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Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie
February 12, 2009
After suffering court action that cost the family $100,000, Liam Sheahan believes clearing trees saved his home and his family. Photo: Paul Rovere
They were labelled law breakers, fined $50,000 and left emotionally and financially drained.
But seven years after the Sheahans bulldozed trees to make a fire break ââ¬â an act that got them dragged before a magistrate and penalised ââ¬â they feel vindicated. Their house is one of the few in Reedy Creek, Victoria, still standing.
Bureau of Meteorology predicts conditions for Victorians firefighters with winds easing throughout the weekend.
The Sheahans' 2004 court battle with the Mitchell Shire Council for illegally clearing trees to guard against fire, as well as their decision to stay at home and battle the weekend blaze, encapsulate two of the biggest issues arising from the bushfire tragedy.
Do Victoria's native vegetation management policies need a major overhaul? And should families risk injury or death by staying home to fight the fire rather than fleeing?
Anger at government policies stopping residents from cutting down trees and clearing scrub to protect their properties is already apparent. "We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down," Warwick Spooner told Nillumbik Mayor Bo Bendtsen at a meeting on Tuesday night.
Although Liam Sheahan's 2002 decision to disregard planning laws and bulldoze 250 trees on his hilltop property hurt his family financially and emotionally, he believes it helped save them and their home on the weekend.
"The house is safe because we did all that," he said as he pointed out his kitchen window to the clear ground where tall gum trees once cast a shadow on his house.
"We have got proof right here. We are the only house standing in a two-kilometre area."
At least seven houses and several sheds on neighbouring properties along Thompson-Spur road in Reedy Creek were destroyed by Saturday night's blaze.
Saving their home was no easy task. At 2pm on Saturday, Mr Sheahan saw the nearby hills ablaze.
He knew what lay ahead when the predicted south-westerly change came.
The family of four had discussed evacuation but decided their property was defensible, due largely to their decision to clear a fire break. It also helped that Mr Sheahan, his son Rowan and daughter Kirsten were all experienced members of the local CFA.
"We prayed and we worked bloody hard. Our house was lit up eight times by the fire as the front passed," Mr Sheahan said. "The elements off our TV antenna melted. We lost a Land Rover, two Subarus, a truck and trailer and two sheds."
Mr Sheahan is still angry about his prosecution, which cost him $100,000 in fines and legal fees. The council's planning laws allow trees to be cleared only when they are within six metres of a house. Mr Sheahan cleared trees up to 100 metres away from his house.
"The council stood up in court and made us to look like the worst, wanton environmental vandals on the earth. We've got thousands of trees on our property. We cleared about 247," he said.
He said the royal commission on the fires must result in changes to planning laws to allow land owners to clear trees and vegetation that pose a fire risk.
"Both the major parties are pandering to the Greens for preferences and that is what is causing the problem. Common sense isn't that common these days," Mr Sheahan said.
Melbourne University bushfire expert Kevin Tolhurst gave evidence to help the Sheahan family in their legal battle with the council.
"Their fight went over nearly two years. The Sheahans were victimised. It wasn't morally right," he said yesterday.
Dr Tolhurst told the Seymour Magistrates court that Mr Sheahan's clearing of the trees had reduced the fire risk to his house from extreme to moderate.
"That their house is still standing is some natural justice for the Sheahans," he said.
He said council vegetation management rules required re-writing. He also called on the State Government to provide clearer guidelines about when families should stay and defend their property.
Houses in fire-prone areas should be audited by experts to advise owners whether their property is defensible, Dr Tolhurst said.
Mr Sheahan said he wanted others to learn from his experience and offered an invitation for Government ministers to visit his property.
He would also like his convictions overturned and fines repaid.
"It would go a long way to making us feel better about the system. But I don't think it will happen."
http://www.smh.com.au/national/fined-for...ml?page=-1
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Green ideas must take blame for deaths
Miranda Devine
February 12, 2009
It wasn't climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn't arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought. It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves.
So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.
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.
In July 2007 Scott Gentle, the Victorian manager of Timber Communities Australia, who lives in Healesville where two fires were still burning yesterday, gave testimony to a Victorian parliamentary bushfire inquiry so prescient it sends a chill down your spine.
