By Phil Mercer in Sydney

The forests and grasslands of south-eastern Australia makes it one of the most bush fire-prone regions to be found anywhere, especially during its hot, dry summers.

As Sydney's Christmas bush fire emergency eases, the big question is what can be done to stop it all happening again.

There are two main issues. Arson - and how offenders should be punished - and fire prevention through a process called back-burning.

The problem is you cannot have a completely blackened landscape and people don't like smoke

Scientist Jim Gould

This is where fires are deliberately set by emergency teams to burn giant buffer zones in the path of the wildfires. The aim is to starve them of fuel and stop their advance.

The New South Wales Government is accused of scaling down its back-burning programme.

In 1993 just under 50,000 hectares of bushland was cleared by managed fires. Last year the figure was less than 20,000 hectares.

Ministers insist bush fire prevention remains a priority.

Days of relentless work has left firefighters exhausted

But the state opposition is calling for a parliamentary inquiry.

Its environmental protection spokesman John Brogden says the safety of fire fighters demands better disaster planning.

"They are putting their lives at risk doing back-burns in the middle of the worst fire season this state has ever seen, when they could have been doing controlled burns in the safer winter months," he said.

Powerful weapon

Back-burning is considered by the authorities as a powerful weapon against bush fires but it is not always popular.

In many fire-prone regions, many residents don't want to be smoked out of their homes every winter and then return to see their prized bushland views reduced to ashes by controlled burn-offs.

Australian Government scientist Jim Gould says the competing pressures of lifestyle and safety may never be reconciled.

"We want to reduce bush fire risk to the community but we need a balance and I don't know if we will ever get the answer to that," he said.

Controlled burnings are not popular with local residents

"The problem is you cannot have a completely blackened landscape and people don't like smoke."

The fire service is also being accused of mishandling back-burning operations.

Farmers near the New South Wales outback town of Dubbo are demanding millions of dollars in compensation after a burn-off ran out of control.

Thousands of sheep and cattle were killed and vast areas of pasture destroyed.

Livestock destroyed

Farmers Association president Mal Young says many have been left with nothing. "Some of these farmers have generations of livestock destroyed. In one fell swoop some of them have been wiped out."

The Rural Fire Service Commissioner Phil Koperburg is denying any mismanagement: "The back-burn did not cause the fire to escape. The fire overran the back-burn.

"All of these fires will be the subject of intensive investigation including coronial inquiries," he added.

Soaking trees helps - but not all back-burns go according to plan

Senior fire authority officers also denied that back-burning was responsible for a blaze that destroyed homes and forced 7,000 people from the coastal town of Sussex Inlet earlier this month.

Planned burn-offs have proved disastrous in the past.

Two years ago, three fire fighters were killed when a routine back-burn to protect homes near bushland at Mount Kuring-gai to the north of Sydney went out of control.

At the time, Australian fire researcher Dr Phil Chaney said even carefully controlled back-burns were dangerous and unpredictable.

New study expected

"Recent studies have shown that we didn't fully understand just how fires move, particularly when fires have already been established in a line and there is a change in wind," he said.

The New South Wales coroner John Abernethy will now investigate whether sufficient back-burning was carried out before the recent Christmas outbreaks.

His report is expected in the next six months.

It may help this fire-scarred country finally adopt a co-ordinated and thorough emergency plan - after failing to learn the hard lessons of the bush fires that devastated Sydney in 1994, which killed four people and wiped out almost 200 homes.