E&OE
9 February 2009
Interview - BBC
Subjects: Bushfires
JOURNALIST: Well, we can speak now to Australia's Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, who joins us on the line. Stephen Smith, your Prime Minister was lost for words, how would you describe the people who are starting these fires deliberately?
STEPHEN SMITH: Well, we have to take it step by step. Certainly police and fire investigators suspect that some of these fires may have been started deliberately. Anyone, of course, who is guilty of arson deserves nothing than the highest condemnation but we need to go through all of our investigative processes for that but in the face of our worst natural disaster, in the face of the most devastating natural tragedy we've seen, the notion that some or part of this could have been caused by deliberate human conduct is gobsmacking and does beggar belief and if people are guilty of such acts then they deserve nothing but absolute condemnation.
JOURNALIST: Australia, of course, is used to very hot weather but it has been really, really fierce, the heat, hasn't it, in recent weeks? Has that contributed, do you think, to these bushfires?
SMITH: There's no doubt that a sustained period of low rainfall over a number of years, the very hot recent weather in the south-east of Australia has, if you like, caused or created the environment where what are clearly our worst bushfires in the nation's history.
Now we've got 131 confirmed dead. Up until these terrible events the two bushfires historically that we refer to occurred in January 1939, what was known as Black Friday, and then in February 1983, Ash Wednesday, and the fatalities for both of those were in the 70s and in 1983 on Ash Wednesday the fatalities were across both Victoria and South Australia. Here we've already got 131 out of Victoria, 750 homes at least destroyed, we've got 10 people on the critical list, over 330,000 hectares have been destroyed by the fire, so we are, as the Prime Minister said today and as the Deputy Prime Minister said when she addressed the House, we have to steel ourselves for worse, for worse information to come, for more terrible bad news.
We are gravely concerned that the fatalities will increase over the coming period.
JOURNALIST: And some Australians are already saying isn't it time now that Australia thinks again about its climate change policy? That maybe even further measures must be required?
SMITH: Well, I don't want to talk in terms of public policy or argument about public policy at a time like this. Suffice to say that in the south-east of Australia we have these terrible bushfires and in the north-east, in Queensland, we have a perverse situation where the north of Queensland is now under terrible floodwaters and we've got about 40 per cent of the state of Queensland which is declared drought now under feet of water through floods. So we've got the extremes of climate at both ends of the continent.
For the moment what we are absolutely concentrating on is tending for those people who have been left injured and homeless. There's been a fantastic reaction to the Victorian bushfire fund which has been launched by the Premier of Victoria in conjunction with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. In one day we've had a A$10 million response so we're focusing now on trying to tend to those people who have been left homeless and who've lost their loved ones and look after the injured and then start the painstaking job of rebuilding and reconstructing and there's been a fantastic across-the-Parliament, across-political parties, across-community support for that.
Today we didn't have a question time in the Parliament, we simply had a condolence motion for the victims and that really reflects the fact that at the moment the only thoughts that the nation has, the only prayers that the nation has, are for those people who've been terribly affected and this is a lot for Australia to have to swallow on but we're doing it with our usual resilience and our usual strength and there have been many number of reports of great courage and great heroism either by volunteer fire-fighters or just by neighbours and community members who have gone out of their way to save people or to get people out of harm's way.
JOURNALIST: All right. Australia's Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.
SMITH: Thank you.
[Ends]
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