Condemnation of arsonists blamed for starting some of the fires that have killed more than 180 people is universal, but there is strong disagreement over why the infernos were so intense and claimed so many lives.

Bushfire expert David Packham at Melbourne's Monash University has blamed green groups, saying their opposition to controlled clearance in forests known as burn-offs had allowed leaves, bark and dead wood to build up for decades, providing fuel for the fires.

"Elements of the (green) movement are behaving like eco-terrorists, waging war against proscribed burning and fuel management," Packham, a former supervisor at the government-run Bureau of Meteorology, told The Australian newspaper.

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine also railed against "greenies," who she said had stopped politicians and bureaucrats from taking steps to reduce the fire hazard with their insistence that forests remain pristine.

"If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from the lamp-posts but greenies," she wrote.

But in the same newspaper alongside Devine's column, environmentalist Tim Flannery argued that climate change was the culprit and similar firestorms were inevitable without action.

He said climate change, already associated with Australia's worst drought in a century, had raised temperatures enough to make the ferocity of the fires unprecedented.

"Let's hope Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible event and change their polluting ways before it's too late," he wrote.

Many survivors have demanded to know why they received no warning that the flames were bearing down on their homes but politicians blamed red tape and each other for their failure to implement an alert system.

Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland said such a system was available. It allows emergency service to access telecommunications servers and send warnings to all mobile phones and landlines warning owners to flee bushfire-threatened area.

But telecommunications giant Telstra said privacy laws limited access to numbers on the servers, delaying the system's implementation.

McClelland said Canberra also needed cooperation from Australia's state governments before it could set up the potentially life saving system but New South Wales state officials said they gave it the green light last year.

Bureaucrats who approved residential homes in heavily-forested areas without insisting on comprehensive fire-protection measures have also come under scrutiny as the search for answers goes on.

Officials are also reviewing long-standing advice telling residents to either flee their homes early or stay right through the bushfire and defend their homes by dousing fires with buckets and hoses.

Many survivors said such measures proved useless against the ferocity of the fires in Victoria state.

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