The need to openly discuss bushfires is front and centre once again.
In a previous opinion piece, I touched on the severity of the fuel loads sitting in Victoria as they were in October 2024. Fast forward to January 2026, and the southern state has faced more devastating losses from recent blazes.
The first month of the year has been a tough one for many, particularly those directly affected. The loss of Ruffy, Victoria, was a grim reminder of Marysville, which was gutted during the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
In the aftermath of the devastation in Ruffy, local Country Fire Authority captain George Noye said the main street looked like “a bomb’s gone off”.
Harcourt Valley CFA captain Andrew Wilson was also quoted as saying the fire was one of the most intense he had fought in more than four decades as a firefighter. He said it burned harder than the fires he battled on Black Saturday and was “up there” with the Black Summer fires in NSW.
The Mt Lawson fire on the NSW border is believed to have most likely begun from a dry lightning strike in hot conditions. It became so fierce that within roughly 24 hours it had generated its own weather, forming a vast pyrocumulonimbus cloud with lightning and thunder.
In the thick of it, Emergency Management Commissioner Tim Wiebusch said the conditions experienced were unlike what had been seen in the 2009 and 2019 fire seasons.
More than 400,000 hectares have burnt so far — an area the article compares to a decent outback cattle station or roughly five times the size of Singapore.
Yes, these fires are destructive and partially fuelled by extreme weather conditions, but natural or climate-driven changes cannot be solely blamed for the intensity of a bushfire front.
While the state burned out of control, emergency leaders and political parties became locked in a heated debate over funding cuts to the CFA.
But a quick look at the yet-to-be-tabled 2024–25 CFA annual report reportedly showed the organisation had reached its highest level of funding in five years.
In October 2020, the Victorian Auditor-General’s office released an audit on reducing bushfire risks. It made 17 recommendations: 14 relating to fuel management for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning and the CFA, and the remaining three for DELWP alone. One recommendation related to land-use planning and two aimed to improve the Powerline Bushfire Safety Program.
All 17 recommendations were accepted.
The article raises an important question: if there is a healthy budget for the CFA, and the Auditor-General’s recommendations were accepted years ago, why are people still voicing concern about how fires are handled and about the fuel loads sitting around the countryside?
It also points to concerns around staffing cuts, noting that the loss of hundreds of jobs from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action’s bushfire forest services group last year did not help the cause.
Toward the end of the month, I asked a firefighter on the scene how things were looking and where the fires were. His reply was: “Where aren’t they in Victoria?”
This is a confronting question — and one that highlights the scale of the challenge still facing regional communities, emergency services and land managers.
For agriculture and rural communities, bushfires are not an abstract policy debate. They affect homes, farms, livestock, infrastructure, landscapes and livelihoods. Questions around preparedness, fuel loads, land management, funding and frontline resourcing continue to matter deeply.
By Libbe Paton, a Future Farmers Network director, managing director at Paton Rural and grazier at Mitta Mitta, Victoria.
