Climate Change Policies Are Hurting Australian Bushfire Victims

Bureaucrats are chasing a Blue Mountains homeowner for alleged environmental infringements. 2GB’s Alan Jones reported that David Wilpour, a 72-year-old man, who lives in Dargan, is in trouble with the local council, and an obscure state government department because he had ‘cleared his land to make it fire safe after he had received permission from Lithgow City council to do so.’  Now, in a bizarre turnaround, the council ‘claims that it never gave him permission to do so.’

Talking to Jones on-air, Wilpour alleges that Lithgow City council, ‘reported him to the DCCW (NSW Department of Climate Change and Water), who refused him entry to his land, including holding up requests for building on the property until they were able to interview him. Something they said could take up to two years.’ Wilpour told Jones that he was eventually interviewed, after seven attempts to contact the Department.

As a consequence of the Lithgow council reporting Wilpour, the DCCW allegedly told him that he may have to pay up to $186,000 in fines or be forced to revegetate his land.

It’s worth noting that this is after Wilpour, who according to The Australian’s Elias Visontay, back in December, stayed to defend his own home, and despite only having one arm, helped firefighters fight off flames heading towards his neighbour’s house.

In his defence, Wilpour pointed out that living in the Bush comes with caveats, stating that he’d told members of the local council that he ‘knows people love living in the bush, but you have to take precautions; and if Council is going to allow subdivision in the bush, then they’ll have to allow people to make them fire safe’. Wilpour also said that he’d been warning of the conditions on the ground for years, noting the potential for disaster.

This is why Wilpour discarded weak Council advice on fire prevention, noting the impractical provisions and restrictions within a council directive telling landowners what they could and couldn’t do in regards to hazard prevention. Wilpour saved his property by choosing to discard that “advice”. Acting on permission from council to reduce the hazard, meant that his house was not on the list of approximately 17 houses consumed by the Gosper Mountain fire.

Wilpour is one example of how Climate Change policies are hurting Australians. The long list of bushfire victims is another. This is why Jones is justified in saying that this bureaucratic attack on Wilpour has left him ‘speechless and astonished’, because

[bureaucrats] ‘knew there was too much fuel on the grounds in national parks. They knew councils were unprepared for what was going to be a catastrophe. They knew councils had locked up fire trails. They knew fire breaks in national parks had been allowed to grow over. It was only a matter of time.’

In his final comments on the case, Jones noted the ridiculous nature of this kind of government over-reach, and the peculiar department involved in it, conceding that not much will change ‘because we don’t have a government with the guts enough to challenge these people.’

The NSW Department for Climate change and water is real. However, there’s no official Government website or easily accessible information about it. The department appears to be a subsidiary division of the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment.

The DCCW has an about page on the Environment.nsw.gov.au website, but there is no information describing role, function, or purpose. The only thing that pops up is one sentence stating that ‘The format and structure of this publication may have been adapted for web delivery. Page last updated: 26^th February 2011.’

This political posturing against Wilpour is as nonsensical as banning petrol and diesel-powered combustion engines. Done in order to placate activists, who claim to know what the climate is doing, but who deny the beauty and uniqueness of the biological union between a man and a woman, and who defines a biological woman and man, as fluid, in other words, whatever anyone wants it to be.

Such nonsense from bureaucrats proves that those how to espouse it are not worthy of our trust. It’s not pragmatic nor is it compassionate. It’s reactionary; serving to pad the coffers of the inner-city elites who keep preaching fear through their apocalyptic climate change lens. A lens built on a prevailing hypothesis from a very young field of science that scientists themselves still know very little about.

The conclusion here has to be that this move is more about government placating eco-fascist dogma than protecting the environment. This is government, including the Greens, hindering, rather than helping victims of the Bushfires recover, rebuild, and restore.

David Wilpour questioned the new normal and saved his property for doing so. Now he’s in the firing line of bureaucrats because of it.

Instead of hammering Wilpour for breaching some kind of “climate change law”, and instead of dispatching officers from the Department of Climate Change to interview (or rather intimidate) Wilpour, it appears that bureaucrats should be going to Wilpour for advice, not threatening him for ignoring theirs.

Wilpour isn’t an outlaw, he’s a bloody hero!