Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (14:30): I rise today with sadness to convey my condolences to the families who have lost loved ones in these fires and to convey my heartfelt sympathy to those who have lost homes, property, farms, livestock and livelihoods. I also rise to thank those thousands of personnel, both volunteer and professional, who have put their own lives at risk to save the lives and property of others and who are still working today to extinguish fires and support individuals and communities. I rise also to thank the federal government for their extensive support, both financial and through manpower and resources.

In 1904 Dorothea Mackellar wrote:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

While Australia’s landscape, flora and fauna are the envy of the world, its tragic pitfall is its inescapable frequency of extreme weather events and climate. We are a country of cyclones, floods, droughts and fires. Nothing is unprecedented in nature. However, unfortunately government failure can be unprecedented. In fact, as many of us know, fire is a necessary component of regrowth in much of our native flora. Exploring Australia’s east coast in 1770 Captain James Cook described the land as ‘a continent of smoke’ and said, ‘We saw smoke by day or fires by night wherever we came’. Fire is not new, and while Western Victoria Region has largely escaped fire devastation at this time the season is still before us and the risk high, extremely high, due to the massive roadside fuel loads.

On 24 January I convened a meeting on fires with Richard Riordan, the member for Polwarth, and Dan Tehan, the federal member for Wannon, in the Terang Civic Hall. The hall itself was one of the relief centres for the St Patrick’s Day fires in 2018. There was huge public interest. More than 200 people packed the hall in the middle of the day, travelling from across the state, and live Facebook streaming reached thousands. It was a clear testament to the public desire for a solution. We heard from some real experts: David Packham, for 20 years principal research scientist at CSIRO and later director of the National Centre for Rural Fire Research; Robert Lowe senior, Indigenous elder of the Peek Whurrong; and Sally Commins from the mountain cattle farming family and project firefighter for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP). We also heard from Jill Porter, who was devastated in the St Patrick’s Day fires, and Cr Neil Trotter, the mayor of the Corangamite shire. Each brought their own specific expertise and suggested solutions.

The meeting was titled ‘Lessons Learnt’, and that is exactly what we have to do in this chamber—learn some lessons and take action. Though the panellists talked about their experiences, they also put forward solutions. The mood of the meeting was positive, but the message was clear: concrete solutions, including greater fuel load reduction, roadside grazing facilitation, local emergency control, better timely information and support for volunteer firefighters. All these messages were non-negotiable in the minds of those present.

You can hardly wonder why there is palpable frustration at the deaf ear of government. Since 1927 there have been 105 inquiries into bushfires and land management—there have been 90 in the last 30 years. These include royal commissions, parliamentary inquiries, state and federal parliamentary committees, boards of inquiry, review committees, standing committees, coroner’s reports, a Council of Australian Governments national inquiry, office of the emergency services commissioner reports, departmental reports and inquiries, CFA reports, ministerial task forces and numerous Auditor-General reports on fire prevention and preparedness.

In 2009 the royal commission alone held 26 community consultations, received 1700 submissions, filed 17 000 documents, heard from 434 individual witnesses, generated over 20 000 pages of transcript and produced 53 internal research papers, two interim reports and a final report of well over 1000 pages. And yet here we are again. Any further inquiries have to look at those recommendations as an audit and actually take action and hold those accountable for not implementing the recommendations.

The people I spoke to know that the problem is not identifying the problem or examining the solutions, it is the will required to implement them. These further inquiries have to ensure action that cannot be avoided. For the people at that meeting it was not a matter of ideology. It was not about the politics. When there is a fire at the end of your property you do not really care what caused it. You just want to deal with it, and when you have done that, you just want to stop it happening again. I find that country people who live with the reality of fire are actually the least ideological about it.

So my intention at every stage was to come back to what matters: the solutions we can effect, the practical things we can do in our local regions to make our communities safer. It is about making people safe and their properties and livestock secure and ending these preventable megafires. So I will touch on some of the solutions. As any management consultant will tell you, to implement something properly you need to measure the progress you have made. You need a target, and to be worth anything your target needs to be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.

