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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will continue. The minister goes on:

THE CFA to get the approval of the union "for any policy that affects the application or operation of this agreement or the work of employees covered by it".

And she says:

This would completely destroy the CFA's chain of command and its volunteer-based model.

What she does not say is that the agreement says, right up the front, on page 11:

For the avoidance of doubt, except as provided in Clause 60-Peer Support, nothing in this agreement shall prevent volunteers in the CFA from providing the services normally provided by such volunteers without remuneration.

The role of volunteers is explicitly protected, right up the front of the agreement.

If you read the minister's opinion piece you might think there are some concerns here, and purely regional areas that are staffed purely by volunteers are under threat, but that is simply not the case. The issues that we are primarily dealing with are in the high-growth areas, primarily in outer suburban Melbourne but also in other outer regional centres. Paid staff will continue to report to volunteers if they are the incident controllers at the incident, and nothing in the agreement affects the ordinary operation of volunteers. Instead, we have a government that is prepared, for its own naked political purposes, to try and divide volunteer and paid firefighters, because that is what is going on here. They are scaring and misleading volunteers by telling them things that are simply untrue.

Mr Hunt interjecting—

I hear the minister at the table interjecting. If he wants to get up and defend what the minister wrote in the Herald Sun, please do. Since we called the minister out, not one member of the government has got up and defended the minister's claims. Not even the minister herself could defend them when she was asked on television, because the government knows in its heart that this bill is based on a lie. This bill is based on a lie and it is based on a naked political attempt to divide volunteer and paid firefighters. The real concern is that this sets an incredible precedent. This sets a precedent that says this government will intervene in one particular industrial dispute that is going on in one particular state if it happens to fall during an election period and rewrite the laws to deal with that one particular dispute. If this government's defence of the CFA holds true, surely it is up to the CFA and the Victorian government to decide how they want to roll out their firefighters and their new stations, and the terms and conditions on which they want to do it. If the government and the CFA in Victoria say, 'We think there is an increased fire risk in many of our areas; the bushfire royal commission has told us to have a look at whether the boundaries are still up to date, and we want to go and put some extra staff in those areas,' surely they should be allowed to do it.

There is a provision in this bill that says nothing in an enterprise agreement can override the CFA's powers or the State Emergency Service's powers under a state act. Well, that provision is going to be one of the first ones that will be tested in the Federal Court or the High Court, because surely it is up to the state government and the CFA itself to determine how it wants to exercise its powers. If the state government has powers to look after Victorians, and the state government and the CFA under their own legislation say, 'The best way to look after Victorians is to put a fire station here with this many people working on it; this many are going to be paid and this many are volunteers,' and they want to put that in an enterprise agreement, surely it is their right to do that.

Instead—and I do not think the government fully appreciates what it is doing here—this federal government is stepping in for naked political purposes and saying, 'We will override the ability of the CFA to reach an agreement with its paid workforce and its volunteers and implement it in the way that it sees fit to protect Victorians.' When, as a result of this legislation, there are stations that cannot be built or crewed in the way that is envisaged in the agreement, and there is lawsuit after lawsuit about what this means, and when that holds up the rollout of new fire stations and new firefighters, it will be this government's responsibility, because you, the government, are saying to people in outer suburban Victoria or in those regional areas: 'You don't deserve the same standard of fire cover as people who live in the cities. For naked political purposes we will pass a bill that will make it more difficult for the Victorian government to give you a standard of fire cover.' It will be on your head when people do not get the standard of fire cover they deserve.

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