Parliamentary Committees

NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE: BUSHFIRE PREPAREDNESS

Debate resumed.

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (11:57): I rise to speak on the bushfire preparedness report and thank the Natural Resources Committee for their work and consideration of this important matter. As a representative of an area which is the subject of this report in the Adelaide Hills, this is an ever present concern of my constituency. As the shadow minister for emergency services, I listen to the plight of those providing emergency service relief and protection on a regular basis.

There are four recommendations of the committee for our consideration and there is a number of comments. I wish to address them briefly as follows. On recommendation 4 which is to have an instruction for the clean-up of public lands, I welcome this. I was shocked to see the attached photographs of public land that is clearly providing a risk to the community, and I welcome the committee's recommendation.

Recommendation 3, which is to ensure that access roads are both there and open to provide access and egress for emergency vehicles, I also welcome. It is extraordinary to think we have to even do a report on these matters. I would also ask that consideration be given to further access roads throughout public property so that they are maintained by local government, or state government, or the instrumentality which is responsible.

I would hope that that would be extended, but all too often we have emergency situations where quick permission has to be obtained to create access ways, and bulldozers are brought in, with even unnecessary damage done to natural environments, to achieve this because we have not ensured that there are adequate access roads or that they are kept in sufficient condition to be ready for emergencies. That, to me, is critical. It is also absolutely necessary to have them wide enough to ensure that they are useful for burn-backs as part of management, where on occasions that is available.

On the question of recommendations 1 and 2—that is, to provide for the mandatory preparation and registration of plans of individual property owners and, in particular, private property owners—I have said (and it has been published today in the daily newspaper) that I do see these as being, effectively, on their own as absolutely useless, and I do see the compulsory registration at council as being an unnecessary burden on both property owners and councils.

With that, obviously people need to plan for two things; one is for the summer, and the period when there is the most fire risk, and preparing their properties and, secondly, in an emergency. They are quite different plans and the circumstances can change, depending, for example, on which way the wind is blowing or where there might be a nearby fire in an emergency as to which plan of exit from the property, what roads they would use, where they would go for respite, etc. These all need to be considered, so they do vary and I frankly think a tick-a-box thing is superficial and inappropriate.

As to insurance and providing rebates if you lodge a plan, what complete nonsense! I am on the record as not being a great advocate of insurance. I personally think that it teaches people to be lazy and irresponsible and that they simply insure something and then walk away and think that if it gets burned down, blown up, destroyed, damaged or stolen, you just put in an insurance claim. I think it is a recipe for laziness, and the Insurance Council of Australia knows my view on it and it is no secret. Nevertheless, I hasten to add that I do provide insurance payments for those things that are compulsorily required to be insured. However, I am not a great supporter of people who use insurance as a means of divesting themselves of personal responsibility, and so I am not happy with this.

I think that most responsible insurance companies, in assessing the risk of a particular property for insurance, will look not at whether or not somebody has a plan but, in fact, at whether they are actually carrying out sensible management of their property, keeping it clear and the like. If I was an insurance company, ticking a box and registering a plan with the council would give me no assurance that somebody was properly preparing their property to the best of their ability in the event of a bushfire. It would give me little confidence. If anything, if somebody were keeping their property in good order and ensuring it as best they can, they should be given some sympathetic response in their annual premiums from insurance companies. That is great, but let them negotiate that.

Bunkers are not a recommendation but a commentary of the committee. I have no objection to bunkers, as they appear to have been used successfully in other jurisdictions when people know what they are doing. There are a number of models out there. and if people wish to attempt to provide extra protection for themselves when they stay and defend property, or they are trapped in an area where they need protection, that is a matter for them. I have not seen any persuasive argument to present subsidies for them, as has been out in the public arena.

As to the question of notice for new owners of their obligation, again there are a number of consequences, perhaps unintended, of imposing obligations to provide information at the change of owners of properties. I note that the Property Council and others are not all that keen on having to ensure that there is to be extra material provided in this sort of caveat emptor proposal. What I do say is that the Adelaide & Mount Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board, which is the one I mostly deal with, has prepared what I think is a quite useful document for landowners particularly in this region who might have small hobby farms and their obligations in respect of bushfire management and clean-up, their obligations in respect of pest control, and their obligation to ensure that they do not cause soil erosion and the like.

