Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

As a Victorian member of this House who represents that part of outer eastern Melbourne and the Yarra Valley that adjoins the McEwen electorate of Fran Bailey, I want to associate myself with all of the speakers on the motion moved by the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday, with the words of the Prime Minister, with all those who spoke yesterday and with the moving words we have just heard from the member for McMillan.

We are united in our sorrow for the families who are grieving. We are shocked at the scale of the tragedy. We are, as previous speakers have said, in total awe of the volunteers and the emergency service workers. We are proud of the community spirit that we are seeing and that we have seen in tragedies in the past. As the Prime Minister indicated and the member for McMillan reiterated, we are still coming to terms with a horror that is growing and a nightmare that is not over.

I thank all of the CFAs from across Casey and McEwen. As you can imagine, they work very closely together and, as we speak and meet here in this House, they are fighting the fires in and around Yarra Glen and Healesville. I thank all of the CFAs from across Victoria and the volunteer firefighters from right around Australia. Together with the police and emergency services, as the Prime Minister indicated, even the most hardened and experienced of police and emergency service workers are seeing things they have never seen in their careers. I thank the staff of the Shire of Yarra Ranges, led by the mayor, Len Cox, and the chief executive officer, Glenn Patterson, who are working around the clock.

I spoke to Fran Bailey earlier. She asked me, in speaking today, to pass on her thanks to all of you who have left messages for her. She has passed the messages on to her constituents on behalf of all 150 of us here in this House, who represent each corner of Australia. As you know, Fran’s office and her home are in Healesville, which today has fire close by on the doorstep, and so that she can keep working she has moved herself and her office down to my office, a little further down on the Maroondah Highway in Chirnside Park.

The Leader of the Opposition spoke yesterday of the accounts he had heard on the ground about the sheer speed and ferocity of the fire. My wife and I and our young sons live right on the gateway to the Yarra Valley, up on a hill on the edge of Chirnside Park and Lilydale. For so many Melburnians, when we saw the mushroom cloud of black and grey erupting over Kinglake on Saturday afternoon, then the wind change and gale force winds, followed by a deadly symphony of fires starting off along the Melba Highway at Dixons Creek and Steels Creek and into Yarra Glen, followed by spot fires and fires started by lightning, the sheer scale of it was beyond comprehension.

As a Victorian member I know—and other Victorian members would agree—that most Melburnians can see the Yarra Valley mountains and the Dandenong Ranges from where they work and live, and when smoke rose from the Yarra Valley late on Saturday afternoon most feared what it might mean. Most instinctively thought of Ash Wednesday—our worst reference point. That we have awoken to and, as we need to keep reminding ourselves, are still in the midst of something more horrific naturally strains our human capacity to comprehend.

Many Victorian members know well the country towns we have been reading and talking about—towns like Marysville, Kinglake and Flowerdale—because we have been to them on school camps or day trips. We have driven along the roads that became death traps. We have played footy or cricket there. All of us in this House and all Australians know these towns and these people, because the community spirit which built them, which has sustained them and which will rebuild them is alive in every Australian in every town.

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