koalas, whose sad state the accompanying ad copy inevitably insists is due to logging of old growth forests. Like just about everything the greenies assert when out for cash, it simply isn't true. What science rather than spin tells us is that the Great Koala National Park will fail the very creatures its spruikers insist they are defending

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Black Summer proved beyond doubt that explosive scrub, koala plagues and megafires go hand in hand. This was already obvious from the Strzelecki Ranges, where Victoria’s supposedly last natural population is still unnaturally dense after 20 megafires in 200 years. But The Greens never let facts get in the way of a good enviro scare

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The news from those who profess to be experts is that koalas are teetering on the brink of extinction, a dire situation for which the solution appears to be more grants and higher profiles for the more quotable doom-ringers. The truth, as evidenced by history and principled research, is that koala populations always have and always fluctuate wildly

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Koalas are cute so fanciful tales of their allegedly imminent extinction work a treat as donation magnets and grant generators, although not for the bush and less favoured species whose survival depends on sensible fire management. While alarums are rung for a species doing just fine, who gives a thought to the truly endangered but far less cuddly broad-headed snake?

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Three professors, each a 'fire expert' of sorts, confirm that wisdom about broken clocks. They are correct in writing that burning 'can actually make forests more flammable'. What they fail to grasp, and perhaps even to recognise, is that hazard-reduction burning comes in different varieties and, guided by theorists and ignited by bureaucrats, we're torturing the bush with the wrong kind of fire

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Pestilence is happening across the country in forests sick from a lack of mild burning. At the same time, millions of dollars are being thrown at academics to study ‘diebacks’ that are, of course, supposedly a consequence of anthropogenic climate change. The truth is far more simple: the bush is dying due to neglect and the determined ignorance of its current stewards

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Koalas are famously said to be capable of shutting down one half of their brains to conserve energy, which makes sense given their nutrient-poor diet. Improbably, expensively and needlessly, koala experts and their political patrons appear to have aped this half-witted approach to foil an 'extinction crisis' that is nothing of the sort

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The fact of the matter is simplicity itself: the longer forest fuels are allowed to accumulate, the bigger and harder to control will be the resulting bushfire. And here's another simple rule: you'll never win a Eureka Prize by detailing a concept so blindingly obvious, not when global warming is both the preferred culprit and scapegoat for the fire bureaucracy's massive failures

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The national broadcaster is spruiking 'Fires', its six-part series on 2020's Black Summer, which I will leave to drama critics to evaluate. Episode Three, however, cannot be allowed to pass without comment, as its premise holds that global warming spawned the infernos. Given that serial wrongologist Tim Flannery is treated as a credible authority, no surprise there

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