There is a lot of headline reading going on with the reactionaries in this thread, and not a lot of article reading. The call is not for a new agency to respond to bushfires. It is for a national monitoring agency to coordinate proper collection and analysis of bushfire data:

Such an agency, the group writes, could agree a consistent approach to measuring the frequency, size and severity of fires, as well as investigating their causes, the greenhouse gas emissions they generate and the public health and economic issues they raised.

He said: “Historically, response to natural hazard emergencies, and associated data collection, has been a matter for individual states and territories.

“However, future increases in hazard frequency and severity, driven by global warming, mean that weather-related hazards require a national response capability, and the basis for this must be an appropriate national database.”

It's tempting to assume that the people involved know exactly what they are doing; but never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.