Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to take note of those answers. I would particularly like to hear from those opposite who have been involved in active firefighting; I have been, down on the farm and on my parents' property, and I know my good friend, Jim Molan, is actively involved in his local fire service. I would genuinely like to speak to those opposite who have been involved, because I think there is a really important level of knowledge to be gained from actually experiencing a fire front. It's truly an extraordinarily frightening and confronting experience. My father and I were protecting our property one day from a fire, and the pump stopped working literally 30 seconds before the bush fire brigade arrived. The gutters of our house were on fire. We both certainly know what it means to be in a dangerous fire situation. I say I'd like to speak to those opposite who have experienced that because I cannot believe that those opposite are politicising disaster preparedness in the way that they are here today.

Aerial firefighting capacity is not a silver bullet. Anyone who has been involved in firefighting and who's been involved on the ground in a bushfire zone, knows that, yes, it has a role to play but it is in no way a silver bullet that can replace people on the ground. When my father was a young man, there were thousands of people involved from the forestry industry where I grew up, down in Pemberton—thousands of mill workers. In fact, the Warren district at that point was a safe Labor seat, because the mill in town employed hundreds, thousands, of blue-collar workers. But when the Labor Party walked away from that industry, they walked away from those workers, and the bush lost an extraordinary capacity for on-the-ground firefighting.

At the same time, society has changed. We've developed the peri-urban areas. In the last decade something like 300,000 new homes have been built in the peri-urban areas of Australia—that is, completely surrounded, in most cases, by reasonably dense bush. That has created an environment where the risk of disasters of this sort, including climatic conditions, is having a massive impact. But the idea that this is something we should politicise or that this is something that in any way we should seek to make political points out of—it's very sad that the Labor Party has, quite frankly, stooped this low.

The Emergency Response Fund—as some of my colleagues have noted in disorderly interjections—was voted for by the Australian Labor Party. It cannot be accessed until advice is received that it is required and that all other funding sources have been depleted. That is its purpose. That is what those opposite and those on this side voted for. But we do provide significant funding for disaster preparedness through other means—$130 million in Commonwealth funds under the National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, $37 million on telecommunications resilience. Again, we know how important it is if you can't contact your local fire brigade, your local bushfire service or your local emergency services in those situations. Being on your own in those circumstances is extraordinarily risky. There's $8 million to work with the states and territories to develop a public service mobile broadband capacity, $2 million for the emergency alert capacity. There's an enduring research capability with $88 million for a new world-class disaster research centre.

In the 30 seconds I have remaining, we also have to make sure that we listen to those who have the experience. Roger Underwood, from Western Australia, was a good friend of my fathers and spent a lot of time in the south-west forest of WA. He knew what it was like to fight fires on the ground. The people in this place have an obligation to listen to people like Roger Underwood, people like Rick Sneeuwjagt, people who have the experience of fighting these sorts of fires on the ground.