"Living in an area like Healesville, whether because of dumb luck or whatever, we have not experienced a fire ââ¬Â¦ since ââ¬Â¦ about 1963. God help us if we ever do, because it will make Ash Wednesday look like a picnic." God help him, he was right.
Gentle complained of obstruction from green local government authorities of any type of fire mitigation strategies. He told of green interference at Kinglake - at the epicentre of Saturday's disaster, where at least 147 people died - during a smaller fire there in 2007.
"The contractors were out working on the fire lines. They put in containment lines and cleared off some of the fire trails. Two weeks later that fire broke out, but unfortunately those trails had been blocked up again [by greens] to turn it back to its natural state ââ¬Â¦ Instances like that are just too numerous to mention. Governments ââ¬Â¦ have been in too much of a rush to appease green idealism ââ¬Â¦ This thing about locking up forests is just not working."
The Kinglake area was a nature-loving community of tree-changers, organic farmers and artists to the north of Melbourne. A council committed to reducing carbon emissions dominates the Nillumbik shire, a so-called "green wedge" area, where restrictions on removing vegetation around houses reportedly added to the dangers. In nearby St Andrews, where more than 20 people are believed to have died, surviving residents have spoken angrily of "greenies" who prevented them from cutting back trees near their property, including in one case, a tea tree that went "whoomp". Dr Phil Cheney, the former head of the CSIRO's bushfire research unit and one of the pioneers of prescribed burning, said yesterday if the fire-ravaged Victorian areas had been hazard-reduced, the flames would not have been as intense.
Kinglake and Maryville, now crime scenes, are built among tall forests of messmate stringy bark trees which pose a special fire hazard, with peeling bark creating firebrands that carry fire five kilometres out. "The only way to reduce the flammability of the bark is by prescribed burning" every five to seven years, Cheney said. He estimates between 35 and 50 tonnes a hectare of dry fuel were waiting to be gobbled up by Saturday's inferno.
Fuel loads above about eight tonnes a hectare are considered a fire hazard. A federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 heard that a fourfold increase in ground fuel leads to a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire.
Things are no better in NSW, although we don't quite have Victoria's perfect storm of winds and forest types. Near Dubbo two years ago, as a bushfire raged through the Goonoo Community Conservation Area, volunteer firefighters bulldozing a control line were obstructed by National Parks and Wildlife Service employees who had driven from Sydney to stop vegetation being damaged.
The poor management of national parks and state forests in Victoria is highlighted by the interactive fire map on the website of the Department of Sustainability and Environment. Yesterday it showed that, of 148 fires started since mid-January, 120 started in state forests, national parks, or other public land, and just 21 on private property.
Only seven months ago, the Victorian Parliament's Environment and Natural Resources Committee tabled its report into the impact of public land management on bushfires, with five recommendations to enhance prescribed burning. This included tripling the amount of land to be hazard-reduced from 130,000 to 385,000 hectares a year. There has been little but lip service from the Government in response. 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.
There is an opening now in Victoria for a predatory legal firm with a taste for David v Goliath class actions.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/green-idea...ml?page=-1
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This is a problem, because if you want to live in the bush, why cut down the trees that surround your home? Yet I see the point of why this man did do this and now his home is safe from the fires, yet the flames were at an incredible height and the embers from these huge trees being thrown in 100km winds and with a back draught temp so intense, nothing could stop it. There were fires in Bendigo that started in some bushland, yet the conditions of the day took out a few blocks of suburbia, so no huge trees, just embers flying from house to house in the winds, yet this fire was contained much quicker because there was no bush to fuel it.
So what do we do, I agree totally that the DSE and their insane need to lock up the bush is what has fed this fire, yet I agree that the animals depend on lush forest in order to survive and it is important for the environment to have such areas, but one spark and its all over, I do not have the answers and I wish someone did.
All the fires in my area have been contained, yet the fires still burning miles away have created a haze of smoke each day, and it is hard to breathe outside, at sunset the sun glows orange. It is just so sad.
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What does one do in such situation Kaz?
Simple. People I know in the bush and in inner suburbia have done it without getting fined. Give the tree 4-5gallons or 20litres of deisel or 1 litre of pure undiluted Round-Up and see what happens to the tree.
