Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak today on this condolence motion on natural disasters and, in doing so, I am very pleased to talk about another part of our country. Might I start, as was referred to by the member for Maribyrnong, with the Dorothea Mackellar poem My Country:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror—

The wide brown land for me!

She goes on:

For flood and fire and famine,

She pays us back threefold …

It is true: this summer season has seen all of that, in Dorothea Mackellar’s poem, come true in Australia, sadly.

I acknowledge and pay my respects to those affected in the recent disasters in Australia. Our hearts went out, as everybody’s did in this place and all around Australia, to the victims of the floods in Queensland in particular and northern New South Wales and now in Victoria. The people of Carnarvon in my state of Western Australia—it is probably a bit far away—suffered devastation with the Gascoyne River flooding. On top of that, of course, in Queensland came that devastating cyclone out of the ocean, Cyclone Yasi, and the damage that it did and the lives that it put on hold and the businesses and the infrastructure that it destroyed. Here we are today talking about some of the memorable moments during that period and the people and the lives that have been so affected by this devastation. I know many people from the affected electorates will talk about the floods and the cyclone. The enduring picture in my mind and in my wife’s mind, as we sat there not believing what we were seeing constantly on the television of the Queensland situation, is of the husband and wife sitting on top of their car with their young child floating down the floodway. The husband obviously tried to get help. They survived; he did not. What a tragic set of events—and there are so many more. There are thousands more stories that could be relayed, and they will be in this House over the next few days and weeks.

I congratulate our leaders, Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and all the leaders from the various states that have had to take a role in these emergencies, declaring emergencies and addressing the adversity within their jurisdictions.

My story is of the devastating fires in my electorate of Canning—the Kelmscott and Roleystone fires. I will mention the earlier fire at Lake Clifton, where houses were lost. I want to tell the story of this fire because it is nothing like Black Saturday. We know what happened in Victoria two years ago on Black Saturday. Fortunately, over the weekend no lives were lost. There were also no lives lost at Lake Clifton. That was only due to the good planning, good luck and some fortune with natural events such as where the wind was coming from et cetera.

I went to the Sri Lankan national day celebrations and entered the Pinjarra races to present a trophy. At three o’clock in the afternoon while driving home I heard on the radio the devastating stories of the fires in the Kelmscott-Roleystone area. It is very difficult for a member of parliament to know exactly what to do. Do we go down and involve ourselves? As you will hear from any of us, we are damned if we do and we are damned if we don’t. If we do, some people will say, ‘Look at him just showing up after the event,’ and those sorts of things. But, on the other side of the coin, many people will say: ‘Isn’t it good that the local representatives have come down to see what they can do to help, to just be of comfort or to just be there?’

Some of this is under inquiry, and I understand an inquiry is being sought into the Kelmscott-Roleystone fire. Without going into too much detail, I understand a fire was started in the most horrific of conditions. It was hot and the wind was blowing up to 70 miles an hour and gusting up even higher. The wind was coming from the east-south-east. The conditions were such that if there were a spark it would take off, and that is exactly what happened. A spark started a grassfire which then travelled along a water course and burnt out the Buckingham Bridge on the Brookton Highway. It then began to race across the paddocks and through the bush towards people’s houses.

It happened so fast. As you can imagine, if you have 70 miles an hour winds the fire will leap from tree to tree. In this bushfire the fire leapt from treetop to treetop and exploded with the help of the eucalypt trees, which have almost explosive qualities. Unfortunately, it headed across the rural lots towards the built-up areas. It went from smaller farms into residential areas. By the time it got there it leapt from house to house. We know now that at least 72 houses have been declared to have been lost in these bushfires. Seventy-two houses were lost in such a short time.

I want to refer to some heroic stories and some very good luck stories. I was fortunate that Premier Colin Barnett, after declaring this area a disaster zone so the funding could flow, took me and Tony Simpson, the state member for Darling Range, on a tour of the area. As we often see, one house was burnt but its neighbour was still standing, the shed next to the house burnt but the house was standing, and the house was standing but the shed at the back was gone. We saw all those things in the neighbourhood that was in the path of this fire that travelled so fast.

It has been a really difficult time. I need to congratulate a number of people for their contribution, not least the Mayor of the City of Armadale, Linton Reynolds, his councillors and staff for being on the spot straightaway. The City of Armadale has provided its rangers and all the support it can. It has provided the arena as a mustering point where agencies can disseminate information. It is also where people without houses have been sleeping over the last couple of nights.