These are all part of the responsibility of landowners. From the draft that I saw I think it is quite a useful document, and is available, as I understand it. It is particularly promoted in councils in the Adelaide Hills to ensure that new landowners are aware of their responsibility—and there is a large turnover because some people go up into the Hills thinking that it is going to be a lifestyle of bliss, harmony and beauty. Very often it is, and I think that should be applauded. The problem is that it comes with an enormous amount of responsibility to ensure that either you and your family are protected or indeed your neighbours are protected. That takes a lot of effort and a lot of work. It is helpful, of course, to have a document such as that which the NRM is producing, so I commend them for that.

As for children attending another school, I am with the member for Fisher: I think this would introduce a gross inconvenience to other schools for other obligations. I am comforted by the fact that, as the CFS tells me, although catastrophic days in the first year of application produced a number of days (I think it was around15 in that summer), there was excessive use.

They have redefined the rules, and there is now perhaps three or four a year. I am advised that they are mostly in school holidays, when most schools are closed (that is, in mid to late December across to the end of January). Of course, we have the February risk period as well, and there may be one or two days there, but I think to try to reaccommodate children into formal education into other schools will only create another enormous expense and inconvenience. I am not an advocate of that.

I just say: use this process of the catastrophic day notification, whereby people are expected to pack up their photographs and children go and visit grandma at the beach or something so that they are out of the zone. If it is excessively used, it will be crying wolf too often, and it will not be adhered to. I think the CFS understands that, and they are much more moderate in their application of it. With those few words, I thank the committee for its work.

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen) (12:07): I will try to keep my comments reasonably brief, but I fear I will run out of time because I have so much to say about this appalling report. I will try to start on a positive note: recommendation 4, as the member for Bragg said, is to be welcomed, because one of the major risks in the area in which I live and represent is that of the failure of various Crown authorities to maintain their properties.

Land owned by SA Water, the national parks, the Mount Bold Reservoir and places like that create enormous hazards. When you add to that the ridiculous situation that we have throughout the Hills, where because of our inept, overfunded and over bureaucratised natural resources management, we now find that what we get is the poisoning of broom and blackberry along our roadsides but no clean-up of the debris thus created. What they have done is remove one pest (that is, the pest plant) and created another pest: the extraordinarily high risk for bushfire created by dead blackberry, apart from anything else.

Members would be aware that not only is the entirety of the electorate of Heysen within a bushfire zone—and I have lived in that electorate through both Ash Wednesday 1 and Ash Wednesday 2; indeed, I have lived, for all but about two years, my entire life in bushfire-prone areas. At the age of 16, in fact, living beside the national park in Sydney, the house I resided in with my family was under ember attack. My parents had gone out, and the only road back was cut. I was at home as a 16 year old, with my 13-year-old sister, in a fibro house with gumtrees all around it, under ember attack. I know that a lot of senior CFS officers have not even lived through that, so I do feel that I have some knowledge about bushfires.

The idea of recommendation 1 of this report, that we should have mandated bushfire plans, is to me errant nonsense. We should certainly have bushfire plans, no doubt, but it is such a complex thing. It is ridiculous to say that you can have a simple checklist; the bushfire plan I have for my house varies according to the day. On Black Saturday in Melbourne, having lived through both Ash Wednesdays here, I happened to travel to Melbourne. If people were here they would remember that it was an extraordinarily bad day here, but we were blessed by a change in the weather that came through here sooner and we were let off the hook.

However, knowing that it was going to be a really bad day and that I was going to Melbourne—and I have to say that when I got there it was the most evil day I have experienced on this earth, and that was in the heart of Melbourne—I spent three hours the night before plugging the gutters, making sure that not only were they clean but that I had plugged them in various ways, because I have a lot of gutters and gullies and so on in my complicated roof. I filled them all, and I made sure that the gutter stoppers were working effectively so that the filling stayed there.

I have spent 35 years in this house, and with everything I have done to the house I have tried to make it more resistant to bushfire. A number of people, when I talk to them about their bushfire preparedness, for instance, and I say to them, on a bad day, 'Did you bring your ladder inside?' look at me with a puzzled look. 'Why would we need to bring our ladder inside?' Well, because with most houses—not mine, because I have built stairs and I have a walk-in to my roof—to get into your roof space you will need your ladder to get through the manhole.

