"The role of emergency communications also has to be done federally," he said . "You can't have one state issuing one warning while another is doing something else, particularly when people holiday all over the country now.

"But the bigger picture is that bushfires are a symptom of a bigger problem and the disease is climate change, and when we're looking at tackling the actual disease that's a federal problem."

Risk Frontiers general manager Andrew Gissing, who represents a natural disaster consultancy, said Australia needs a "strategic vision" spanning the next two decades, incorporating all natural disasters, but said the federal government's role in disaster response doesn't need significant reform.

"There are issues that come to bear when we have seven different versions of emergency management across the states and territories, so there is more room for collaboration to develop a common language so the states all understand what the relevant power of agencies and so on are, and can work together without learning new systems.

"It's been 20 years since aerial fire fighting was brought into the mainstream, what's the next generation of research and innovation in the science and technology of fighting fires? The key challenge facing us now is how to rapidly identify where fires are, and to rapidly move resources to extinguish them quickly."