Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Paterson has been saying, it is really good to see some movement on this. There haven't been a lot of outcomes from the fires of last summer. The inquiries are still happening. There are tentative recommendations but we haven't seen a lot of action. So I'm really pleased to see that Defence can get its stuff together and get a bunch of recommendations through to be considered by this parliament. I note that we do have some questions about some of the issues and look forward to it being considered by the Senate and for us to make a final view about it. As we saw in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury, in my electorate, firsthand throughout summer, the Australian Defence Force played an absolutely vital role in assisting our community during that emergency, and that applies to a range of emergencies and disasters across the rest of the country.

In our case, the Richmond RAAF base was a hive of activity and there was never a more hopeful sound than that of a plane full of fire retardant heading towards the smoke. People were very pleased to see those planes. There are some planes I don't want to see over my electorate and there are others I'm very happy to see. The planes and their crew were supported by the entire base. I know that leave was cancelled and permanent defence personnel and reservists alike threw everything they had into making sure the tankers could get in and back out as fast as possible, in what were some of the darkest days for our small communities. The RAAF provided space in the workshop and maintenance hangers and it provided accommodation and catering support for firefighters. So, they were there for us across the whole gamut.

In the first month of the campaign, between 150 and 300 firefighters from Victoria's Country Fire Authority were fed and watered at the base. The same went for others as the months went on. The RAAF aircraft, including the C-130 'Hercs' were used to bring firefighters from interstate and to take them elsewhere. 37 Squadron was kept busy. For example, in November alone they brought South Australian firefighters from Adelaide up to Port Macquarie in New South Wales, Tasmanian firefighters were carried from Hobart to Port Macquarie, and Victorian firefighters were brought from Essendon and Mildura up to Armidale. So, our RAAF base didn't just support the fire effort in the immediate area of the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury. They supported the fire effort up and down the eastern seaboard. It really does highlight how important that base is. There is periodically talk about closing Richmond RAAF base—that it's outlived its usefulness. But I cannot imagine there ever being a good reason to give up that strip of tarmac on the edge of our largest city. It isn't just a base for our emergency operations overseas when international crises occur and we lend a hand—in the Pacific or in Asia—but, as last summer showed, it was pivotal in our ability to deal with the Gospers fire and with fires up and down Victoria and New South Wales, up into Queensland and across to the west. We sometimes think about bushfires as being on the eastern seaboard, but there are also those that occur further west.

There is so much capacity at the base, either by drawing on the Defence resources that are already there or by, potentially, building up alongside the defence forces the additional skills for bushfire defence. We could be training our own firefighting pilot crews there, for instance. We could be researching the effectiveness of various firefighting techniques and honing our ability to respond fast to fires. But what we saw should leave nobody in any doubt that it is absolutely an essential base now for our firefighting efforts in the summer. As we expect that fires will become more frequent, not less, and will be of greater ferocity, not less, it remains absolutely crucial.

We had RAAF personnel, including 22 Squadron, plus Army reservists not just working off the base but also at the RAAF headquarters in Wilberforce, where I turned up for the early morning briefings. They'd often be there unloading pallets of stuff or getting ready to deliver eskies of food to the fire ground. They were out at Bilpin providing supplies for the firefighters, with volunteers preparing the meals for the firefighters as they came in from a long, hard shift or were heading out for one. Everywhere I went I caught moments of our reservists and permanent personnel helping out. Once the fire had gone through, they were there long after the flames had cleared, for many, many weeks, helping to clear dangerous trees from trails in places like Blackheath, Bell and Mount Victoria.

I witnessed all of that last summer and I give a heartfelt thanks to Defence Force personnel for their service on behalf of the people in the electorate of Macquarie and beyond. We all watched on TV, way outside my electorate, what the Navy was doing down on the South Coast and into Victoria. I think none of us have any doubt about the role that the Defence Force can play in something like a bushfire. But, with the pandemic, we've also seen the roles that can be played during other types of disasters or emergencies.

That's why I am really pleased to see that there is some intent to improve the way in which their role is activated and defined. I think that there could have been a greater role for Defence during the fires. They have the skills, the training and the mindset. We need to do more work on what that role is and what role they play in the future. None of us in New South Wales will forget the confusion that surrounded the activation of their role and the clear discord between the Premier of New South Wales and the Prime Minister. We need to get things right so that we don't have those sorts of disagreements playing out in the midst of a disaster. We need to get the legal stuff right.

This bill will make several changes to the administrative arrangements for the use of ADF personnel, particularly, when reservists are called out. The changes follow the review by Defence after the last bushfire season. I do hope they take into account the experience of Defence during the current pandemic. The aim of the bill is to simplify arrangements, particularly for advising the Governor-General prior to the issuing of an order to call out the reserves. That's a really good thing. It'll increase flexibility, hopefully in terms of the types and periods of services that reserves render during a call-out, rather than just requiring one continuous full-time service call. Having some flexibility clearly was what was needed during the bushfires.