If you do not have your ladder inside you are not going to be able to get into your manhole, and you know what? That is where most of the fires occur that take most of the properties in a bushfire. It is not the fire front coming through, most houses survive that. It is the embers that get into the roof—for people who have not filled their gutters with water—that start the fire. That is where most people lose their house, yet they have not brought their ladder inside. So who is going to create this simple checklist for how we are going to survive this?

Then, as I said, different days different ways. I had three adult children living at home at that stage, Black Saturday in Melbourne, and they had been trained over the years about what to do and how to protect the house, but I am so glad that the weather did change in Adelaide that day because if what had happened in Healesville and places like that had happened through the Adelaide Hills I probably would have lost not just my house but, more importantly, my three children. Even a house that is well prepared would not survive that fire. So I have changed my plan to accommodate those sorts of days.

That was a truly catastrophic day. As the member for Bragg already mentioned, one of the big problems we have is that over the past couple of summers we have had numerous catastrophic days declared which were simply not catastrophic. I have lived in my house for 35 years, but I have several neighbours around me who were there when I moved in; they have been there well over 35 years. We all know what a bad day looks like, and the days that have been declared catastrophic up there have not been catastrophic. So you get the situation where people think 'Well, I don't care whether the CFS has declared it. This is not a catastrophic day.'

You need to be able to pick for yourself whether or not it is a catastrophic day. If it were a day like Black Saturday here, I would absolutely leave my house and leave early. Of course, your bushfire action plan would no doubt say somewhere 'Leave early,' but what does that mean? If you go to meetings when there has been a major fire incident, people are saying, 'When I hear the siren, is that when I should leave?', 'When it's at the bottom of the street, is that when I should leave?' They do not have any idea.

There are so many complications about having one of these so-called bushfire plans. They need to be constantly changing and evolving. Ours evolved according to how old our children were; when they were very young it was a plan to leave early, but as the children grew older and we were able to make adjustments, and they reached an age where they could assist, our plan changed. Subsequent to Black Saturday my plan has changed again. It will vary according to each day, so to have a mandated plan—apart from what the member for Kavel mentioned about rates necessarily going up because of the amazing amount of implementation that would be involved—is just crazy.

The other recommendation that I want to briefly mention is the idea of access and egress. When I first read the recommendation I thought 'Oh, so the council is going to tell everyone where they can get out and where they can get in.' I hope that the meaning of the recommendation (and I think it is recommendation 3) is actually that they will make sure that the roads are kept open.

The Adelaide Hills Council is a particular culprit. Anyone who is familiar with Sheoak Road, which did provide an alternative escape route—what did the councils do? Mitcham and Adelaide Hills Council have put in six or seven slow points down that road. Those slow points are about as wide as this chamber, some of them, and if you have experienced a real fire, if you have experienced something like Greenhill Road on Ash Wednesday 2, it is nothing but a deathtrap—an absolute deathtrap. Once you get the smoke and the noise and the panic and you have to slow people into one lane and only have one car at a time going through and nothing coming in the other direction, potentially fire trucks, no-one able to see anything, it is an absolute deathtrap.

Try as I might, I could not stop this government from putting money into downgrading the old road down past Eagle On The Hill, which was an alternative way out of the Hills. Instead of keeping it open as a two-lane each way access/egress as an alternative way out if we had a problem on the freeway, what did this government do? In spite of all my protests, they said, 'No, no, no,' and they have actually spent money narrowing that road and creating more of a hazard for the people who live in the Hills.

It is not just the government—it is the council, as well—and I could go on citing example after example of where councils and state government have actually acted not to keep access roads open but to positively endanger the lives of the people who live in bushfire prone areas. I believe they should be held to account. I have written to the council on numerous occasions. I have done media on it at the top of Sheoak Road. It is a disgrace that they are allowed to put in these slow points on what should be an alternative egress in the event of a fire.

Apart from all of that, I do want to also mention quickly the fact that my view is that if you did mandate (if this government is silly enough to think that mandating would be a good idea) a bushfire action plan—as I said, they are too complicated to even really make any sense, but if you did mandate it—apart from the increase in the rates, you would then find that the insurance companies would not only say, 'Well, you're up for a higher rate,' but they would begin to say, 'Okay, you've made a claim in relation to damage from a bushfire. We will now test everything on your bushfire plan as to whether or not your bushfire plan was correctly lodged, updated and adhered to.'

