Fran Bailey (McEwen, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the House for this opportunity. Could I firstly express my condolences to the people and communities in the electorates of McMillan, Gippsland and Indi and also to the family of firefighter Mr David Balfour from the ACT, who died fighting the fires in Marysville in my electorate.

Last Thursday evening I attended a memorial service in the small town of Strathewen, where 42 people out of a population of 200 perished. In attending that memorial service, the survivors with their family and friends resolved three things: they wanted to thank all those who had contributed in any way to the survivors; they wanted to remember those who perished; and they wanted to build for the future with hope. So I am going to take their lead today.

I firstly want to place on the record my thankyou to all of the firefighters, both on the ground and in the air, on behalf of all of the people of my electorate of McEwen. Those people are just magnificent. On the ground they were fighting a fire that was so intense in its heat that it melted glass and metal. One firefighter pointed out to me the shell of a four-wheel drive vehicle and asked if I realised what the mound in front of it was. I thought it was just dirt and ash. He said to me, ‘That is the bullbar that melted off the vehicle.’ They fought winds, as we all know, of terrible ferocity and they just kept going back. The helicopter pilots were filling and emptying their helicopters with a turnaround of three minutes, which is just extraordinary.

There were many others on the ground who possibly have not been thanked as much as they should, and I want to acknowledge them today. They are the Parks Victoria rangers, the employees of the DSE, the SES, the ambulance officers, the police, the power workers and the timber workers. All of those people performed magnificently on the ground. Since the fires, of course, we have had the Defence Force there. One very experienced soldier said to me up at Kinglake last week that he is used to working in war zones, and sadly that is what a lot of my electorate looks like. Prime Minister, we really need Major General John Cantwell for at least 12 months. He is the man with the experience, the knowledge of logistics and the ability to mobilise forces. He was an inspired choice and we need him for the long haul.

In putting my thanks on the record, Prime Minister, I also want to thank you for your personal calls, for your offers of assistance and for your commitment to visiting personally so many communities in my electorate, along with other ministers. I also want to thank you for providing me with Sarah from your office, who I have yet to meet but who I feel is my new best friend. That is a contact and number that I will make good use of.

Mr Speaker, I also want to thank you for your very kind offer of the assistance of your staff in the south-western corner of my electorate. To the Leader of the Opposition: I thank you and Lucy for being prepared to spend so much time and to get around the electorate. To all members of this House, on both sides, thank you for all your phone calls, letters and offers of support and your concern. It has been wonderful and I have made sure that constituents throughout my electorate are aware of this. I know it is always dangerous to single out one person, but I am going to do that. To my friend and colleague the member for Casey, wherever he is—oh, I see he has changed position; I have missed some things!—Tony, you have always been a good friend, but for providing my staff with a safe refuge when we were evacuated from the office and for all your other offers of help: thank you.

I also want to place on the record, on behalf of all the people of my electorate, thanks for the generosity that has come from right around the nation—even from those people in Far North Queensland whose towns have been flooded. We know that they have provided assistance by sending semitrailer loads down into some of my small towns. It has been simply amazing.

I want to remember—and this is probably the most difficult part—the 209 people who have been acknowledged as having perished in the Black Saturday fires up to this point. Of the 209, 195 are from my electorate. I want to read the names of all of the towns in my electorate that have been affected: Marysville, Narbethong, Buxton, Taggerty, Camberville, Kinglake, Pheasant Creek, Flowerdale, Glenburn, Humevale, Strathewen, Whittlesea, Strath Creek, Upper Plenty, Clonbinane, Redesdale, Reedy Creek, Mittons Bridge, Wallan, Wondong, Heathcote Junction, Healesville, Chum Creek, Toolangi, Yarra Glen, Dixons Creek, Steels Creek, Christmas Hills and St Andrews.

These communities will never, ever be the same again. They have lost their people, many of whom were community leaders. They have lost homes. They have lost businesses. They have lost their stock. They have lost their communities. We have, however, really moved from that first phase—the emergency relief phase—to the recovery phase and the rebuilding phase, which is probably the biggest challenge that we have ahead of us. The recovery phase is difficult because each community is at a different stage. I want to illustrate, by discussing three of my communities, how difficult this is. The community of Strathewen, which I have mentioned, is a very small community. All of the people, of course, are hurting tremendously, and they will be hurting for a long time into the future. They have started having community meetings. The one thing that I want to stress in this House today is that the community members themselves must be the decision makers in the recovery and the rebuilding phases. Strathewen, being a very small community, has very different needs in some ways to those of Kinglake, which has suffered enormous devastation in losing so many of its people and its businesses. The Army is very active in there and the clean-up has already started—albeit in a small way to this point.

