Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Summer is ahead of us and I want to acknowledge all of the volunteer emergency services people in my electorate and even around Australia who will be flat out. In my electorate, the volunteers in Forrest will be working overtime with the amount of tourists as well as locals they look after, and they do an amazing job. I look at my surf life saving clubs along the coast. We all have surf life saving clubs that do an amazing job. In WA in the 2022-23 report, it said 90 per cent of the drowning deaths in Western Australia were men, which was up 17 per cent on the year before. While 52 per cent of those occurred at a beach, over 90 per cent were over a kilometre from a surf lifesaving service, which, in itself, tells a story. The surf lifesavers provided first aid and prevented accidents and incidents for nearly 70,000 people. There were over 550,000 people who were caught in a rip that they were able to help.

The other group that I want to mention is our fire and emergency services. In WA, we have 27,000 volunteers. They just have such a big job to do. I look at my area in the south-west of the state, the cape-to-cape region, which has significant fuel loads and is a great challenge for our fire and emergency services. In 2023-24 the comms centre answered approximately 40,000 calls. The volunteers and career firefighters responded to 3,200 crash rescue incidents, 5,800 bushfires and 1,500 search-and-rescue efforts. That includes the likes of our volunteer marine and sea rescue group as well. Look at the number of hours that our volunteers dedicate to our emergency services. To those of us who live in rural and regional parts of Australia, often it's all volunteers or majority volunteers, and they do an extraordinary job.

I also want to recognise St John Ambulance. We had 4,288 St John's volunteers listed in that 2022-23 report. Having a mum who was a St John Ambulance attendant—and our home phone was the ambulance phone all her life—I cannot tell you how important it is in a small community when the people who come to help you when you are hurt, injured, desperately ill or have had an emergency are your local people. The amount of comfort and support it gives you when it is someone you know is great. Often these same ambulance volunteers have to deal with the worst situations locally with people they know, and that comes at a cost for them.

I just want to acknowledge the great importance for rural, regional and remote communities of our volunteer and professional emergency services operatives. When we look at what happens with each one of these, the number of hours that go into training that nobody sees is extraordinary. They do this week in and week out. They don't even look to be thanked. They do it because they are committed to what they do and they are very, very good at it. Sometimes the numbers ebb and flow, and there can be an extraordinary amount expected of a small number of people. But they keep doing it because they believe in it and they know not only that what they are doing helps each one of us when we are most at risk but also that they are part of that really genuine local community that makes such a difference to us.

We cannot do without our emergency services volunteers. Nothing means more in a small community. If it's a bushfire, a flood, an accident on the road or an incident of any sort, when we see our local volunteers turn up we are very, very grateful. You can often form a bond with those volunteers that lasts for the rest of your life. I just wanted to say thank you to every one of our professional and volunteer workers, who just do such an extraordinary job in emergency services. We desperately need them all, and we are very grateful to have them all.