David Packham spoke on the nature of fires, the limits of firefighting capability and hence the need to reduce fuel load. He noted that an overall target is useful for planning, quality control, transparency and efficiency purposes. In his view the royal commission target of 5 per cent minimum is the lowest conceivable and the ideal burn program would amount to about 10 to 12 per cent of the area of forests and national parks.

Mayor Neil Trotter raised the roadside vegetation issue. He was clear in his view:

… our roadsides are becoming unfit for purpose.

He detailed the experience the Corangamite shire has had in introducing policies to allow and encourage roadside grazing. But his conclusion is inescapable:

… there are a number of controls and regulations by state government that limits our capacity …

Restrictions on classification of native vegetation and grasses make permitting—

grazing—

a bureaucratic nightmare … It has become too hard to negotiate council and government regulation. As a consequence it is safer to do nothing.

What a disgrace. This was his specific call for action, and it is one I will continue to prosecute.

Sally Commins spoke about her experience as a project firefighter with DELWP and as part of a High Country farming family who have faced fire more times than they care to remember through the decades. Her point on High Country grazing supports the fuel load reduction arguments of David Packham and Mayor Trotter. She showed striking pictures from 2003 of the family’s grazing lease at Nunniong which demonstrated the ferocity of the fire in the area and the devastating environmental disruption and huge loss of wildlife it brought. But she noted:

… the area where our cattle grazed was untouched. As a result we lost no cattle in the mountains, and the area where they grazed provided a sanctuary for other fleeing animals.

Her solution:

The problem we have today is that government land management authorities are not adapting to Australian conditions.

She said that burning is now not permitted and that it used to be done by the graziers themselves, without heavy equipment. To lock out High Country graziers, as we have done in this state, was a catastrophic mistake but an easily reversible decision. Sally’s final point was this:

If, as records estimate, as few as three or four hundred thousand Aboriginal people with no resources or machinery were able to regularly burn much of southern Australia in safety and create a magnificent landscape, then surely with the resources we have available today it is possible to reduce fuel loads.

I was delighted to invite Robert Lowe, Sr, Indigenous elder of the Peek Whurrong, to share his experience and that of his people:

We learnt from our ancestors … my grandfathers … my aunties how to do controlled burning … it’s a legacy we hold, but it’s a legacy that got lost somewhere along the line …

I can … remember my grandfather always used to round up all the young fellows on the mission station, and we’d follow him down to the side of the river … and we’d watch and learn …

And all he would have was a box of matches and a hessian bag, and he would burn the majority of that river in one day. And all he had … to control that fire was a wet hessian bag. And we learnt …

And we’d do controlled burns around the forest, and not once did those fires get away …

… our ancestors taught us when you light a fire in the middle of summer there’s going to be a big explosion, and we’ve seen that in the fires around the state this year …

We’ve got to learn from each other and learn from the mistakes …

What our ancestors left us was a legacy we should never forget, but I can’t teach my son … or grandsons …because the government has taken away our rights. My uncle … was actually charged for arson for controlled burning on the mission station that we were raised on …

Somewhere someone’s got to make that choice, but the only people who can make that choice is the government.

He said we can control our own destiny by having controlled burns.

These four speakers gave real and achievable solutions: dedicate proper resources to planned burning, enable and encourage roadside grazing, reverse the ban on High Country grazing and learn from and implement the Indigenous practices which kept our country safe from time immemorial.

Jill Porter, a dairy farmer at The Sisters, near Garvoc, whose farm was totally burnt out in the St Patrick’s Day fire and who is now a prominent advocate for electrical infrastructure safety in rural Victoria, spoke powerfully on the impact of electricity causing fires. She said that bushfires alter the lives and livelihoods of families and communities forever:

When the smoke clears and the grass is green again—

the long process of the recovery—

… really only begins. Building a home, a business or a herd of cows, it takes a lifetime—

or several lifetimes.

