Australia wildfires: Cooler weather helps firefighters as PM returns home from holiday to crisis

'I get it that people would have been upset to know that I was holidaying with my family,' says Scott Morrison as home state burns

Cool weather has eased conditions at some of the major wildfires burning across Australia, with firefighters trying to contain blazes before hotter conditions are expected to return at the end of the week.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison visited the Rural Fire Service (RFS) headquarters in Sydney, having returned on Saturday night from a holiday in Hawaii that has drawn sharp criticism as the wildfires crisis in his home state deepened.

After the deaths of two firefighters on Thursday night, Mr Morrison announced he would return home early, and on Sunday he acknowledged his holiday had caused anger.

“I get it that people would have been upset to know that I was holidaying with my family while their families were under great stress,” the prime minister said.

He also addressed his conservative Liberal-National coalition’s climate policies, which his government has been forced to defend following the severity of this year’s bushfires. Mr Morrison said there was no argument that there is a link between climate change and weather events around the world.

“But I’m sure people would equally acknowledge the direct connection to any single fire event is not a credible suggestion to make that link,” Mr Morrison told journalists.

Earlier this month, Australia drew criticism at a UN climate summit in Madrid for its climate-change policy of using old carbon credits to count towards future emissions targets.

Australia is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters per capita because of its reliance on coal-fired power plants. It has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, but critics accuse Mr Morrison of paying lip service to that commitment.

Mr Morrison recommitted to those policies, which he took to a general election in May, on Sunday.

The intensity of fires eased overnight in New South Wales (NWS), Victoria and South Australia states, where fires had been burning out of control on Friday and Saturday as a combination of extreme heat and strong winds had created “catastrophic” conditions in some areas.

“We have still got an enormous amount of fire burning in the landscape,” NSW’s RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said, adding that the spreading fires in the Blue Mountains area around 100km (62 miles) west of Sydney would be a significant focus for fire crews.

“We’ve seen widespread damage and destruction being reported across a number of these fire grounds, and we’ve got impact assessment teams already deployed into the field this morning.”

More than 105 fires were still burning across NSW on Sunday, with 59 considered not contained, although none were burning at the emergency level that a number were classed at during Saturday.

One man is still unaccounted for after staying on Saturday to protect his property near Lithgow, a town west of Sydney, as fires approached. Dozens of properties were reported damaged or destroyed.

“Today is thankfully expected to be much cooler for large sections of NSW, which will be a welcome reprieve. However, many communities away from the coast will still experience significant heat,” the Bureau of Meteorology said in a tweet.

Conditions are expected to remain favourable over coming days and firefighters will work to contain some of the firefronts near communities, particularly in the Blue Mountains region to the west of Sydney.

“This [fire] season is much more lengthened and has started a lot earlier, and there isn’t the respite rains that we can expect any time soon, and that is making this season harder than many we have seen in a long time,” Mr Morrison said.

Australia has been fighting wildfires for months as hot, dry conditions created an early start to the fire season, with blazes claiming eight lives and destroying more than 700 homes and nearly 3 million acres of bushland.

Smoke from bushfires prompted match officials to abandon Saturday’s Big Bash League cricket match in Canberra over what they called “dangerous and unreasonable playing conditions”.

Additional reporting by Reuters