Great news but terrible that we're in this situation in the first place. Hopefully the Australian government wakes up to the climate crisis.
Our current government won't really even try, for extrinsic reasons; but even if it wanted to, it couldn't. Our piss-weak policies and decadal political sclerosis make us a laughing stock in the relevant international forums. This has only recently become apparent, as there's a lot of momentum in international affairs, and Australia did have a decent stock of political capital. But it's well and truly depleted now, at least in this area. Only serious domestic action on emissions can get our federal government positioned to actually do its job and make all possible efforts to protect the nation.
China could also take the lead here; it's actually surprising that they aren't because it's an ideal opportunity for them to project power on a global scale and an important step in their replacing the USA as the global super power.
It's very hard to imagine, given the current crew. They're pretty hard core on the motivated reasoning front. And they've moved from outright denial to a more nuanced accept-but-deflect position, which could go on for years with nothing meaningful happening.
Expect little before the next federal election (2022).
https://reneweconomy.com.au/lobbyist-who-provided-morrisons-...
As for hazard reduction burns, these have been on the increase for years. The rate of increase has been hard to sustain, because the fire season has been rapidly extending, and reducing the windows of opportunity for burning. There's certainly scope to draw on indigenous understanding of cool burns, but that's not something that is likely to happen quickly at scale.
Simplistic notions of 'proof' are no more pertinent to assessing the evidence on the relationship between climate collapse and forest fires than they were with lung cancer and smoking. These are complex systems we're talking about. We just have to assess prior scientific knowledge and multiple lines of empirical evidence as best we can. University-based research, the CSIRO, and relevant on-the-ground forest management and firefighting agencies have been predicting an increase in forest fires consequent on expected climate change patterns in Australia for many years. This has now come to pass. If people have alternative explanations, these would be bolstered by, preferably, pointing out where they similarly predicted the increase in forest fires, and then making their predictions for what will happen in the coming decades.
You can predict that probably statistically you'll see changing patterns of precipitation with changing climate leading to dryer woods, but whether that correlation holds is only clear with observed statistics, and whether that specific instance is connected can only be quantified probabilistically.
Do you want to wait until we're reasonably sure that this specific issue is connected, let alone all the other things bound to happen? (Some more probable than others.) By then it'll be too late to roll it back or do anything but keep it from getting worse in a meaningful way.
The climate crisis is very real and very observable.