I want to particularly pay tribute to the career firefighters from metropolitan Perth and the bush firefighters from around Armadale, Roleystone and other areas in the south-west. Of course, the Roleystone bush fire brigade were the first ones there, because it was their town. They were there in minutes. Without them, more houses would have been lost. There could have been more loss of human life if they had not intervened at such an early stage. When we toured the other day we saw the firefighters at Roleystone along with all the other firefighters. They were exhausted. They had been fighting the fire throughout the night. They were changing over. They were sitting back and having a rest, as they should have been.

The Fire and Emergency Services Authority incident controllers and those who ran the headquarters that coordinated the response and the SES volunteers who made themselves available for hours and hours need to be congratulated. The action of the police is one reason why there was such minimal risk to life. The statewide alert emergency warning system did not really work. People were getting the message to leave their house three or four hours after the fire. It was the police who went door to door telling people to get out and making them get out. In some cases they arrested people who would not leave. That played out on TV. Some people were very unwilling to leave. Once you have decided to stay and fight and the time for fleeing has gone then you are there on your own. There are a huge number of stories documented in the media. The police certainly need recognition for all their fantastic work.

On the day we visited with the Premier and others it was amazing to see the huge helicopters swooping in, after engorging themselves with water, and accurately bombing the fires in coordination with the firefighters on the ground. It was a brilliant thing to see. As an aside, Western Australia is getting two helicopter tankers from Victoria in the next few weeks. Obviously, it has not stopped raining in Victoria so the chances of them needing firefighting equipment for a while is diminished. Two helicopters from Victoria are coming to Western Australia because it is tinder dry over there and the chance of there being more fires is very real.

There are so many other people to mention. I am mindful of the fact that once you start mentioning people you forget people. I want to mention the Salvation Army. There they were the other day, providing all the food for the fireys, the helpers and the coordinators. They were selfless. They were there on their own, with their trailer, making sure that all those hardworking people were being fed. The work of these dedicated people is truly outstanding.

I mentioned the response of the state government. As soon as they could, Colin Barnett, along with the Minister for Police and Minister for Emergency Services, Rob Johnson, gave their full attention to the situation and declared the area an emergency zone. I also want to congratulate the member for Darling Range, Tony Simpson, for being there. I will mention a few things about him in a moment. The new member for Armadale, Tony Buti, was on the spot, helping his constituents in the best possible way that any member of parliament can. Of course, their staff were also there.

There is another story I have to mention. Before I got up there I was getting calls from some of my constituents. What happened was that people were told to evacuate. Where do they go? Some went to the arena, but many from the Clifton Hills and Kelmscott areas went down to the Stargate Shopping Centre. Being a Sunday, the Stargate Shopping Centre car park was empty, so they all parked there. My office is just over the road from there. You could sit at the bottom and see the hills ablaze. They were sitting there, wondering whether one of those blazes was their home. They were sitting there with their dogs, some of them with a bird in a cage and that sort of thing. They were devastated, just numb, watching part of their world burn.

On the edge of the Stargate Shopping Centre, open on a Sunday night, was the IGA supermarket. Glen Wood, the owner of the IGA supermarket, was handing out free water to everyone. He ran out of water. He had to go to another store to get another pallet of water because he had given out so much. He decided later on—and this was where I finally made myself useful—that he would put on a barbecue for those who had been left stranded. I did my best to turn the onions and sausages. Tony Simpson, the state member, raced home and got his barbie and we did our best to feed people for most of the night. People came along and started giving immediately. A lady turned up straightaway with three boxes of soft toys for the kids. That was in the car park. A lady and her husband from across the road from the shopping centre brought out a table, got an extension cord and an electric kettle and made cups of tea and coffee for people who were stranded in the car park. You hear all these fantastic stories, like you heard in Queensland, about how people help. Glen Wood, we are not going to forget you. I know the community will not.

Allen Gale from FESA has already confirmed that 72 homes have been lost, 32 homes have had significant damage and 430 hectares of land have been burnt out. There are many people who did not know for days what had happened to their homes. When we went to the briefing at the arena on Monday morning it was like the list of the damned, with people waiting to hear whether their house or street had been 100 per cent destroyed. When people heard their house number, they broke down, quite understandably. It is very hard for them to come to grips with.

