Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Back on 9 November Neville Smith was fighting the fire in Tenterfield—next door to your seat, Mr Deputy Speaker Hogan—and he was severely burnt. He spent months in hospital. That was an omen that, quite obviously, this was a fire season that had started early and would be more ferocious. I remember going to Tenterfield and seeing the town isolated. It looked like something from Dante's 'Inferno' as I sat on the hill and pondered how people were dealing with the fires—those on the periphery, those fighting them and those isolated within them. To see fires actually burning through the town was something that was quite awe-inspiring and horrifying. That was merely the start.

I go to three names: Vivian Chaplain, George Nole and Courtney Partridge-McLennan, who all died in the seat of New England—an absolute tragedy. You should never judge a tragedy by numbers. What is too many people to die? One—one is too many people to die. Two were from Wytaliba and one died from an asthma attack brought on by the smoke.

We live, in New England, with the experience of fire. It was so intense that where I lived the spiders were dying in the roof and falling out because, after such a period of smoke, they could not survive. The ramifications of the fire went way beyond where the fire was. If you went to the pool, the pool was closed because the pollution level was unhealthy. You couldn't exercise. It looked hellish. You'd wake up every morning—and I'm sure you saw a lot of the clips on programs like Sunriseand the sun just rose as a red ball. You knew that that was a sign that other people's lives were hell and they were fighting those fires.

We look at what happened across our nation, but, for the intent of this speech, in my electorate at Nowendoc I talked to mates of mine, blokes I played football with. They would resiliently say: 'My property will go next. It's going to get burnt out. We're trying our best, but we know this is not going to work.' We can look at Ebor, where, unfortunately, a person was back-burning around a marijuana crop—and I say that not in the sense of mirth but to show people the consequences of their actions. By the time that fire had started, there were pyrocumulus clouds that were actually changing the weather. You saw it and you knew once more that there was something like an inferno for miles. From 100 kilometres away, you could see that pyrocumulus cloud. That was the result of a misdemeanour—probably not malfeasance but a lack of thought, a lack of understanding of the consequences, at a time where the whole of our landscape was a tinderbox.

When you see fires and say, 'They won't burn across that ground'—in the right conditions, they will burn across anything. You could see straw just rolling along alight. You could see areas where all the cow pats were alight and smouldering. There were fires at Nundle and Guy Fawkes River National Park and also fires at Moonbi—I say Moonbi because it is one that I was fighting myself. As I drove along the road I heard that message—and I can tell you exactly where I was: I was at Llangothlin driving north towards Tenterfield to try and see what I could do as a politician to assist the people in Tenterfield with their fire—that a fire had just started near the New England Highway at Moonbi. I knew what that meant because I have lived in the area for 50 years. It meant the fire was going to go home. I did a U-turn immediately on hearing that on the radio, and started to go back. I rang the neighbours and said: 'Where do we meet up? How do with deal with this? What's the process? What's the drill?' We knew how the fire would burn through, we knew the areas where if it broke out we'd have real problems, and we knew the areas where we could try to engage, burn back and deal with it.

One of the great things of our nation—the stoicism, the ethos to give a guy a fair go and to stand by your mates—is never better encapsulated than when you go to the middle of your neighbour's paddock in the middle of nowhere and there are fire trucks emblazoned with names of towns from all across our nation. They have turned up at your place, at your area, to help you, but they have never met you before in their life, and they are not paid to do it. That describes one of the things that comes out of this. What an incredible nation we are. What an incredible nation that a former Prime Minister of Australia is not doing speaking circuits and not writing books; he's fighting fires at Drake, he's fighting fires around Tenterfield. He's doing it with his mates and he's doing it over a long period of time. When you talk to him and say, 'Tony Abbott, why are you doing this?' he says: 'I get paid a pension from parliament. I've got staff. I don't feel like I'm doing this for free; I feel like I'm doing this because it's what an Australian does.' It's not what a former Prime Minister does; it's what an Australian does. This is the essence of who we are. This shows our better angels.

We acknowledge the tragedies of Vivian Chaplain, George and Courtney, and our hearts go out to their families. We acknowledge the grief of people such as Mayor Carol Sparks from Glenn Innes, the tireless work of people such as Mayor Peter Petty from Tenterfield, and the ongoing discussions by mayors such as Eric Noakes from Walcha. They were having meetings on Boxing Day. You listen and you think, 'What I can do is so minor compared to what these people are doing: fighting fires right through Christmas.' They're not with their family; they're with their mates—and mates they've never met before in their life, because they're Australian.

So many people do it for free, but other businesses have to get paid. Other businesses that contract have to get paid. We must make sure that we pursue that they get fair compensation for the work that they have done, not as a charity but under contract, and make sure that the issue does not compound the economic crisis in small towns such as Walcha that rely so much on the contracting businesses, hotels, fuel distributors and all the people who are putting their endeavours towards fighting the fires. They can't do it for free, because they have a product they have to sell or staff they have to pay.

