SCENIC Rim Councillor Marshall Chalk has lived on and managed high country properties all his life and now he has issued a warning to newcomers about dangers hidden in plain sight.
“Most people don’t understand the cost of managing land,” he said.
“It is a real worry for our region.
“People are buying big blocks of land and think they are being nature conscious by just letting them green over.
“We’ve experienced some really bad bushfires in the past and my worry is if it happens again, it will be a disaster because there is just so much fuel load to burn now.
“The local firies did an amazing job last time but I worry if it happens again, we won’t have the same luck.
“There is a real naivety of people coming up here, they don’t realise that its beautiful one day and deadly the next.”
He said Scenic Rim Council had planning in place to educate new residents on how to mitigate some of the risks associated with managing large blocks of land.
“Mitigating risk can be hard because the state government pulls the strings and they have different priorities to what we have locally,” he said.
“[State Government] don’t understand or know how to manage the land, a lot of fires are starting in national parks and spreading onto private land and then it’s our problem to deal with when it’s essentially their fires.
“That’s the frustrating part, we are managing ours the best we can but our neighbours, who are the higher levels of government, don’t invest as much in their areas as we do in ours.
“They complain when they’re destroyed but they’re not taking preventative measures the way we are.”
He said nowadays everything was blamed on climate change but damaging bushfires had been happening for hundreds of years.
“Even if there was no climate change it would still happen,” he said.
“It’s about management and if climate change is occurring then we need to be managing the land a lot better than we are right now.”