Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I'm honoured to be able to rise in this debate to extend the condolences of my community in Melbourne's west to those who have suffered in this 'black summer'. While my electorate has not been directly affected by the fires that we've experienced in recent months, the loss of life and property experienced by so many thousands of Australians, as well as the incalculable ecological destruction and loss of animal life, is a national tragedy of unprecedented scale that all Australians feel at this time. My condolences and thoughts go to all of those who have been directly affected by this.

I want to particularly put on the record my recognition of the incalculable debt that we as Australians all owe to those firefighters who sacrificed their lives this summer, particularly those who had come from the other side of the world to fight fires in Australia. We've also seen in my community in Melbourne's west Australians at their best in the way that they've responded to this crisis. I've never been prouder to represent this community than I have been over recent months. People from all backgrounds have rallied together to help their fellow Aussies in need. Volunteers from the Australian Islamic centre, the Newport mosque, collected five truckloads full of donations and then left Newport at 3 am, drove to Bairnsdale, with the assistance of the MFB and the CFA, and put on a breakfast sausage sizzle for exhausted firefighters. They were featured on CNN for their efforts. The Authors for Fireys campaign, kicked off by YA authors Emily Gale and Nova Weetman, raised $511,000, and local authors in Melbourne's west, like Andy Griffiths, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Enza Gandolfo all participated in this extraordinarily worthy donation drive.

We are very proud to host Foodbank in Yarraville, and my heart was bursting with pride to see the 1½-kilometre-long queues of Australians pulling up in their cars, their utes, their trucks, their kombis—you name it—to make material donations at Foodbank to produce the thousands of food hampers that hundreds of volunteers from my community and across Melbourne put together at Foodbank in those times. They were the best kinds of traffic jams experienced by my community! We couldn't get around, but seeing those trucks lined up in community spirit was something extraordinary. One Yarraville resident, a school student, Oscar, saw these cars and he set up a carwash fundraiser, where he was aiming to raise $100 for the wildlife rescue and rehabilitation fund and ended up raising $3,000. What a legend! Oscar, well done, mate.

No matter what their background, people were chipping in. Dr Tien Kieu, an upper house member in Victoria, travelled with the Venerable Thich Phuoc Tan from the Quang Minh Temple in Braybrook in Melbourne's west, and Quang Minh Temple delivered $33,000 in donations to the CFA in Bairnsdale and CFA District 11 Headquarters Brigade. The Vietnamese Evangelical Church in Footscray raised $42,815 for the Salvos' relief efforts. The East Meets West Festival in Footscray suspended fundraising for the very important Vietnamese community museum in Footscray and dedicated their efforts throughout the day to raising funds for the bushfire as well. Sikh Volunteers Australia organised their volunteers to stay for 15 days in the East Gippsland area and helped serve 1,000 meals per day. The Tarneit Sikh gurdwara, with the assistance of their volunteers, sent tonnes of food to the communities of Bairnsdale and Bruthen. Let's Feed, an important charity in Melbourne's west, and its founder, Jasvinder Sidhu, made two trips to the bushfire affected communities, delivering four vans and 10 tonnes of food. They've committed to working with Bairnsdale Neighbourhood House in the next six months to help 100 families and also to assist the organisation in replacing equipment such as fridges and freezers.

The community response has been amazing. But the Australian government needs to do much more to respond to the underlying cause of this crisis: climate change. This 'black summer' has sheeted home to all Australians that the summers of our childhoods have past. Scientists have been telling us for more than a decade that climate change would mean that the Australian bushfire season would be longer and more intense, and this year all of us have experienced what this means, in the form of the tragic direct loss of life and the destruction of physical property and ecological environments and also in the form of the choking smoke enveloping our cities and electorates such as my own. It is beyond time for all of us in this place to get together and take real action on this threat to the Australian way of life, reduce emissions and, once and for all, tackle the challenge of climate change.

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