Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Respect for Emergency Services Volunteers) Bill 2016, potentially will have a significant impact on how well residents in outer metropolitan Melbourne are protected from fire. That is the untold story of this bill and something that the government has failed to utter a single sentence about. It is really what the negotiations that are going on in Victoria, about the enterprise agreement and the actions of the state Labor government, are about.

The government would have you think that this is some takeover of activities in rural areas some distance from the CBD or major regional centres. The government would have you think that this is about some proposed takeover of purely volunteer brigades in areas that cover the vast majority of Victoria. Those things are completely untrue. To understand what is going on in Victoria, you need to understand a bit about the history. In Victoria the metropolitan fire district was set quite some time ago. It extends 15 kays, give or take, from the GPO, and outside that area you are in the CFA. Quite some time ago, 15 kays from the CBD GPO would have been quite a long distance, and you could legitimately have said you were in the country, but now we have outer metropolitan Melbourne suburbs like Springvale that are in the CFA district.

Increasingly as Melbourne grows, there are areas that are within the CFA fire district but, for all intents and purposes, the people living there think they are in outer metropolitan Melbourne. We have big new housing estates being opened up on the outskirts of Melbourne that are covered by the CFA. Where you used to have farmers and rural workers—people with the time to be volunteers, as we have in many other areas in Victoria—these people are being replaced by people who work in factories or work nine to five in offices and who expect, because they are paying their levies, rates and taxes, that they will have the same standard of fire cover as people in the city.

This issue has been raised in the bushfires royal commission. The bushfires royal commission said: 'We've got a problem here in Victoria with these boundaries. What is called country in some areas is still legitimately country, but in some areas it is now suburban Melbourne, so what are we going to do about it?'

The issue becomes increasingly acute when you live in one of those outer suburban areas and fire trucks do not get to incidents on time. That is not because volunteers are not working hard or doing their best; of course they are. It is just a fact of life that when somewhere that was once farmland is now a housing estate there will be fewer people able to commit time around the clock in the way that they used to. So the government in Victoria has decided, following the bushfires royal commission and recommendations from an independent panel, to roll out additional paid firefighters in some of these urban growth areas, and that makes sense. It is what the people of Victoria would expect.

What we are dealing with in Victoria is what happens in those areas where fire services were once solely volunteer but are now becoming what are called 'integrated fire stations' because of the number of people who live there. We are not talking about what happens in purely rural areas where the brigade will remain purely volunteer; we are talking about these growth areas. What the state government has said is: 'We're going to employ some additional staff there. We have then got to work through a process of how they relate to the volunteers, so that these stations become what are called "integrated stations" where paid staff and volunteers are working side by side, as they do currently in many CFA stations.' So it is nothing new. It is just saying we have got to move with the times and move with the fact that there are lots of people living in areas where there used to be fewer people.

But what does this government do? This government sees a political opportunity and it pounces. It comes into Victoria during a federal election campaign—when this issue about how to deal with growth in population and Melbourne has been going on for years and has been managed within the CFA and the state government for years—and inflames tensions. The fact that it has to come in and tell untruths to the people of Melbourne and Victoria in order to inflame those tensions tells you everything you need to know about this bill. The minister who is responsible for industrial relations, who had all the staff of her office and all the staff of her department at her disposal, sat down and wrote an opinion piece for a significant newspaper in Victoria, the Herald Sun, saying everyone should be concerned about this agreement and everyone needs to back their legislation. She likened what is going on to Ash Wednesday, which is an appalling comparison to make, and then she said here is why you should be scared and why people should vote for this government's bill. The No. 1 reason, she says, is:

SEVEN paid firefighters (ie union members) to be present before CFA personnel are able to be deployed to a fire;

The No. 1 reason the minister gives after deliberation—this is not an off-the-cuff quote; this is a deliberate opinion piece that she spent a long time thinking up—is simply untrue. I could understand why people would be concerned if they thought that this agreement meant that if volunteers were deployed to a fire they would have to sit there and wait until paid staff turned up, but that is not what the agreement says. Despite the minister's putting it in writing to the whole country—indeed, to the whole state—in the middle of an election campaign, that is not what the agreement says. What it says is that in these areas where you have volunteers and professionals overlapping seven firefighters have to be deployed, but they do not have to turn up before the volunteers can start fighting the fire. If the volunteer turns up first, they start first. That is what the agreement says. And why do you have seven? It is to ensure that the minimum number of firefighters who can fight a fire safely are on their way, are going to turn up at some point. Seven is understood to be the minimum. At the end of the day, that could be a mix of seven paid and volunteers, but there is nothing in the agreement, despite what the minister says in that clear untruth that she peddled after deliberation, that stops a volunteer or a team of volunteers fighting the fire first if they turn up.

The second reason that the minister gave as to why we should support this was:

PAID firefighters to report only to other paid firefighters (not CFA commanders);

The implication is that paid firefighters cannot report to volunteers. Again, that is a complete untruth, because what clause 77.5 says is that the first arriving incident controller on scene can determine the number of appliances and crews, and elsewhere the agreement refers to the incident controller, who could be a volunteer. In other words, the agreement says, despite the clear lies from the minister in this piece in the Herald Sun, that if the incident controller is a volunteer then ultimately the paid firefighters report to them.

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