Disease can strike a plant at anytime really. icon_rolleyes
I know it sounds drastic, but so is fining someone for wanting to clear a tree or two that surrounds their property. They've devasted the entire coastal forests that ran up the entire East coast of Australia, they're raping the trees in Tassie and elsewhere, and I don't see any of them screaming blue murder over that.
Revenue raising IMO... stuff them. I'm sick of the bastards stealing money off people under the guise of being a pack of goody-2-shoes. That includes the pigs. Speeding fines, traffic offenses and the like have become major busness here. So what do teh councils do? Monkey see monkey do.
After all, none of us as natural human entites are bound by any of their laws. All their laws are Corporate Laws that they fool people into thinking they're obliged to pay under the proposterous Corporate name entity that they issue us with at their will. For instance, I'm not MR.ANDREW.X... as they would pretend I am when issueing any fine, court order or legal demand for property of any sort. They invented the name (for instance) MR.ANDREW.X - not me. My true and only name is Andrew from the family X... all in lower case not upper case and NO TITLE. MR.ANDREW.X is a corporate entity that they have invented to allow the duristriction over the natural entity of Andrew from the family X. When in court, if one makes them distinguish the difference, then they have no duristriction over you. Simple. Case closed before it even began. Why on EARTH would anyone pay their fines? Unless they are unaware of the game these fraudsters play.
Our ReverveBank, all our courts, every States police force, our councils, the RTA and many other seemingly goverment owned bodies are in fact Corporate entities - registered Incorperations with their very own ACN and ABN numbers and all owned by private enteprises, not government. What on earth is a corporate entity trying to do in asking and pretending to demand that a natural entity owes them money when there will NOT be any goods of exchange in the transaction?? Corporate Law forbids that. That's called FRAUD, and it is. When people don't knwo this, they fall for their deceit which allows them full duristriction over them. If instead they spaced themselves from their psuedo corporate name, and delclared themselves as an AGENT only for their corporate name, the authorities are then stuffed. No duristriction over the natural entity at all... which means they cannot make you pay for anything they have issued to the corporate entity as you are NOT that entity. We are all soverigns, not corporates. Common Law supercedes or is above any Admiral or Corporate Law.
This applies in any country that is owned by the Masons. They set it up like that and its worked really well for them in the past 100 odd years when people were illiterate, misinformed or not informed at all as to their rights and the game they play.
Mississippi and many other States in the US have all filed for soverignty and they'll get it very soon. Unless Marshal Law is imposed as it's the only law above Common Law. Chief Russell Means has declared and won the full soverignty of his people in the States. They are now no longer under the duristriction of any Law in the States... especially not Corporate Law. People are rushing to join their newly formed Independant State - Indians and White alike. Why can't we do it here?. The aborigines can, and no doubt will very soon. See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p8Tz2H2oIk
See here also for playing them at their own game here, and look at what will soon be owed to the Aborigines here (3rd video down the list, MarkMcMurtrie), you'll be shocked. :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcXPjkaH...re=related
http://www.thecrowhouse.com/mcmurtrie.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCy2uYi1x...27&index=0
http://www.thecrowhouse.com/strawman.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76ZEBq66gzg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf5ZrUVL0gU...feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTpnL48Beqk...feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVg4vA8mraA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpESn0mxSdk...feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGHQDquNkro...feature=related
Got any fines at the moment Karen? Tell em to shove it. And if you cut down a tree near your place and they book you for it... tell them the same.
They have no right, they never did... they only pretended they did.
The times they are a changing.
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Andrew X,
Interesting point and no I do not have any fines, nor do I want to cut down any trees, I just do not see this happening on a wide scale, but I totally agree with your opinion on government bodies!
Yet all bodies can not find a balance, a rule/law is introduced and it requires a medium, and then that rule has a zillion by-laws, what ifs! I could live in a world without authority, because I do not respect nor fear it, so it does not govern my life, yet 99% of the population could not survive without rules/laws to abide by or be determined to break.
I see the entire system for the corrupt cycle that it is, yet the general population just see cops, lawyers, governments and penalties, not as a form of controlled chaos, but as life! They accept that a person with a badge or a government official has authority over them, so they either want to rebel or be a sheep.
