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Thanks for all your comments, information and observations during what will surely go down as the worst week in the peacetime history of modern Australia.

As we've traversed Victoria, driving from fire-affected communities to fire-endangered communities and back again, I have tried to keep up with all your posts and debates on my mobile and dust-covered laptop.

As I write, is carrying a story about how Canberra and the states passed up the opportunity to create a telephone-based alert system because of arguments over who should provide the $A20m in funding and which system worked best.

Certainly, the technology is available to send mobile and fixed phone messages to local residents whose lives and properties are threatened by advancing firefronts.

So once again, what some consider the dysfunctionality of the federal system, and the failure 108 years after federation to reach common agreement on what constitutes "the national interest", will be up for debate.

So, too, as your comments show, will be the question of pre-fire season burn-offs - controlled blazes in the winter which would destroy much of the fuel that makes bushfires so very angry and destructive in the summer.

Some of you will have probably seen to that debate. "It's the same old story," she said from London. 'We need to educate people, we need to also have a bit of courage and we probably need somebody to direct the operation.

"It's useless running around looking for arsonists. The arsonists are us. They are our government and our administrators. We have been stupid."

Here is the columnist Miranda Devine addressing the same question: "It wasn't climate change which killed as many as 300 people in Victoria last weekend. It wasn't arsonists. It was the unstoppable intensity of a bushfire, turbo-charged by huge quantities of ground fuel which had been allowed to accumulate over years of drought.

"It was the power of green ideology over government to oppose attempts to reduce fuel hazards before a megafire erupts, and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation to protect themselves."

Then there's the debate about whether there is a direct link between climate change and the wildfires, and whether global warming will be a threat multiplier.

As reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted back in 2007 that fires in Australia were "virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency" because of steadily warming temperatures over the next several decades.

Australia's very own CSIRO also predicted that by the end of the next decade, there could be up to 65% more "extreme" fire-danger days compared with 1990, and that by mid-century, there could be a 300% increase in such days.

The climate change debate raises another more frightening question: in Victoria this past week, have we seen a glimpse of the future?

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