Erasing the horrific images never happens. Dead cow paddock remains. The flashbacks—

of injured cows—

haunt. The landscape and view is changed …

I’m not sure you ever truly recover, and I’m certain you never get back to where you were.

She outlined just why she now campaigns on electrical infrastructure:

When we look at Victoria’s history we can see that over 80 per cent of bushfire fatalities since the 1950s have occurred from powerline-started bushfires.

She gave one example:

In 2009—Black Saturday—six of the 11 fires were caused by electrical assets. Of the 173 people who died, 159 were directly related to powerline-started fires.

Her proposal is simple: proper implementation of the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission recommendations. But her experience is clear: this will not happen with the current energy regulator, Energy Safe Victoria (ESV). She said:

There is no accountability or transparency of government and ESV … Today it continues to lack independence. It functions as a truly captured regulator. It has a lack of technical capacity, it has poor technical skills and electrical skills, it has a lack of good governance and it has a continued reliance on data sought from the network businesses—from Powercor, from Ausnet.

She went on to say that when their assets get burnt—that is, the assets of these network businesses—they apply to the energy regulator and get a cost pass to replace assets. That cost is passed on through electricity bills. They also pass that on to their insurance companies and our insurance premiums rise. Jill’s solution: reform Energy Safe Victoria and ensure the proper implementation of the royal commission recommendations.

The support for fire-affected communities from individuals statewide and internationally has been a true testament to the virtues of charity and volunteerism. But we need to make sure that those donations are spent for the purposes intended by the donors. I particularly would like to recognise the efforts of my constituents across Western Victoria, who, while mostly avoiding suffering damage from the fires this season, having gone through fires themselves many times, can empathise with those in Eastern and Northern Victoria.

Most of us in rural Victoria have been burnt by fire. We have smelt the smoke, felt the heat, shed the tears, buried the livestock and mourned loved ones. I lost my own grandfather to a devastating fire in Western Victoria when he was trying to defend his farm. Teams of volunteer firefighters have departed Western Victoria to extinguish fires. Farmers, previously receiving hay from others when fire affected, have given many tonnes of hay to save livestock. And now teams of volunteers, including my predecessor in this place, Simon Ramsay, are part of the fabulous BlazeAid volunteer effort to rebuild the fencing so desperately needed to secure farm animals.

I want to make mention of the Moyne shire, who correctly handed back the $1 million allocated to them for drought relief by the federal government and recently provided their shire vehicle, driven by the mayor, Daniel Meade, and Cr Ian Smith, to deliver hay to a Bairnsdale farmer who had been completely wiped out. They were part of a huge convoy of hay trucks from south-west farmers. I would especially like to thank the organiser of this hay run, Allansford’s Eddie White, who brought 31 trucks, including B-doubles, and took between 1050 and 1200 bales from Allansford to Gippsland.

I also want to pay tribute to those farmers, many organised by Richard Beggs, a farmer from Glenthompson, who have provided land to agist stock who are now suffering a contaminated water issue. As Cr Meade said, ‘When you go there and see houses, sheds and fences burnt firsthand, it makes you shake your head and realise we have so much feed here, that the affected farmers can’t access’. I echo Cr Meade’s comments. Our Western Victoria roadsides are brimming over with edible fodder. I urgently asked the Minister for Agriculture to use her best officers, with her colleagues, to facilitate roadside grazing so we can save this stock. I look forward to her reply.

Although the fires this season predominantly took place in the east of the state, I would like to take a moment to discuss the fires that tore through the Budj Bim, the UNESCO world heritage site in my electorate. Perhaps the slight silver lining of this fire season is the revealing of new sections of an ancient aquaculture system built by Indigenous people. I visited the site just before the fires to learn from the Indigenous leaders about how they used cold burning to encourage native vegetation growth to attract the native animals which provided their source of food.