On the back of this tragedy and the stoicism and resilience of the Australian people, we have to look forward to how we can do this better in the future. I can't stand the word 'learnings'. I always say 'learning' is a verb, 'knowledge' is a noun, and 'learnings' is a nonsense. From the knowledge that we have gained from this, what can we do better in the future? I want to mention a couple of these issues.

Fighting some fires, some trucks have had to go over 100 kilometres to refill. The fire is in front of you. You've got to understand the terror. When it's night—I can show people some of the photos of my family's place—it is so terrifying to see that silhouette of the hill become emblazoned in red, and you know the fire is getting closer and closer and closer. You unplug all the tanks around your parents' place and you go up and get your firefighting plant—remember, it can't be connected to electricity, because when the electricity goes off the fire plant doesn't work—connect the fire plant up, make sure all the hoses can reach the vital parts, make sure you have an alternative plan to get out if something goes wrong, make sure you have an alternative plan to put the fires out in your house if the firefighting plant goes down, work out the most likely places the house will catch on fire in an ember attack. These are the things you do. And guess what? Just as you're doing them—it is incredible—a truck turns up with two blokes, and they're just mates. They say, 'We heard it was getting close to your place, so we're here.' Then another truck turns up with what they call a shuttle, which is a big water tank with a pump, and they say, 'We're here.' You never ask them to come; they just turn up, because that's what Australians do. And then when you say to them, 'Fellas, I think I'm right; you should go home'—I remember one bloke, and I won't give his name, because he'd be embarrassed, but he said: 'Mate, I'm a bit tired, so I'll just sleep here tonight. Do you mind if I crash on your couch?' Do you know what they're really saying? They're saying, 'You might need help, and I'm not leaving.' Doesn't it just get you, to think that's the essence of our nation? You know when they say they're tired and they want to crash on your couch it's—not a lie, but a statement: 'Don't tell me to go. You need a hand. I'm staying here.'

Let's get back to positive things, because you've got to be positive, you've got to look forward, you've got to look at how you can do things better. We can't travel 100 kilometres to refill a fire truck. Think about that instance. If someone says, 'We're out of water; we're going, and we'll be as quick as we can, but it's going to be about three hours.' Think in your own minds how that would make you feel, with a massive fire coming, and you're trying to do the back-burning, trying to stop the spot fires. If you look at the resource and you look at the people in the yellow uniforms disappearing—not because they want to but because they have to, because they've got to refill—we need central watering points. I propose this as maybe something we can do in a bipartisan way—for the government to give a grant in these areas where there have been fires and say, 'We'll build a dam, and you can use half the water'—farmer, state forest, whatever—'and the other half is always ours.' And it comes with a licence, that no matter how much water is in there, if a fire starts, it's all ours, no questions asked. That way, we're not travelling 100 kilometres; we're travelling 20, or 15 or 10 or five, and that makes such a difference.

You can't stop a raging bushfire, although you can mitigate, but you can stop small ones, and you can back-burn on small ones, and that's where this comes in. You don't wait until the bombers are over London before you start knocking them out of the sky. As soon as they take off, you try to knock them down. So, it is about watering points. What happens in fires when trees are next to the road is twofold. They burn and fall over the road, or they bake the soils, crack the soils, and the soils become unstable and the trees fall over the road. The consequence of that is that if someone, a civilian, is trying to escape from a fire, that's where they stop. And they stop in an area of intense fire pressure, because the forest is next to the road, and that's where they die, if they can't go back and they can't go forward and they can't get out.

The vegetation management laws must be changed so that, without question, you can remove the trees to a space where, if they fall over, people can still get out and fire trucks can get in. It might look quaint having trees next to the road; it might look good. But if they're in a fire area, the safety of people is paramount, and it must be put at the top. Likewise, fuel loads: if you double the fuel load, the speed at which the fire spreads is doubled, and the intensity of the heat is quadrupled. And the radiant heat is what's going to kill you, in many instances, long before the fire gets to you. If you see what happens in a fire, you see the awesome, terrifying power of a fire as it races through the heads of the trees. You hear it roar as it comes towards you. It doesn't come up silently. It roars. And its speed is way beyond the speed of a fire truck or a tractor or anything else. But it has to burn something. You can't stop the fuel load in the trees, but you can mitigate the fuel load on the ground, and you must do it.

Even a bad burn in winter—something that's imperfect, something that does cause smoke damage to clothes, something that does maybe get slightly out of control and burns more areas than you need—is a vastly better alternative than what we just experienced. That is the alternative. If you don't do the back-burning, nature will do it for you, and it will do it for you in such a profound way that it burns out millions of square kilometres and kills people, destroys houses, kills stock and brutally maims and kills wildlife.

I try to convey some of these things so that people will know some of the essence of what happens on a fire ground. One of the first things to move off fire grounds is insects, especially the spiders. When you stand in an area you become very aware that the ground is alive with beetles and spiders—they almost know that something is on, and they're moving out. It's part of this almost apocalyptic feel that it gets; it's the eeriness. Then the smoke comes and you know it's approaching.

In this period of time we must also make sure that we have proper communications. So often now, we all reach for our mobile phone. We don't have the two-way radios of the past. We've got to get proper communications—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10:25 to 10:49

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