The changes will also look at the immunity that's provided in certain circumstances from civil and criminal liability for Defence personnel and other designated protected persons responding to an emergency—similar to those that are enjoyed by civil emergency services. That is really important and has come up in discussions that I've had with people. Getting that bit right will be really key. I note we are aware of some concerns about that part of the bill, around the immunity provisions and potential interpretations. I think there is real value in the Senate taking a look at that before we form a final position on it.

I welcome the fact that this does look at addressing the current arrangements that mean reservists who are providing continuous full-time service during a call-out don't receive superannuation. They're the sorts of basic things we need to get right. I welcome this legislation. We're coming up to nearly 12 months after the fires began and there hasn't been a lot of change that we've seen. I talk about this from a perspective of what people are seeing on the ground as well as what we're seeing here. There's been lots of talk but there hasn't been a lot of tangible action. There's still a lot to do. Just to be clear, so that this place recognises it, the work is far from over in bushfire-affected areas. There's been no significant planning to reduce the impact of bushfires. We still have the $4 billion Emergency Response Fund that this place voted on 18 months ago and we've not seen a cent spent. There's been nothing in my electorate to say, 'Here's how we will make things better for next time.' That is really disappointing. While it's good to see this type of legislation, there's so much more that could be happening.

We're not seeing an injection of funds into the community to really tackle the enormous environmental issues that we face. There are small amounts of money that are just starting to trickle through, but we're into the next fire season. We failed to get environmentalists and researchers out on the ground fast to do early audits of what was lost. We've missed that opportunity now, so why aren't we seeing legislation here that would set up a fund that allows, in the case of an emergency, researchers to be taken off and allowed to park their existing projects. Academics tell me that parking a project, in a research context, is an impossible thing to do, but why aren't we making it easier so they can sideline certain research and divert their energy into the stuff that can only happen in a tiny little window of opportunity in our World Heritage area? We have missed the opportunity to really understand the impact. We'll now start to see which bits recover and which bits don't, but we're never getting that ground zero data that would have been so useful. That's the sort of legislation I'd like to see here: some real planning around how we respond to these sorts of disasters going forward.

The other thing we're not seeing in this place is any commitment to fixing one of the fundamental issues for communities like mine, which is around a failure of mobile communication. There were people in my electorate who had no way to make a phone call as fires were bearing down on them. There were brigades who had no way to activate their brigade. They had no way to communicate because of a failure of communication. We're meant to be seeing a satellite phone in every rural fire brigade. The failure to make any provision for improved telecommunications is a fundamental flaw, and it leaves people's lives at risk. The lives of people in the Blue Mountains, the Hawkesbury and many other areas are at risk because of that failure. We don't need recommendations; we just need to fix that problem. This government has failed miserably to do that.

That's why there is some unease in my community when they look at the areas that were fire affected. I was in Mount Tomah last Friday with shadow minister Jason Clare, and we identified that not one single house had been rebuilt in that area. As far as I can establish, there were only two pre-DAs of all the 40 hours that burnt down. We didn't lose hundreds of homes—not this time; we lost hundreds in the previous fire—but the pace of the recovery is so slow that there aren't any homes being rebuilt yet.

These are the sorts of things that this parliament really needs to consider. We need to put in place mechanisms so that recovery can happen faster. Ultimately what I'm saying is that this is a step forward, but, gee, it's a small step. It's a terrific step from a defence personnel perspective, and I know that my community will be grateful for the clarity that it will ultimately provide. The RAAF, Army and Navy personnel and reservists who live in my electorate will be grateful for that clarity.

My communities have faced disasters, and we're not just talking about bushfires in the electorate of Macquarie; we also face floods and storms—you name it; it probably happens in my electorate. We need confidence in the government that things are in place—so that things can happen much faster. I worry less about a Prime Minister being overseas than about the mechanisms being put in place—and they clearly weren't. Personally, I couldn't sleep while the beds were burning; I needed to be out in my electorate every day. That was my approach to it. I saw great people doing incredible work, but they didn't have the things in place that would have made their lives better, that would have made the decisions quicker and faster, and that may well have meant a different outcome for some of my communities.

Eighty per cent of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area was fire affected. The fire went through 80 per cent of it. If we had been able to reduce that, we might be seeing less of an environmental disaster unfolding there. While some parts of it are recovering, and there are the wonderful furry trees with the new green growth growing from the bottom of the trunk right up the top, there are others that are still black ash—simply a burnt forest standing, never to recover, for the foreseeable future.

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