The newspaper has been reporting on a number of people, so they are on the public record now—people like Mary Wooldridge, in the West Australian here. She lost everything. The paper mentions Tim Semones and his family, with a young baby. Their neighbours have nothing to go back to. The story of the Tucci family is unbelievable. Their home was one of the ones you saw regularly on TV as part of the fire coverage. It was one of the first to go.

I must mention one of the tragic things about this. When people say, ‘Turn off your evaporative air-conditioner,’ turn it off. What happens—and you can see it in houses like this one in the newspaper—is that the embers get sucked into the draught in the air-conditioning. And what is in the core of the air-conditioning? A sort of cane. It burns straight down, blows all the embers into your house and that is how your house starts to blow up and burn straightaway. The air-conditioning blows all the hot embers into the family room and lounge room and off it goes. It burns from the centre out.

Eileen Parker, sadly, lost everything. So did Frank Duffy. There are some fantastic stories of help. Mr Kalajzich is on the front page of the West Australian today. He is an old gentleman who secured his house and moved his wife out of the place, then raced around and saved a lot of neighbours’ houses. Some people were at the cricket, watching the English being beaten at the WACA, and there was old Mr Kalajzich, making sure that their place was spared.

I just want to mention the 11 houses that were destroyed in the Lake Clifton fire. Unlike the Roleystone-Kelmscott fire, the Lake Clifton fire was deliberately lit. An arsonist was involved in the Lake Clifton fire. It is the same story: prevailing winds and off it went. I would like to congratulate all the carers, the firefighters and the volunteers et cetera from the Lake Clifton community, the Western Australian state government, state member Murray Cowper and the Shire of Waroona councillors and staff for their magnificent effort.

Murray Cowper and I visited some of the people whose homes were burnt out in the Lake Clifton area. I went to Joe Ferraro’s place and it was totally burnt out. As an aside, you do see some interesting things. At Joe’s place, for example, he had shifted his dinghy away from the house and put it under a tree. When he got back it was in the shape of a banana because the tree had burnt, fallen over his boat and turned it into a U shape, compounding it. That was very unlucky. I wondered what the smell was. He had had eight boxes of prawns delivered after Christmas and they had burnt underneath the house. He was not able to get to them until the insurance assessors had been there, and, of course, in the hot weather they stank to high heaven. There are so many people in that area who were affected by the fire. I will not read their names, but I have the 11 names here of the people who lost their houses.

The member for Maribyrnong is quite correct: we as a parliament need to do something about the insurance industry. We have talked about ‘flood’ and all the obscure definitions. I would like to recount an example to the member for Maribyrnong. Joe Ferraro, while I was there, was telling me that the insurance people were giving him a hard time because he had added a sleep-out onto his house. They said, ‘Your insurance is now void because we don’t think you’ve actually got a plan or approval for that from the shire.’ So they will find any way to get out of it. At least he was insured. We feel sorry for the people who were not insured and we are going to help them. But the people who were insured did the right thing and we have to make sure that the insurance companies do not use technicalities or the fine print to get out of paying up. These people have been paying insurance for years, and this is the first time they have ever had to call on it.

In conclusion, I seek leave to table a photo. It sort of demonstrates the defiance and resilience. The photo shows the property at 155 Buckingham Road. It is all gone, and the only thing that is left is a singed Australian flag that is still flying.

Leave granted.

I leave this House with another report on a natural disaster, completely different from most of the reports today. All I can say is that as Australians and representatives of Australians we are getting behind these people and we will stay behind them because, once things have moved on, people continue to need help.

For example, in the Lake Clifton area, now that the fire is over, people are trying to rebuild but they are finding that there are issues with insurance. That is when we really need to help. In Armadale, for example, at the moment they have asked people to stop delivering food and other material goods, which people are doing because of their generosity—money, yes, to the City of Perth Lord Mayor’s Distress Relief Fund. The real crunch will come later on when they try to rebuild and they need planning approval. I note the City of Armadale has taken away any demolition costs and any council planning costs, as they affect the places that need to be rebuilt. Those sorts of things need to happen right across Australia as well as in my electorate.

I add my support to this motion. All of us here extend our sympathies to those who have been affected by the fires and, in my electorate, those in the Roleystone, Kelmscott and Lake Clifton area. Thank you.

Debate interrupted.

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