Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker Scrymgour, I'd like to hazard a guess and say that you understand completely the power of mother nature. Our thoughts and our support need to go to our brothers and sisters, our fellow Australians, in northern Queensland as they go through those terrible floods up there. I'd like to also recognise the great work of the my good friend the member for Herbert for the great work he's doing with his great community.

But the fact remains that, in my electorate down on the west coast of Tasmania, the electorate of Braddon, a different disaster is occurring. At the moment, approximately 16,000 hectares of my electorate are on fire. North of the Pieman River on the rugged west coast, our rainforests and our button grass plains are immersed in fires—many fires—to the point that they are almost now into forestry area, up onto the north-west coast, and posing significant risk to the coupes that are maintained by Sustainable Timber Tasmania and Tasmanian forestry. I'd like to recognise sincerely the great work of our firefighters—our Tasmania Fire Service, those volunteer rural fire brigade services and those tenders who get out there every day and who understand intimately their background, their back door and how to best fight that fire.

Ironically, in an area that is so heavily wooded, it is our forestry operators that are saving the day with heavy earthmoving machinery. I would like to send a big shout-out to Collins's earthmoving Collins Contracting at Smithton, who have got several bulldozers putting fire breaks in. The logging contractors have got fallers felling trees, and I saw footage last night of a faller felling a large tree that was on fire. That posed a significant life-threatening risk to the person doing that job on the ground. Often in this place, as we sit on our shiny seats, we forget that that very real risk takes place on the ground. I think it would do us all well and bode us all well if we thought about those real people doing that real dangerous job, protecting their real communities from life-or-death risk. So, to all of those involved, I want to say a big heartfelt thank you. Of course, this comes on the eve or just past the anniversary, on 7 February 1967, of Tasmania 's worst fire disaster, Black Tuesday, in which 62 people—62 Tasmanians—lost their lives. Nine hundred were injured, and 7,000 were left homeless. Mother Nature is indeed a powerful thing, and we need to respect it and we need to fight it.