But if I turn to the community of Marysville, which has lost one in five of its population, the coroner has asked for at least another two weeks and possibly longer. This means that the residents cannot get back into their own communities, albeit this is under a very controlled regime—and we understand that that is how it has to be. But it means a delay, of course, in the recovery period and the rebuilding phase. Major General Cantwell, Andrew Forrest—who has been magnificent, I must say—and I met with the Marysville community just yesterday. It was interesting to note that, while some individuals will be able to—or could—move back, when it is declared okay, to the site where their home used to exist, as a community they decided not to do that. They will wait, and the community will move back as a whole. This says so much about the community spirit. This is something that I think we really have to take note of—that, despite the devastation and loss, these people want to live and work back in their communities. There have been magnificent efforts in providing temporary accommodation, but much of it is a long way from the communities. They actually do not want that. If they have to live in a caravan, or one of these temporary dwellings that Andrew Forrest will probably make available, they would rather it be stuck up in a corner of their home site or on a fairway at a golf course or on a vacant block of land—better that than they be accommodated far from their place.

I want to raise a few issues about the third phase of rebuilding. I have heard myself saying such things before, and I know that many here have said that we must never ever let this happen again—and we must not. But people have said these things before, following other disasters. This is by no means an exhaustive list. The first of those issues is the need for safe shelters. Colleagues, I ask you to contemplate—even though it is almost too horrible to contemplate—if that fire had happened not on the Saturday but on the Friday what the toll would have been with all of those schools burnt to the ground. Back in 1988, I have discovered, the Victorian education department had a plan to build 72 of what I would call community and school safe shelters. Only one has ever been built. We have to do better than that.

Much has been said about the need for an early warning system, and no-one would disagree with that. But, colleagues, many of my communities that have been burnt to the ground would never have received an early warning signal because the communications infrastructure simply does not deliver into those areas. It is another thing that we have to fix.

Much has been spoken about the need for a fuel reduction program. In Victoria we have had terrible fires going back to 1851: the 1939 bushfires, Ash Wednesday of 1983, those terrible fires in north-east Victoria in 2003. After every single one of those fires we had inquiry after inquiry, and in each one of those one of the main recommendations was to reduce the fuel load, not just on the floor of public land but also in the plantations now on private land.

Prime Minister, as a federal government, millions of dollars are provided to state and local governments for their roads. I am going to suggest here today that we tie that funding to fuel reduction programs because, unless we do something, nothing will be done. This is something, colleagues, I hope that we can have unanimous agreement on. I guess I would like to take all of you up into areas like Steels Creek and Redesdale. There is only one road along which people can get out of these areas. On that Saturday they simply could not get out.

One of the biggest issues facing us is the need for providing employment in these regions. The volunteer effort has been magnificent, but we all know that events and people move on. It is already starting to happen. I can understand that and, to a degree, the people in my electorate understand that. I think that we have got to be able to provide assistance for industries to re-establish. Prime Minister, industries like the trout industry will take up the low-interest loans. I single this one out in particular because it may not be known to this House but 80 per cent of our nation’s trout comes from the electorate of McEwen. But there are millions of dollars in infrastructure and much of this is still intact. Owners and their employees today are engaged in cleaning out and decontaminating these ponds, but they need to restock. An average sized trout farm of 20 ponds would need to spend half a million dollars on restocking. For the next 12 months they would have a feed bill of another half a million dollars. Obviously some of them cannot employ the 20 and 30 people that they had prior to the fires, but they tell me that they can get by with at least four or five, which is a wages bill of around $150,000. They have no income coming in for that 12-month period. I think that this is an area where we can move. In looking just at fencing and rural properties, while it is magnificent for voluntary groups like Rotary to want to be able to help, we need to pay people so that they can spend money in their areas, because one of the most urgent needs is to maintain a critical mass within these communities in order for them to have a future.

I know that I am going to meet with the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy a little later. I have an idea about how many of these businesses can survive, and that is perhaps as a virtual small business—for these communities that have been affected by the fires to have an internet business. Places like the alpaca shop in Marysville and many, many others could trade on the internet. That would at least generate some income. We can work out the details later, but I know that the minister’s department has the IT grunt to assist with that.

I am not going to take up any more time of the parliament except to say that, when we move on—and we are moving on to question time and there will be important debates happening in this place today and in the future—and when we disagree vehemently from the government benches to the opposition benches, which is a sign of a healthy democracy, I would hope that on this issue, in building for the future and rebuilding better and with hope, every single one of us will ensure that we speak with one voice, because I do not want any other Australian citizen to go through what my constituents have gone through.

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