On the second day of Parliament for 2019 I spoke on a motion of condolence for the tragic 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. On the second day of Parliament 2020 I am now speaking on a motion of condolence for the tragic 2020 bushfires. How many times do we have to come back to this place to repeat the same exercise? Parliaments should strive to be places of action, not reaction; places of solutions, not condolences. While I take the opportunity to extend my gratitude to all firefighters and volunteers and for all charitable donations and efforts of Victorians across the state, we must also consider how we can prevent more bushfires moving forward.

The industry most impacted by bushfires has been the agricultural sector. What farmers need most is not our condolences. Farmers need, desperately, agistment and fodder for their stock. Farmers depend on their livestock for their livelihoods, and without uncontaminated water or sufficient feed their livelihoods perish.

I commend the efforts of all the volunteers and the donations of hay. However, the more effective solution is what I have spoken about many times in this Parliament. There is abundant roadside vegetation across Western Victoria that could be consumed by fire-affected livestock. We ought to suspend the onerous regulations that are severely restricting roadside grazing so that fire-affected farmers can utilise the long paddock, preserve their livelihoods and reduce the tragedy of this bushfire season. The benefits of grazing roadsides not only advantages farmers and afflicted livestock but dramatically reduces the fire risk posed by abundant vegetation acting as a fuel load.

Concerns of damage to remnant vegetation are not justified given specific plant growth can be excluded and given that native grasses have been grazed and burnt by Indigenous communities for centuries. Trees on roadsides are a major inhibiting factor to evacuation for residents and livestock and movement of emergency services. Eliminating or inhibiting tree growth on roadsides would be advantageous in the event of fire. We do not need to waste time and money on arborists assessing roadside trees: we should not have trees on roadsides that so dangerously impact roads.

There is a case in point. The St Patrick’s Day fires devastated the area near Garvoc. The Princes Highway is the number one highway in this state. Where the fire crossed the road and the railway line the road is now a forest on either side, caused by no fuel reduction burning, no removal of the burnt trees and the flourishing of millions of seedlings of blackwood and also blackberries and bracken. It is another fire waiting to happen.

Roadsides need to be safe places, not wildlife corridors or conservation zones. Roads and roadsides need to be firebreaks, not fire wicks. It seems we must remind this government and the population that the day job of state governments is to manage property whether that is forests, parks, reserves or roadsides. This government has been in control of the levers of power for 16 of past 20 years. There is no excuse for failing to manage these public spaces. There have been innumerable expert reports that have recommended reducing fuel loads. There is much evidence that where fuel reduction has occurred fire intensity is reduced. In some cases it will be actually stopped.

Our population, our farms and our wildlife will continue to be affected, even exterminated, if we allow intense-heat fires to continue because of fuel loads. There is no point in locking up the forests and throwing away the keys. The logging workers in Gippsland have proved their worth in clearing roads and saving lives. It is appalling that the government is going to stop their ability to log the forests.

Further, we can begin strengthening the CFA volunteer service rather than destroying it like this government seems so intent on doing. The exodus of volunteers perfectly coincides with an enormous increase in Victoria’s career firefighting service, which is now 20 per cent larger than it was at the end of 2014 and costs the taxpayer an extra $280 million per year. Our weakened CFA means fire risk is real for rural Victorians. It is compounded by the Labor government’s inaction on fuel reduction, mismanagement of roadside vegetation and unsafe power infrastructure.

Adam Barnett, the CEO of Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria, wrote a letter to all Victorian MPs recently. He said:

… large fires require the mobilisation and deployment of thousands of volunteers to fight them while their local patch still has sufficient volunteers and equipment for required fire and emergency response.

…

The fact is, Victoria’s number of volunteer firefighters is at its lowest level in history … For many volunteers, this means finding a different avenue with a different organisation where their contribution to their community is better spent.

They also need better equipment. I would like to conclude by echoing my earlier remarks. We should not have to continuously return to this place and voice our condolences for the lives, animals and property lost in Victorian fires. Fire-affected and fire-prone communities need action and solutions from their parliamentarians, not just commiserations.