People are just like the authorities, they feed off each other, someone told me yesterday that they knew some people that went into centrelink and said they had been affected by these fires, they received the money that the government is giving to the victims, yet these people are not affected, then you have those others that are going to these burnt homes and looting, like what the hell! How low do you have to be to steal from someone who has just lost everything? It is people like this that create the reason for such stupid laws and ridiculous expectations.
I am afraid to say that I agree with all that you say Andrew, but at the end of the day the majority of the population could not live in a world without being told what they can do!
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Total sense Karen. I wish you hadn't stop.
The yin and yan of our socities outlook on them does occur as a sort of balance, no doubt.
The freeman does in a way start to be ' them' as you say. But sayings such as rule or be ruled come to mind. What can you do? Your damned if you do or don't. Another one of life's little sicknesses in a way. But I'm sure you can take your power back, or be in control using this method without having to resort to the old macho tactics. If they try to force anything down you, all you need do is say to them, "ok, I will comply under stress and duress". Then if need be, you can have your day in court.
Ultimately its best to never get involved with such filth, but they sometimes bring the fight to you. Don't know how to avoid them totally really, but its best if one can, no doubt.
Yeah, I came from a very strict upbringing Karen, and lived in Carlton for over 30years. In the early days it was the Broadmeadows of Melb - I'm talking the 60's and earlier. At night it was an extremely dark suburb, with only 1 measly light every couple of blocks. Gangs were always on the prowl for someone to beat to death.
The dream totally ended about the time I hit 12 from memory, when I turned the corner on my way to primary school in the morning and there were what looked like 6 plain clothsed men. 2 were holding up a guy against the wall and another 2 had guns in their hands pointing at the bloke whose face was being squashed against teh wall by the other 2 who held him. I didn't realize wtf was going on so I turned and ran like mad. One of them, would you believe set chase after me and after about 50m of spriniting, I started pulling away from him. He was a bit fat and I could run like the clappers at that age and stood over 5&aHalffoot tall... I was the second tallest in a school of over 400 kids. Then I looked over my shoulder and he yelled "Stop!! this is the Police!!" as he pointed his gun straight at me. I wouldn't have stopped had he not said he was a cop... I was getting ready to start snaking my path randomly as I was running and was only a few metres away from a laneway that I would have bolted down. So I stopped and he asked what I was running from. I asked if he was joking, and he just about wacked me. The hide on the prick. So I explained, he checked my bag to find books and pencils in it and let me go.
Believe it or not, I never told my parents as I knew my mum would have died if she'd heard. I was also worried about having to be escorted to school every morning, so I didn't tell them.lolol I mean, it's one thing being mummy's little boy, but it's another when everyone knows about it.LOLOL Oh, denial can be such fun.  lolol But I can assure you Karen that this changed my outlook of them...totally. Plus by then I'd heard alot from others in school about them so it wasn't hard to sway me. By 16, my life and character went through total morphisis. They'd sown the seed, so it just grew. This is what many of the younger cops don't realise. If they did, things might be quite different for them... and their double faced stance on proving guilt when one is claimed to be innocent doesn't aid their cause one bit either.
Interesting when you think about it all, you're not wrong.
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Interesting story Andrew X,
Your experience is exactly what I am saying, a young boy sees men with guns, then they ask you why were you running, like you had something to hide or you were guilty of something. I like to call them the evil necessity of society, because could you imagine life without them? I am sure most of them join and actually think they can make society a better place, yet they do not realize that they are part of a system that they can not control, nor change! They belong to a hierarchy just like all of our societal systems.
The systems are structured to keep society separated, so it is that old philosophy of cops and robbers, they want people to make, sell and take drugs, they want us to drive our cars over the limit, why would they make cars that can reach a top speed of 260 or more, when the limit is 100?
Itââ¬â¢s all a big con to keep us enthralled into energy of rebellion, refusal and denial, so we do not see the bigger picture. We are lucky to live in this country, because I think as a society, we still have plenty of rights to disagree or fight rules and regulations that we may oppose.
All these things distract us from our true source of spirit, because we get locked into lower energy. Everyday living is a hard call!
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