One of the critical issues here is the endorsement that John Brumby has provided to the head of the CFA. Announcing reappointment!

This is a familiar political and business play to limit any suggestion of mismanagement or systematic inadequacy. Failure to reappoint the leader is an implicit admission of liability, it is evidence used in civil proceedings.

I’d suggest that the government is taking this decision to limit exposure to liability rather than to maintain the effectiveness of the CFA.

Go ahead. Demand Rees’ head from a pedestal, for all I care.

I’m not in a position to do that, Robert, and neither are you. My concern is for the process: to jump ahead and declare the whole investigation a farce, a kangaroo court or whatever is as rash as claiming (or implying) that I’m gunning for Russell Rees.

Royal Commissions are mighty things, but also quite fragile in the early stages. It’s too early to say that this one is a witch-hunt, just as it’s too early to say that it has everything that anyone could want. Commentators – with pedestal or not – have no business jumping in and trying to jerk the direction of investigations toward this or away from that.

They were NOT Brumby Govt consultations, they were run by the Royal Commission. Not all who sent in a submission appeared as witnesses, but I’m confident all submissions have been read.

If the CFA was a purely professional organization, sacking the CEO and giving him carte blanche to sack anyone he needs to, to achieve the cultural change he wants, stands some chance of success. But only some – how has replacing the coach worked for the Richmond footy club over the past 20 years?

The CFA is a largely volunteer-run organization. If you try and impose an alien culture and values from the top down, all you will achieve is that the volunteers will piss off and do something else.

Go ahead. Demand Rees’ head from a pedestal, for all I care. Robert Manne certainly is. But unless greater appreciation is paid to why the CFA are like they are, any attempt to change the way they do things is doomed to failure.

Maybe it can become another Melbourne ritual – a horrible set of fires, followed by a winter of drizzle, cold wind, Aussie Rules, and a system-not-individual Royal Commission. The Commissioner can choose when to release the report on that year’s fires: in September (if the news is bad, it gets buried by the AFL finals; if good, everyone’s happy and the Commissioner goes into the birdcage at the Melbourne Cup).

It’s OK for people to be burned physically, but as long as nobody’s burnt career-wise then that’s OK, eh Robert? You can’t know what difference Rees will or won’t make until the findings are clearer than they are today.

Ambigulous: it’s one thing to put an ad in the paper, but on the day the Commission was announced the Commissioner should have said explicitly that he will read any and all submissions his own self. The Brumby government has form on “community consultation”.

That said, it’s not just about climate. The 2003 and 2006 fires were comparable in size, but didn’t cause mass casualties because we didn’t get that furnace northerly and the fires were away from heavily populated areas.

To some exent I’m indulging in the gambler’s fallacy, but I reckon the odds of a repeat of Black Saturday next year are pretty low.

It’s pretty unlikely we’ll see another fire as bad as Black Saturday for a while – in the past, I would have said a generation, with climate change, maybe a decade. In any case, by the time it happens again Rees, and anyone else that this inquiry nails, will be long retired.