HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Member Index
House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-11-26 Daily Xml
Contents
Pdf Xml

Motions

Bushfires and Emergency Services

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. S.S. Marshall (resumed on motion).

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (17:11): I will not speak for long. I think most members who have spoken to this motion have probably covered the ground quite well. The only comment I would like to add is my personal thanks on behalf of my electorate to the CFS volunteers, SES volunteers and the staff of those two organisations who worked very hard to bring the fire under control and also to an end.

I would also like to acknowledge the important contribution made by farmers in the district through the use of their fire farm units. In fact, the great job that the farmers did with their fire farm units, which contained the fire in many cases, was specifically mentioned on a number of the news reports I heard. They were really the first responders in most cases.

I would also like to acknowledge the contribution that the Metropolitan Fire Service make, in terms of supporting their volunteers and the work that they do and in backing up other areas when CFS appliances have gone to the fire itself. They keep peri-urban areas safe particularly, while CFS brigades have moved either interstate or intrastate.

Organisations such as the Red Cross make an important contribution to the wellbeing of these communities, as do other community organisations and service clubs that often provide a lot of support for firefighters, in terms of providing food and other support in those areas. I think it has been mentioned already—and certainly it has been mentioned on the radio—but I would like to acknowledge the contribution that small business and businesspeople have made by allowing their staff and workers to volunteer, because it does disrupt their businesses.

Lastly, I would also like to acknowledge the contribution made by local government. I had the opportunity to talk to the Mayor of Yorke Peninsula Council to get a view of what happened on the peninsula, what contribution local government made and also to inquire about any damage to public infrastructure, because with some fires the cost to local communities through local government is quite enormous, in terms of damage done to public infrastructure. It is not the case in this situation, as the mayor mentioned to me. I would also like to acknowledge the mayor and his council and the contribution they have made to the wellbeing of that community.

One of the things I learnt from the Pinery fires of some years back was that, horrific as fire and other disasters are, it is often the post-fire or post-disaster recovery and the contribution we make to that that is just as important. One thing I found in the Pinery fire, which at that time was part of my electorate, was that the damage done to the psychological wellbeing of people in those communities was quite profound. Some people recover quite quickly and some people do not.

I recall going to some forums that had a psychologist. He was a Tasmanian psychologist who was experienced in the area of disaster and trauma. He came along to talk to various groups and individuals. The contribution he made was quite important at the time. He said there is no right time for people to recover from a disaster—in this case, from fire. Everybody deals with that grief and that process differently and so you should not let people tell you that you should be over it by a certain time.

Secondly, the loss is not always obvious. We often look at loss in terms of physical things, but often there is loss of memories. For example, if a house is burnt down, it is the loss of photographs, loss of lived experience with their families and all those experiences that come with that home, which is quite traumatic. Somebody might lose a shed, but that shed may contain some furniture or artefacts which are actually very important to the person and which we do not know about. Anyone from the outside might say that it is only a shed and can be replaced, but what you do not replace are those memories and feelings associated with that shed, which can be quite profound, particularly if it was the furniture of a family member who had passed away, for example.

The message I am trying to get across here is that we have to be very careful as a community not to forget about the people who actually suffered from these losses. Do not assume that one year later we should say, 'You should be over it by now,' because all of us experience loss in a different way.

The other point he made, which was very important, was that the greatest way to help individual people recover from disaster is not to drag in experts to do the work but to get local people to talk to each other and support each other. He said that lived experience, that shared experience, is much more beneficial to individuals, and they also trust that more than actually flying in a whole range of experts to talk about it.

The experts are useful in terms of providing advice, but in terms of the recovery process—and I certainly found this with the Pinery fires, particularly with men—holding some barbecues with men and talking through it was actually much more beneficial. When men actually talked about their shared war stories or shared experiences with other men in the community, it was much more beneficial than trying to get other health professionals—as important as they are—into the scheme. I think that is very important advice.