How you would ever adhere to how frequently your gutters are cleaned, for instance, is just nonsense. Who is going to assess that? The entire idea—whilst I agree that everyone in the Hills in a bushfire zone should have a bushfire plan, it should never be mandated.

Time expired.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (12:18): I rise to speak about the Natural Resources Committee report on bushfire preparedness. We have had a lot of discussion about the issues surrounding the committee's recommendations, and I want particularly to focus on bushfire preparedness and bushfire action plans—and, as the CFS says, Prepare, Act, Survive. I want to talk particularly about the need for the bushfire action plans to be reviewed each year and to be updated, and for people to be familiar with them. The best way to do that is for all members—and particularly those in rural and regional areas and bushfire prone areas—to encourage all of their constituents to download onto their smartphones the CFS smartphone app. There is one from the CFA, which is similar, in New South Wales, to the Rural Fire Service. But the Country Fire Service app is very good.

In fact, I have the app on both my iPad and my iPhone, where you can have notifications. You can have push notifications sent to you. You can decide the area around where you live, to be notified from. I have about a 20 kilometre zone around our property between Kangarilla and Meadows. If there is a bushfire there or an incident there, they will send an alert to my iPad and my iPhone to let me know that there is an incident going on there. That is a very, very good thing. I congratulate the CFS for having done that. On the CFS phone app there is a very good list of questions there, and one of those questions is: 'Are you prepared?' There is a checklist there, and I will just quickly read from that. First, it says:

I have completed the CFS household risk assessment tool.

There is a tool on there and you can go through there, and it is a very good, comprehensive way of just looking around your home and your property to see what sort of risk is involved there. The second point is:

I understand the fire danger rating system and how to find out what tomorrow's FDR is.

Today, we have a severe fire danger rating in the Mount Lofty Ranges. It will go up to extreme and then catastrophic. You need to know what the fire danger ratings are and you need to understand them. The third point is:

I understand that staying and defending is a traumatic and dangerous activity. I know how to recognise the signs of stress and how to combat them.

As the member for Heysen has said, it is a very stressful situation. I know the member for Colton, who has been a firefighter, and other members who have been involved in bushfires, they know: the noise, the heat, the smoke and how dark it gets. It is very stressful and if you are not physically prepared that is bad enough, but you need to be mentally prepared as well. The next point is:

All flammable material within 20 metres of my house has been removed. This includes removal of dead branches, fallen leaves and cutting long grass.

It does not mean to say that you have to completely change the outside of your house to desert, but making sure that your lawns are well watered, your gardens are well kept and the trees are pruned, and the CFS has good advice on its app. The next point is:

I have prevented sparks and burning material from entering through the windows, under doors and under floorboards.

The ember attack that the member for Heysen talked about, on an extreme catastrophic day with high winds embers get bigger, they last longer and they will travel up to 30 kilometres. So, you may not even see the smoke. You certainly will not hear the fire siren from the CFS. The warnings will not be there, but you may be under ember attack a long time before the fire comes anywhere near you. So, be prepared. As it says here:

I have prevented sparks and burning material from entering through the windows, under doors and under floorboards.

The next thing is:

My gutters are clear of flammable debris, such as leaves, twigs, pine needles, etc.

Not only clean your gutters out, but have the gutter plugs in there and fill your gutters with water. The scouts still make a little sandbag that you can buy that goes in there. You can buy commercial gutter plugs. That is a very efficient way of making sure that the embers and sparks do not get into the gutters and set the material there alight and then spread into the roof cavity.

The member for Heysen mentioned inspecting your roof cavity. Make sure you have a ladder inside. One of the simplest ways of extinguishing a small fire in your roof cavity is with one of those pump-up water pistols. So, if your kids can leave it up there and leave it alone, just fill up a pump-up water pistol and you can put out a little fire in the roof cavity which may save your house. Just leave it up in the roof cavity so that when you go through the access hatch, it is there, you can look around, and obviously you need a good torch. The next point the CFS has on its app is:

I have my bushfire survival relocation and recovery kits prepared.

