Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with great sadness too to speak on this motion. I thank the Deputy Prime Minister for moving the motion. I too pay tribute to the words of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, but more particularly to our colleague the member for McMillan and those affected in the fires. I look forward today to the member for Gippsland’s contribution at 2 pm and to the contribution of the member for Indi, whom I spoke to this morning. As we all know, Sophie is a tough person, and she is pretty upset by the whole thing. I look forward to her words this afternoon, as everyone else does. I was impressed by the speech by the member for New England. I thought he made some very good points, which I will speak of later in my contribution.

The words to describe this tragedy are not there. There is nothing we can say which puts into perspective what is actually still occurring in Victoria. The article on the front page of the Australian today—especially the first seven or eight paragraphs, about what happened in Marysville—is quite staggering. The suggestion that 100 of the 519 residents may have perished in Marysville is something which is beyond belief outside a war zone—one in five people in a township. As I said flippantly yesterday at a doorstop interview on the way into parliament, it just reminds you to hug your kids, because what is going on in the human tragedy that we see still occurring is beyond belief.

We talk about the stages of recovery—and the member for Canberra knows too well. We moved to Canberra not long after the Canberra bushfires, for work, as many do, and many of the people who became our friends lived in Duffy and those places and had similar experiences of a firestorm. It is remarkable that only four perished—four is too many, of course—and 500 houses were lost. One of the things that struck me in Duffy was when we moved here and we went for a drive around, as you do in a new city—you explore. We went up and had a look. This was about six months after the bushfires. The indiscriminate nature of it strikes you. I remember driving about four streets back in Duffy, and a house was gone. All the other houses around it were fine, but there had been embers and it had gone up. I think that was one of the houses that someone had died in. The other bit was the road. I forget the name of the road along next to the pine forest—

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