Again, I would like to thank all those CFS brigades and all those volunteers who made an excellent contribution to the motion on that fire. I would also like to acknowledge my local brigades. My local brigades help keep our community safe every day. I now have only one brigade in my electorate as a result of boundary redistributions over the years, but when I was first elected I had brigades at Dalkeith, Concordia, Roseworthy, Woolsheds-Wasleys, Gawler River, Freeling, Shea-Oak Log and Greenock. I had quite a few dealings with them; less so with some of them now.

Obviously, I continue to have dealings with my local brigade, which is only a kilometre down the road. The Dalkeith CFS brigade is the most important CFS brigade in the state, from my point of view. I have an ongoing relationship with them, but we still work closely with Concordia, Roseworthy, Woolsheds-Wasleys and Freeling, which I support in some ways from time to time. The Concordia CFS brigade often come in to Gawler and do demonstrations, and I work with them as well. With those few comments, I commend the motion to the chamber.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (17:19): I rise also to support this very important motion and note how dear to my heart and my community's heart this motion is, given our recent experience with fires. Before I became an MP back in 2013, we were unfortunate enough to have a fire at Eden Valley. Known as the Eden Valley fire, it came hot on the heels of the Krondorf fire, which was a much smaller fire but one which potentially foresaw what was to come at Eden Valley. It was a fire that affected huge swathes of Eden Valley, especially across the ridge line between the flats at Sedan and Cambrai and the Eden Valley proper.

I have a number of friends who live in that area who were directly affected by that fire, some losing their vineyard crop for the year. But people also lost livestock and houses and experienced the ensuing difficulties with getting telecommunications back. It was a very eye-opening experience, especially for someone like me who volunteered with BlazeAid to help people fix their fences and saw firsthand the devastation that was wrought and the very personal experiences that people had in grappling with this awful thing called a bushfire.

Unfortunately, for my community, that is not the half of what has happened. In early 2015, we had the Sampson Flat bushfire, which was quite different. Instead of affecting mostly farmland, it affected scrubland and tree-change communities around Kersbrook, and a whole series of communities between there and what is known as Sampson Flat, a place that people probably did not know about until the fire but one that is very much in the hearts and minds of the southern Barossa and people in my community.

After that fire, I helped again with BlazeAid and was able to find out firsthand what was going on in communities, understanding how people were grappling with the recovery process. Sampson Flat was slow; it burnt for over a week and kept moving and changing. I remember speaking to the Kersbrook CFS guys, who had to deal with not just the fire front but also spot fires for weeks and weeks afterwards, as stumps relit and parts of that heavy and dense wooded area that still needed to be put out. It was a huge imposition upon them, and I want to thank them at this juncture for the work they did, not just during the time of the fire but for long afterwards in helping to rebuild their community.

But then we moved on to late 2015 and what in my experience was a fire that will live long in the memories of my community. Every time there is a hot, fast-moving wind, that fire brings back memories for me and for everybody in the western Barossa, as well as across the Adelaide Plains, memories of the Pinery bushfire in late 2015. The fire broke all the models and records for how quick a fire front can move, a fire that blacked out the sky, a fire that saw traffic diverted off the Sturt Highway through the Barossa creating a veritable car park.

What struck me most during that fire, because it all happened in the one day and was finished by 8 or 9 o'clock that night, was driving down the Sturt Highway in the days after and seeing the burnt-out cars on the side of the Sturt Highway wondering what happened to those people. Quite clearly, they were rescued. Unfortunately, two deceased people came to grief further west. I realise what our CFS crews and police did to save those people. But also, where the fire jumped the Sturt Highway heading towards the Barossa, it was only the good efforts of the CFS and a wind change that stopped the fire from creeping into the Barossa proper.

To this day, I hold real fears about what would have happened if that fire had headed further south towards Gomersal Road, a road that was taking diverted traffic from the Sturt Highway and where a fast-moving fire front could have potentially run into a road with hundreds if not thousands of cars on it and the potential devastation that would have caused. But it was stopped, and you can see where it did jump the Sturt Highway in some of those spots where the CFS quite clearly beat it back. I think that day they saved many lives of the people in my community.

