Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (14:37): It is a privilege to follow Ms Garrett and speak on this condolence motion for the 2019–20 bushfires. I pay tribute to Ms Garrett’s work in her previous role as Minister for Emergency Services. It is sad she is not there today, really, but anyway. At the outset, I would also like to endorse the comments of my colleagues across the chamber who have paid tribute to all those who worked during the fires to make others safe, to care for them and to still respond to them to this day. We owe a great debt of gratitude to all those unsung heroes. We do not know their names, but they are there every day doing something for somebody else.

This motion is the third bushfire condolence motion that I have spoken on in my relatively short time in Parliament. In early 2019 I spoke on a motion of condolence for the tragic 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. In early 2020 I spoke on a motion of condolence for the tragic 2020 bushfires. Now in early 2021 I am speaking on a similar motion. Every year, this Parliament repeats this same exercise of grandstanding and speaking platitudes about how tragic past bushfires have been for regional communities. As I said on the last motion, parliaments should strive to be places of action, not reaction—places of solutions, not condolences. We have a responsibility to provide solutions to bushfire risk, because in this sunburnt country the recent fires will no doubt not be the last. I have offered many solutions throughout my time in this place which the government seemingly have ignored. These solutions fall under three main areas: fuel load reduction, safe energy infrastructure and strong rural fire services.

First, fuel load reduction is fundamental to mitigating the risk of bushfire, because we cannot control the weather or ignitions but we can control the fuel. This can and must be instigated through multiple avenues. Controlled burning is the primary method of reducing fuel loads; that is essential yet severely insufficiently completed. Even after a royal commission recommendation to dramatically increase fuel reduction burns, Victoria has marginally increased its burns. Former CSIRO research scientist David Packham, OAM, often points out that fuels have increased to 10 times the Aboriginal-managed level, with an increase in rate of spread of 10 times and 100 times in intensity, to account for 97 per cent of the current fire rate of spread and intensity. The 1-degree increase in Earth’s atmospheric temperature over the past 100 years on the other hand yields only a calculated 3 per cent increase in fire rate of spread and fire intensity. Clearly we need to do much more to reduce fuel loads as the primary contributing factor to fires.

There are numerous ways in which we can do so in addition to controlled burns, many of which I have advocated for in the Legislative Council continuously, including utilising Indigenous land management practices, which worked for thousands of years, and allowing roadside grazing, because roads should be a firebreak, not a fire wick, and that is what my community has endured in Western Victoria. I am aware that, in the High Country area here in the last fires, land that had been grazed subsequently provided a safe refuge not only for livestock but for wild animals as well, but grazing has been eliminated from many areas in these forests, unfortunately. Those two options are prevented by a ludicrous notion of using Indigenous burning practices being problematic due to intellectual property rights to which other Victorians are apparently not a party and an ideological opposition to droving on roadsides by bureaucrats in Melbourne who would prefer roadsides to be conservation zones and wildlife corridors rather than safe places.

Secondly, safe energy infrastructure is imperative to ensuring rural communities are safe from fire risk. The 2018 St Patrick’s Day fires in my electorate were instigated by a faulty power pole collapsing and igniting vegetation beneath it. Thousands of these similarly unsafe power poles are right across regional Victoria but are being replaced at a rate that will actually take centuries to fully complete. Now, people in that fire-affected area are still suffering. They not only suffered the physical loss of land and property and livestock, but they are still suffering emotionally and psychologically, so the effects of fire go on long after the fire has passed. I pay particular tribute to Jill Porter, who did so much to make sure that those affected got fair compensation through the legal system, which would not have happened without her amazing intervention.

This is simply unacceptable and is putting Victorians’ lives at risk. We have to do something about energy infrastructure. Further, we seem to be determined to continue down this path of introducing power infrastructure that poses a fire risk. The current proposal of the Western Victoria Transmission Network Project fails to heed the advice of the royal commission to put energy infrastructure underground, and the local communities along a 190-kilometre stretch are rightly concerned about the fire risk that it will pose to their community, as it traverses forests and essential conservation areas of great importance. We are also in a situation where we are proposing to allow people to camp on private land that has leases of river frontage, and the farmers are rightly concerned about the fire risk that that imposes. Now, we speak on endless motions in this Parliament about how terrible bushfires are and how sad we are about the lives and property destroyed by them, but if we are not willing to take action and stop proposals such as this then our words are futile.

Thirdly, a strong rural fire service comprised largely of volunteers is essential to ensuring that small fires are maintained and extinguished when they inevitably appear in this ‘continent of smoke’, as Captain James Cook described it when exploring Australia’s east coast in 1770. In 2020 the number of volunteer firefighters in Victoria fell again, to just 32 679. This figure is 4144 less than in 2015, when the Andrews government assumed office. Volunteer firefighters are integral to fire management because the simple reality is that permanent firefighters cannot be stationed in all rural and remote communities. We need a strong surge capacity when fires break out, but with fewer and fewer volunteers every year that capacity is weakening. And it is no surprise volunteers are leaving. Daniel Andrews has torn apart the CFA in favour of his union mates in the United Firefighters Union, to whom he seems curiously indebted. There seems to be an ideological resentment for volunteerism in this government, and they are determined to push this exodus of volunteers along through underfunding, mistreatment and neglect.

To close, we need this Parliament and the government to be focused on providing and accepting necessary solutions to the bushfire problem in this state. Ultimately there was a time when Victoria understood how to manage and utilise the land and its forests and when rural Victorians were allowed to use common sense to manage the land we live on rather than being regulated by inside-the-tram-tracks politicians and bureaucrats from Melbourne. The centralisation of Melbourne in our government life by bureaucrats, unions, environmental bureaucrats and political correctness has precluded Victoria from implementing effective solutions to fire risks, such as fuel load reduction, controlled burning, roadside grazing, Indigenous fire techniques, underground energy infrastructure and a well-funded volunteer firefighting service. I hope that this is the last bushfire motion I have to speak on and that henceforth we can return to the Parliament to congratulate the government on its valiant efforts in greatly reducing bushfires in Victoria. However, I sadly doubt that.