I don't know about Australia, but here in Northern California, that's not how it works. 500 years ago, forest fires were common, cool burning, and did more good than harm. Today, it's been so long since the previous fire that there's a huge amount of underbrush and dead material. When a fire comes through, it's so hot that it kills everything, including huge, old growth doug fir trees. However, it's not hot enough to actually incinerate the old growth trees, so you get left with a bunch of standing deads, and plenty of dead wood for another fire.
Planned burns are a thing here in Australia. It has turned into a bit of a populist talking point amongst certain people. The truth is that the time window to safely do burns in winter has sort of disappeared. Plus these fires have been intense enough to jump through places that have been burnt. As anecdata, I grew up in Southern Australia and little bushfires were common every summer. Occasionally a big one. I've moved to south east Queensland and never really seen any significant bushfires in the past decade (if I did it was government doing a planned burn in a national park). It is sub tropical, usually pretty wet in summer (sometimes with a drought, but usually much, much wetter than say east coast of tasmania). These last few years are different. The national parks I go to for walks are super dry. Creeks are dried up that are usually running. I had that scary feeling I had from my youth of smelling smoke on a hike and worrying about fire. It isn't something I have had for a long time.
Yes. That is what has started to happen. I live in Lake Tahoe for a number of years and you'd regularly see signs posted "Controlled Burn in progress, do not report" with smoke in the distance.
The problem is that there isn't enough money for the man powered required to control burn everything. And 50 to 100 years of "don't let anything burn" has led to a LOT of areas with a lot of build up. Those areas require a lot of care to controlled burn correctly and are often way way WAY out there - making it harder/more expensive to control.
There is also the problem of encroachment of civilization on the forests. At least in CA there are houses basically built into the forrest, or right up to the edge. How do you burn those areas assuring the residence 100% safety?
That has been practised for a long time in Australia. Ironically and sadly the authorities responsible are now reducing their controlled burning because they say there are too few days in the year when it is safe to do so due to climate change.
We could, but we don't do enough of it because of liability risks. Imagine if the controlled burn goes out of control, and burns down <someone's lakehouse/dacha/cabin/dog/three month old baby>.
People will be in the streets, crying for blood, and won't give up until the Department of Controlled Forest Burns is dissolved, and its executives are sleeping in the Bay, wearing cement overshoes.
Yes, you can buy insurance for this sort of thing, but no, money doesn't grow on trees, and insuring your controlled burn program is not going to come cheap.
Not sure where you are, but controlled burns are common in California. And it's expected that a small portion of them get out of control. Source: my neighbor, who's a retired wildland firefighter.
