Ya Australian firefighters are really good, they actually fly up here to the northwestern US to battle blazes in their off season. They often eat at the restaur

Ya Australian firefighters are really good, they actually fly up here to the northwestern US to battle blazes in their off season. They often eat at the restaurants by the airport here in Boise. I don't know how the politics in Australia work, but the main problem in the US is that the states with the biggest fire problems are democratic (California, Oregon and Washington) so are under constant pressure from republicans to have their federal fire budgets lowered, or are republican like Idaho and vote for smaller federal budgets anyway. For a bit of background, this crisis has been playing out for over a century. Republicans supported the large timber, mining and ranching lobbies that clearcut the old growth forests of the northwest, poisoned the water with mercury/arsenic and desertified grasslands. Fire prevention measures left forests too thick with young trees of the wrong species that can't survive burns and the loss of native species on the high desert makes range fires larger and more intense. Global warming has raised winter temperatures to the point that pine beetles no longer freeze out, so most forests are sick or dying as their phloem is stripped by the beetles (similar things are happening with invader aphids on the east coast as their forests die). Democratic environmentalists worked to stop public land mismanagement but were largely mocked until it was too late. This is primarily a republican problem, because democrats vote for solutions but are mostly outvoted in these times. The closest thing to blaming democrats for this would be via political horse trading, so maybe democrats pushed wedge issues like abortion or affirmative action so republicans attacked democratic causes like the environment in response. Or maybe democrats looked the other way as a trade for getting their own causes through. But the evidence suggests that when it comes to fires specifically, there is no "both sides" argument here. The messed up part is that the politics don't carry over to firefighters. It wouldn't surprise me if they are majority republican, or at the very least conservative. Working hard but being undercut by their party. Some help is on the way with new federal fire disaster funding put forth by republicans: https://www.crapo.senate.gov/media/newsreleases/crapo-wyden-risch-simpson-acting-usfs-cheif-christiansen-to-discuss-new-fire-disaster-funding-program https://www.crapo.senate.gov/media/newsreleases/crapo-wyden-... But keep in mind that this is a thinly-veiled attempt to reintroduce the timber industry and "thin the threat" rather than letting trees burn. Personally I'm against this, as I've seen extraction lobbyists run roughshod over the environment here. But I've also noticed that younger republicans here, especially hunters and anglers, support protecting public lands and regulating resource extraction more intelligently than in the past in order to protect natural resources for future generations. So time will tell. I've tried to make this as factual as I can, but it's inherently a political issue. I don't mean to offend, just inform.