A problem is usually just an upside down opportunity for someone or somebody else.

Guess Govt are paying… poor old tax payer. But if solves a problem sensibly probably OK.  Always a loser and a winner but in this case more of us taxpayers to spread load, and enriching some undeservedly may be best solution.

When is the big bonfire to burn all that slash?  Maybe could use a few bonfires on orchards next year as opposed to helicopters  to combat frost? Would that work, or possibly not?

Yes- completely perverse outcomes from events like this. One dump site is just below me. I can see it from the house. The land was flooded badly, smothered in silt. A low lying valley. Parts have yet to dry out. Hectares of greasy mud. Still. Like most landowners in the vicinity he was faced with a massive bill to restore the land, and had not moved on it. Now he gets silt dumped on top of his problem and his flood prone land becomes flood proofed (they are going right over top of the fences - meters high). And he gets paid for it - $1/CuM. Prob multi millionare at the end of it, and restored land. 

Now go half a km down the road - I posted a pic shortly after the flood, of a boat parked in the middle of a paddock in a sea of logs. Still there, as are the trashed orchards next door. That guy has lost his land and livelihood by the same event and likely to come out a pauper. He would be wondering why he didn't own a flood prone valley half a Km up the road. Totally different outcomes - random, same event.

Pays not to think about stuff sometimes. Imagine how the guy with the trashed orchards and lost boat is feeling.

Regards

Alan