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Ahead of every summer, Australian networks run the same cycle: inspect, clear, document, and be ready before conditions turn. The work is well understood and generally done well. What is less settled is what "ready" actually means, and what counts as proof of it.
Ask a transmission operator, a researcher modelling fire consequence, and the people living beside the line, and you get three defensible answers that do not entirely agree. Those differences are worth an hour before the season starts, because they decide what gets inspected, what gets recorded, and what a network can show when someone asks whether it was prepared. It is also a rare chance to hear how peers answer the question, before you have to answer it yourself.
Sixty minutes of discussion, with the last ten given over to your questions.
What we will cover
- "Ready" is not one thing. What readiness means from each seat at the table, where those definitions diverge, and how the pre-summer bushfire inspection became the artefact everyone points to as proof.
- Proving it. How preparedness is demonstrated to a regulator, a board and a community, and what separates evidence from activity.
- Doing more with what you already have. LiDAR, consequence modelling and existing datasets working harder, plus where technology helps and where judgment still decides.
We close with one thing to do before summer from each panelist.
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What you'll take away
- How a large transmission network approaches pre-summer readiness, and what it keeps as evidence
- What consequence modelling can tell you about which parts of your network matter most, in language you can use with a board
- A sense of where your own program sits next to your peers, and one practical thing to do before the season turns
Who should attend
Vegetation management and bushfire mitigation leads at transmission and distribution networks, asset and risk managers, researchers, fire and land management agencies, community engagement teams, clean energy generators and mining operators running their own transmission, and industry associations.
Speakers
Brett Cirulis — Brett Cirulis is a Senior Research Officer with FLARE Wildfire Research at the University of Melbourne, one of Australia's largest fire research groups. His work sits in fire risk modelling, the discipline of understanding how a fire behaves once it starts and what it puts at risk. FLARE's research spans fire behaviour, landscape flammability, ecosystem interactions and future fire.
Heath Frewin — Heath Frewin is Principal Consultant at UVM Strategy, advising utilities in Australia and internationally on vegetation management maturity. He co-authored LiveEO's 2026 field guide "There is no universal playbook," and his frameworks for staging technology adoption and assessing programme maturity are used by utilities entering wildfire mitigation for the first time.
Steve Martin — Steve Martin is Senior Strategist for Land Assets, Research and Development at Powerlink Queensland, where he leads strategy for land and vegetation across the transmission network. He represents Powerlink at the South East Queensland Fire and Biodiversity Consortium and has been recognised for his contribution to the development of vegetation risk management guidelines.
Alan Khoo — Alan Khoo is an Enterprise Solutions Engineer at LiveEO, based in Melbourne, working with transmission and distribution networks across Australia and New Zealand. He helps vegetation and asset teams work out where satellite-derived insight fits alongside the programmes and data they already have, from scoping a deployment to getting insights into the systems planners use day to day.
Save your spot
Register now to secure your seat. If you cannot make the live session, register anyway and we will send you the recording.
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