Better bushfire safety decision-making: Making sense of complexities and challenges surrounding ‘Stay or Go’ and the Australian Fire Danger Rating System

Abstract

In the context of bushfires (and other emergencies), state agencies should avoid developing policy and/or advice that locks people into rigid binary choices. In Victoria, Australia post-fire inquiries have found the bushfire safety advice often referred to as ‘Stay (and defend your property) or Go (early before the fire arrives)’ to be contradictory and competing in its logic. However, this advice continues to provide a basis for positive community safety outcomes. It can still be used effectively by policy makers and practitioners within emergency management agencies to inform and educate a highly urbanised society that has become experientially detached from bushfire. With the introduction of the Australian Fire Danger Ratings System and climate challenges ahead, it appears that logics at the core of ‘Stay or Go’ will continue to offer communities located alongside complex bushfire risk in urban, regional, and rural areas a basis for appropriate safety decisions using the best available information.

Points for practitioners

• Provides guidelines for ways in which ‘Stay or Go’ advice can continue to be used by emergency management policy makers and practitioners as a basis for positive community safety outcomes from bushfire risk.
• Challenges suggestions from significant bushfire inquiries that the logics at the core of ‘Stay or Go’ contradict each other. Staying and defending a home or leaving early offer a basis for surviving bushfire depending on individual circumstances—practitioners should ensure that this is a key message of bushfire education campaigns.
• Provides pathways for practitioners and the community to work together and co-create collaborative bushfire plans whereby preparing for bushfire risk is a shared responsibility.