And there is a comprehensive list on here about everything from clothing, to batteries, to first aid equipment, medications, documents, passports, this sort of thing, having those in a bag ready to go, and having a battery powered radio. We read about it, we hear about it occasionally, but we need to think about it. It is on the app here. I suggest that all members have a look at this app. The next point is:

I have written and practised a bushfire survival plan based on all available CFS information. The plan includes everyone in the house, including pets and stock, and we have reviewed and practised it together.

My wife and I have gone through what we will do on our property, depending on what the day is and where we are at the time, how we would manage the cattle, because we have over 200 head of cattle on the place to move around. We do not want to lose them. There is a lot of money there, as well as (as anybody) we would not want to see livestock killed in a fire. So, there is a lot to manage and a lot to be prepared for and it does not happen on the day.

We have everything from the handheld whipper snipper to a Grillo. If you do not know what a Grillo is, google it: it is the mother of all whipper snippers. We have a 30 horsepower ride-on lawnmower. We have a 100 horsepower slasher on the back of the tractor. We do all we can to reduce our risk of overgrowth and fuel load. Yet, what do we see, and the members for Heysen and Bragg have mentioned this, on the roads around the property there is 1.5 metre high phalaris that is choking the sides of the roads, there is gorse, there are all sorts of weeds and undergrowth.

The council, God bless them, does try but because of the native vegetation proponents there are rocks, stumps, branches and you cannot get in there with any machinery to clean the roadsides up. The fuel load is horrendous. We talked about that in this place last sitting week. We talked about the fuel loads around the Adelaide Hills: 20 tonnes per hectare. That is absolutely incredible. The last point that the CFS has on this checklist is:

I have more than one contingency plan.

The CFS app is very comprehensive. I suggest everybody here listens to the emergency warning signals and takes note of how bushfire ready you are. Another point is: 'email your intentions to your family, friends and neighbours'. On the neighbours point of view, last Thursday night Horse SA and the Country Fire Service put on a community bushfire awareness night at the Meadows pub. It was mainly aimed at horse owners, but it was for everybody. The CFS were very helpful. They had two lovely young women who gave a very good overview of the problems that you are going to face and preparing your bushfire action plan.

You need to be prepared, you need to be able to act and you need to make sure that you survive. If surviving means you leave then you need to do that as early as you possibly can. We only get one or possibly two catastrophic days most summers since those FDRs have come in. We get very few extreme days as well, so you are not going to have to leave very often, but be prepared to leave and evacuate your property early. Do not wait until the last moment because, as I said, you may not see the smoke or the fire, you certainly won't hear the fire sirens, but you may be under ember attack before you know it, and fires travel at horrendous speeds in that sort of country.

On the issue of bunkers, it is great to have a safe place to go to, but one of the problems you have with a severe and intense fire is oxygen depletion, so you will be asphyxiated. You need to have an auxiliary air supply, and that should be medical air. You do not have to have oxygen, but you have to have compressed air like firefighters wear with their breathing apparatus. It is not just a matter of protecting yourself from the radiant heat, the embers and the impact of the fire, it is about having air to breathe, so having an air supply in there. You need to have a fire bunker that is up to standards and you need to know that equipment in there is going to work when you want it to work. Firefighters check their breathing apparatus every day.

The Hon. R.B. Such: Very expensive.

Dr McFETRIDGE: As the member for Fisher says, bunkers can be very expensive to build. That is an issue. Escape roads are another issue. Having been in the CFS in Happy Valley and Kangarilla and having had the vet practice through there, there are many roads up there where it is very difficult to get a car through, never mind a fire truck. If you are trying to get out of there with a horse float or if you have a trailer load of goods it is going to be a really difficult situation to cope with.

There are thousands and thousands of horses in the Adelaide Hills, so if people are trying to move those out down to Morphettville, the showgrounds or some other place—there is a buddy system that Horse SA have where you can move your horses out the day before. You have a buddy where you can move your horses to. That is a start. There are so many issues that we are going to have to cope with if we have a serious bushfire season. It is going to be serious this year because of the winter we had. The undergrowth and the fuel load is high, but we need to be prepared. As the CFS say: 'Prepare, Act, Survive'.

Motion carried.

Mr GARDNER: Sir, I draw your attention to the state of the house.

A quorum having been formed: