Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is my great honour to represent in this place some of most beautiful and productive farming land not just in South Australia but in the country and some of the best and most productive farming families in my state. This year, of course, has brought a very bitter harvest. Fires swept across my electorate just last week and burnt to a cinder so much of that productive farming land. For so many of those communities it has been a fairly daunting and debilitating week.

Some 82,600 hectares have burnt. The fire has a 265-kilometre perimeter. Two people are deceased and 90 people have sought assistance or been hospitalised for their injuries. That fire continues to burn at this moment. Hay bales, hay sheds, fences and trees are still burning in my electorate and still pose a risk. There are still areas of concern in my electorate. Today, as if to add insult to injury, mother nature has delivered us a dust storm. That dust storm has been produced by the fact that in many places the fires burnt so hot that the loam burnt completely away and we have been left with nothing but sand by the side of the road. Particularly through Owen and Hamley Bridge it looked like moonscape, like some dystopian nightmare that one might see in a Mad Max film.

It is very difficult to explain the change, to see this productive farming land and these proud farming communities being subject to such a terrible fire. It started at Pinery, making this little community famous for all the wrong reasons, perhaps. Mallala, the Pinkerton Plains, Wasleys, Owen, Hamley Bridge, Stockport, Roseworthy, Templers, Freeling, Daveyston, Greenock, Kapunda, Tarlee, Marrabel, Allendale North and Eudunda and all the farming communities and little places in between have been greatly affected by these fires.

Speaking as someone who has lived off and on in the area since 1985, driven around the area and travelled through it—I went to school in the area—nobody I know has ever seen a fire of this intensity, ferocity, speed or size on these plains. It has been a truly unique event.

What else has been unique has been the community's solidarity, the community coming together and having conversations, and ultimately the recovery that will occur. On the day after the fires I drove firstly to Greenock to check if my own property was still in one piece. I was very lucky—it was the opposite hills that were affected, and you can see the fire from my front yard. Of course, I know people who live on those hills. When I travelled back to my home town of Kapunda it was truly a town under siege. Many of the fields that I had worked in carting hay in my youth—not for very long, fortunately; it is too hard work for the likes of me—are now terribly burnt. Not far from there, on the Freeling to Daveyston road and on the Sturt Highway, there were terrible scenes as people tried to escape in their cars from the fire. Unfortunately the national highway had been left open—that is not a criticism of anyone; it takes time to do these things—and we had a situation where people were driving on the wrong side of the road to get away from the flames and fireballs. We had people driving up the middle of the highway, and there is still the burnt-out wreckage of a Commodore ute sitting in the middle of the highway—at least, there was on the weekend. There were cars abandoned. On the Freeling to Daveyston road, there was a terrible pile-up in the worst possible place—next to some pine trees, which burnt. It was a terrible day but it might have been even worse if we had not had so many brave emergency services workers and CFS volunteers doing their best in what was an extraordinary set of circumstances.

I do not want to labour the personal stories too much but they are terribly touching. Around my electorate, people had many grim tales of close calls and communities looking after each other and saving one another. People were pulling people from cars and putting them in their own cars. People were literally jumping into CFS trucks to be saved. I want to retain some stoicism in my reflections on my own electorate because these great farming communities are being stoic and tough and largely taking this in their stride. But what I would say is there is really no defence against the weather conditions that were present on that day. Around Greenock, there were wind gusts of over 100 kilometres an hour. One wonders what you can do in the face of such ferocious weather conditions.

What we as a community can do is prepare. The South Australian government, like other state governments, goes out of its way each year to promote preparation and safety. As a community we have to try and respond to that as best we can. It is often something that gets put off. I was a little guilty of that; I waited too long to prepare. As a community and as a nation we have to do far better. We have to use this parliament as an amplifier to say that people really do need to prepare their properties and have a bushfire plan—whether you are visiting an area or whether you are on the outer suburban fringe. This fire could have easily gone into the suburbs, as the Sampson Flat fire did.

It has been a difficult year for fires in South Australia and particularly in my electorate. We really do need national government action. The Minister for Justice was very kind to me during this whole affair and in the Sampson Flat fires as well. We as a parliament really do need to have a national week where we encourage people to prepare their properties and bushfire plans. I think we need to look very carefully at this. These fires are burning hotter and harder, with greater intensity and bigger fuel loads. At the same time, we have more and more people living in rural communities or on the outer suburban fringe where they are vulnerable to these fires. If you do not prepare, you can have panic, and that will cost lives. We really do need to look at having a national water bombing fleet and large fixed wing air tankers to fight these fires, to prevent these fires from taking off and to mitigate their effects. These are some of the practical things we could do as a national parliament to prevent the bitter harvest that I have seen in my own community. These fires, when they come to your community, greatly affect you and the people around you. My thoughts and condolences are with those families who lost someone in the fires. My thoughts are with all those who suffered injuries or who lost property, livestock or pets. To all who suffered from these terrible fires in my electorate, I wish you all the best in your recovery.