What happens after each of these fires, whether it be Eden Valley, Sampson Flat or Pinery, is to see how the community rebuilds afterwards and to see how people come to grips with the terrible psychological damage that happens when something as uncontrollable as a bushfire comes straight towards you and people have to grapple with the fact that they cannot go back to the way the community was before. You need to accept that there is a new normal and a heightened sense of awareness every time there is a hot wind that blows from the north.

It came into stark relief last week with the 42° day and news of not only the Yorketown fire but also the fire out at Beaufort and the fire that erupted on the McEvoy property, some three to five kilometres from where I live in Angaston. I put on the record my thanks to the 19 CFS vehicles that were fighting the fire and put it out in very quick order just east of Angaston. In fact, had those crews not done that and had the wind changed direction and the fire had blown back towards the township, there could and would have been a serious disaster for the outskirts of the Angaston community and the many businesses that were in the way of that fire.

I had the opportunity to talk to a couple of businesses—a horse stud, as well as a large winery out that way—about the steps they put in place to deal with what could have been a fire front coming towards them, stopped only by the good work of many CFS crews, farm fire units, as well as the aerial bombers deployed at the time. On Saturday afternoon, together with the local Greenock CFS crew, I also had the opportunity to open the project to help renew their fire station.

They are in Greenock and they received about $50,000 or $60,000 to refit the inside of their existing shed. They were able to do it on the smell of an oily rag and, through their own fundraising, they were able to actually take that bucket of money and expand it. The project is called Project Renew, which comes out of a bucket of money that I am very proud to have pushed for as the shadow minister in opposition to see us deliver that as an election commitment.

To see that roll out and see the good that it has done in my local community is absolutely fantastic. I talked to some of the deputy group officers who were down at Yorketown dealing with that fire front as it headed towards Edithburgh and heard their stories firsthand. I met Mark Jones, the new CFS chief, there for the first time. The discussions, especially between the group officers and the chief fire officer, were all about the job. They were all about what we can learn, what we could have done better and what were the good things about how the crews responded to this fire.

They were all about how they could deal with this menace—the menace that is bushfires. It really stood out to me that nobody was looking for kudos, nobody was looking for a pat on the back or for thanks. It is a job that they enjoy doing because it gives back to their community. They just get on and do it, and this government has been able to say thank you by putting money into the resources that these guys need to be able to do their job properly. They take great pride in how they look after their CFS stations, and I think that is a huge credit to them.

I must admit that, having worked with the Angaston CFS to try to get part of their car park resealed or seen the outcome of Project Renew at Greenock or some of the work that the Freeling CFS did post the Pinery fire and the way that they were able to harness community awareness to help gather some funds to upgrade some of the tank infrastructure around the Freeling station, whether it be the old brick Nuri CFS station—a CFS station that is extremely busy; in fact, it takes more calls than many of the retained MFS stations that exist around regional South Australia—my community has a great legacy of volunteering and a great legacy of CFS volunteerism that helps to respond in these very difficult situations.

To finish, I just want to mention a quick anecdote. Every year around this time—in fact, it is on Friday night—in my home town of Angaston we have the Angaston Christmas parade. I live in a town of about 2,000 people, and I would estimate that somewhere between 50 and 75 per cent of the town come out for Angaston Town Night. Most of the time, it is extremely hot and uncomfortable, but I think the weather this Friday night might be a little bit better. We have a parade and, ever since I have been elected, the mayor and I have been lucky enough to lead the parade. Every year we dress up in a stupid costume with the kids, and we all walk down. I hope that maybe this year for the first time both my girls will actually walk from one end to the other without falling over or having to be carried.

What I noticed, as part of this parade, is that everyone comes down and there are a lot of businesses that put floats into the parade, lots of different community groups, primary schools that get involved, the kindergarten, after-school care, church groups that get involved— and Santa comes along, normally in some sort of ageing Ford ute, tinny in hand, beard on. However, Father Christmas is not the one who gets the biggest cheer: it is actually the CFS truck that comes after him that gets all the kudos. Again, it is not overt. It is not flamboyant.

