Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Bushfires

Emma KEALY (Lowan) (16:31): Today I grieve for Victorians impacted by the Victorian bushfires, which have severely impacted my part of the state. My electorate of Lowan is about 20 per cent of the state of Victoria, and over this fire season we have lost almost 250,000 hectares of mostly national parks and state parks and also extensive amounts of private land. We had a number of communities that were under threat over the fire season. It is not only about dealing with the trauma of bushfire, it is not just about the flames licking your house or the smoke coming into your home and it is not just about the actual fire. It is also about the businesses that rely on people to come to our region and spend their money to support local people and support local jobs. It is also about supporting the mental health of the CFA volunteers who were on those trucks and away from their businesses, away from their farms, away from their families, over not just Christmas, not just Boxing Day, not just New Year’s Day but also Australia Day and every single day in between.

But mostly I grieve for everybody impacted by these fires, because the Allan Labor government has been absolutely neglectful in their support during this disaster. I think it says it all for our local people that when the Premier and the Prime Minister came to visit the fireground on 29 December they landed in Horsham, which was nowhere near the bushfires; they made an announcement around personal hardship support, which very few people are actually eligible for; and they excluded Horsham Rural City Council as an eligible LGA in that personal hardship announcement, even though that was the council area they thought was best to make that announcement, which was nowhere near the fireground. However, there were businesses in the Horsham region that could not trade because the roads were closed into the national park. They are still not eligible for a cent from this government.

We had in that package an announcement whereby CFA volunteers who were sleeping on the floors of CFA stations during the bushfire to protect their communities did not evacuate, and therefore they are not eligible for personal hardship payments. Volunteers who were fighting fires are not eligible because they did not leave, they stayed and bravely fought those fires. That is what the Labor government thinks about CFA volunteers. That is the biggest kick in the face and kick in the teeth for people who have lost their homes in the past. They are living with the trauma of bushfire; they are still courageous enough to turn out to the CFA and turn out to help their neighbours and friends in their time of need. Where is the Allan Labor government in their time of need? The heartless Allan Labor government is absent.

They were on holidays. It was the story of the entire summer. Everyone was on holidays apart from the people who were paid to be at the fires, our CFA volunteers and our community members, who turned up in droves to support our communities.

I think the biggest snub for the CFA, though, was when I got a text message the evening of 29 December about the visit by the Premier and the Prime Minister, because, you see, it had been organised beforehand by the Premier’s office that they would go and have a meet and greet. They would go and meet CFA volunteers, and they would meet people who had been impacted by the fires and businesses who had been impacted by the fires in the Grampians region. They were snubbed. The Prime Minister and the Premier did not bother to visit them. They instead got in a plane from Horsham, flew over the top of the firegrounds, went back to Horsham and then went back home. You talk about ‘not holding a hose’; they would not even set foot anywhere near a burnt ember. They would not look those CFA volunteers in the eye who were ineligible for personal hardship payments and explain why. They would not hear from local businesses what the impact had been on them when they had gone through a bushfire not eight months earlier that year. It was an absolute disgrace, and the fact is that the Premier has not been back since and that the Prime Minister has not been back since and that we still have a situation whereby the state government has not even applied for category C and category D support, which would enable businesses to be able to get financial support to keep them running, to keep employing people in our local area at a time when they have lost their complete tourism season.

There is nobody there. There is nobody in that region. Our locals are going, but there are only so many ice creams you can buy in Halls Gap. There are only so many times you can go out to a lovely winery like Pomonal Estate and have lunch and enjoy their fabulous produce. There are only so many T-shirts you can buy from Absolute Outdoors. There are only so many things that the locals can do, but there has been no return of the tourism trade and there is no interest from the government in advertising the region. Our region needs to be promoted. It is the hard work of people in the incident control centre, the CFA volunteers, Forest Fire Management Victoria and the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action – everybody has worked so hard to protect our tourism assets. You can still go up the Pinnacle. You can still go to Boroka Lookout. You can still enjoy MacKenzie Falls. All of those iconic walks and viewing areas in the Grampians National Park are able to be enjoyed. And it is not just the northern end of the Grampians. Down in the southern end of the Grampians, down around Mount Sturgeon, it is still intact. We have lost a lot of the Grampians, but the best bits, the tourist attractions, are still there. Come and visit. Come and support our businesses, because the Allan Labor government and the Albanese Labor government are not providing support. I ask all Victorians to come and support our region, because it is beautiful, our people are wonderful and our businesses are great.

This did not have to happen. In fact on 17 December I had a pre-planned meeting with some wonderful people from the Howitt Society, with Peter Flinn, Simon Armytage, Bill Crawford and Rex Beveridge. Some people will know those names; they have probably met with them before. They have been able to meet with many ministers for emergency services in the past. Not for the last couple – they have not been able to get through the door. Their biggest advocacy is that we need to do more fuel reduction in order to reduce the chance of large-scale blazes in the national parks and on our farmland. On the morning of 17 December I was meeting with them, and they were telling me they desperately needed to do more planned burns or there was going to be a massive fire in the Grampians. Rex Beveridge showed me a photo of a tree that had been lit by lightning on his property, and the branches had just dropped. That was the start of the Grampians bushfires. That is something I will never forget, because in the royal commission into the Black Saturday bushfires it was recommended that 390,000 hectares were to be burnt every year through a cool burn. In the report that I read last week actually, in the last financial year the government only achieved one-third of that.

Our national parks are a tinderbox. They are full of fuel, and when you do not reduce the fuel, you have intensely hot fires that destroy our old-growth trees and destroy the seed stock in the soil. They do not regrow; they need to be reseeded. It breaks the environment. I hate to think about the number of animals and birds and reptiles that have been destroyed in this fire. It is not environmentally friendly to not do cool burns. It is not environmentally friendly to stop reducing fuel reduction. It is a disgrace that we are putting CFA volunteers into these incredibly dangerous fires because the government will not increase fuel reduction burns in line with the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission’s recommendations. If there is one thing that this fire should show everybody in this place, it is that we need to increase our fuel reduction right across the state, because we are the example of what happens when you do not reduce fuels in a controlled way, and we do not want to be that example for no reason. We want others to learn.

As I said, the personal hardship funds that have been announced so far simply do not hit the mark. It is not just CFA volunteers who did not evacuate because they were fighting the fires who are not eligible; most of the businesses in the Grampians are not eligible for these payments because they are not employees – they do not pay themselves a wage – and they are not sole traders because they have employees. They live through their business. They are not eligible. They have been going now for 50 days with no income and no support from the Allan Labor government. The Allan Labor government have turned their backs on these businesses in their time of need. It is disgraceful, and it is not something that has happened with other emergencies and other disasters we have seen in the past. We did not see it in the Gippsland fires. We did not see it through the North Central floods. We have not seen this. It is because this government have absolutely lost their focus on what it means to Victorians to be there when people need them at a disaster. They were absent. They were heartless. They were not present, and they are still not present.

We have had ministers come through, no doubt. But they have not brought anything but empty pockets, empty promises, a few nods and thoughts and prayers. It does not cut it. You have got to stand up in a disaster, and the Allan Labor government has not.

Going forward, we need those payments to come through. We need to support businesses. We need agricultural support so that we can make sure we can actually provide a fuel subsidy so when people donate feed to support our stock, they can get it there with some sort of support from the government. Why should that impose a cost? People are being generous and kind and trying to help, and the government slugs them with a fuel tax on the way through. It is not fair. We need to make sure we have an air fleet that meets Victorians’ fire needs. We cannot continue to wait for the American air fleet to be available before we have got those large-scale capacity aircraft, because they are not able to be here in time. There were not here. They just were not here. With the air fleet we do have, while we have similar numbers to what we have had in the past, they have a smaller capacity, and so we do not have the capacity to put out fires as we have had in the past.

I have heard that some of the aircraft were not allowed to put in a special product that stops the water from splashing, a fire suppressant in the water, because it would be bad for the environment. Well, how has that worked out for us? It just does not make sense for my people, it does not makes sense for people in the Liberals and Nationals. It should be something the government listens to. If they do not listen and look at this and learn something, I do not think Labor will ever learn anything.

We need to make sure that we have tankers that are not 30 years old and breaking down on the way to a fire. We cannot have CFA volunteers sitting in the back of a truck for hundreds of kilometres to help on a strike team in a fire. We cannot have incident control centres where people are bringing in their own laptops – at Stawell – because there is nothing provided for them to be able to do something. We cannot have situations where we have an incident control centre, as set up in Stawell, and there are not enough rooms to house everybody. They need a new station. They need a spare tanker so that when they call for three strike teams out of Stawell, they can deliver three strike teams because they have got the tankers to be able to do it and provide backfill for other tankers around the state.

We need more of the ultralights. We need to get them out there, particularly for Lake Bolac and Yalla-Y-Poora. They have been crying out for that equipment for such a long time. It is something that the Leader of the Liberal Party noted and heard when we were at Willaura with the Westmere group. They have done an incredible job. The Dundas group are incredible. Aaron Croft and the Grampians group have done an amazing job. These strike teams – and that is not all of them; there are many, many more other groups that have done so much work – have turned up day after day after day after day. They are tired. They deserve support.

I urge the Allan Labor government to listen to this advice. I have been on the fireground every single day. I have met with volunteers. I was standing with them during the fires on Boxing Day; I was in the incident control centre. I have heard them. I am passing this on not as politics but as something that needs to change. When our communities are hit by fire they need to understand and to trust that the government will be there to back them up, but the Allan Labor government has been nowhere to be seen. We need more than thoughts and prayers. We need government support and we need action, and we need them right now.