The CFS station is part of our community but, in our own little way, as a town we pay tribute to the work that CFS station does as well as all the guys who volunteer there. We do our little bit to say thank you and make them realise that they are appreciated, especially after having lived through Eden Valley, Sampson Flat, Pinery and now this small Angaston fire last week. We are constantly reminded of how important these crews are, and that is why this motion is so important.

We cannot replace those volunteer hours. We should not replace those volunteer hours. Instead, what we should do are things like saying thank you, things that make CFS volunteers realise how appreciated they are, that they are an integral part of our community that helps keep our community together and helps keep our community safe when we most need it.

Ms HILDYARD (Reynell) (17:31): I rise very briefly today to wholeheartedly support this motion and to add my deep gratitude, respect for and appreciation of our emergency services personnel, particularly our volunteer CFS firefighters, and the many community organisations and their workers and volunteers for their efforts in protecting Yorke Peninsula communities and in supporting people at such an incredibly difficult and frightening time.

As has been spoken about, brigades from across the state pitched in to fight these fires that threatened lives, homes, properties and livestock. My heart goes out to members of these communities who were confronted with such danger, such catastrophe, such loss. These fires occurred under catastrophic weather conditions, and our volunteers again showed their skill, courage and endurance in protecting our regional communities in dreadful conditions.

In so quickly responding to a call for help and action around the country, emergency services personnel, including the volunteers, also absolutely demonstrated the fine values that characterise all their efforts: generosity, kindness, preparedness to give of themselves to serve others, courage and mateship. The brigades from around the country that came to the assistance of Yorke Peninsula communities put those in trouble first, reached out to those who needed a hand at great risk to themselves, and acted with humanity. I thank all these brigades for responding so quickly and with such a wonderful sense of service.

One of our local southern brigades, the Morphett Vale CFS, also answered the call for help. I have been blessed to have many opportunities to interact and support the wonderful people who make up the Morphett Vale CFS, and I am constantly inspired by their deep commitment to serving others. Morphett Vale CFS brigade captain Matt Bonser told The Advertiser how his brigade had been busy monitoring our southern suburbs before getting a call to attend the unfolding blaze near Edithburgh. Despite having worked all day, the Morphett Vale crew returned to the station and were then dispatched to the fire ground.

Arriving around midnight, the Morphett Vale firefighters would have been an incredibly welcome sight for those hardworking CFS crews already on the ground. They worked tirelessly and selflessly; some, whom I had the pleasure of seeing just last weekend, were getting ready to head off this week to offer yet more support. I very much thank every member of this crew for their enormous hearts, their humanity and their willingness to give to others in distress. Our local community, and indeed our whole state, is enriched by their efforts.

Indeed, thank you to members of all crews and thank you to those other support workers and volunteers in various community and other organisations for what they provide to people experiencing their most difficult moments. Their compassion, their organisation, their willingness to walk alongside people and help rebuild lives in the long months ahead is extraordinary and to be commended.

Finally, I offer my thanks also to the many local community members who just pitched in and helped however they could, providing food, shelter, a listening ear, time, a hand with clean-up and repairs—whatever was required and whatever continues to be required.

Mr BASHAM (Finniss) (17:34): I also rise to thank the Premier for moving this motion. I support it wholeheartedly. My memories of fire go back very much to my youth. My grandfather was the district supervisor for the CFS around the Port Elliot and Goolwa areas. He used to look after the CFS in that region, so much so that I even remember the call sign for the radio. VL5GE was the call sign for the Port Elliot CFS when they used HF radios, which ceased in about 1980. I certainly have a very long memory of the work volunteers did in that community.

My first real memory of a fire in the community was after my parents moved to our farm at Mount Compass in 1976. Apparently, everyone who moved to Mount Compass at that time lit up a paddock to try to clean it. They would do this in the autumn. Every farmer learnt that that was the only time they could ever do it because the way the soils worked at Mount Compass was that they kept burning. They burnt down directly underneath each cow pat in the paddock, and they would burn for a week or two.

Several times during that burn-off, which was only four hectares that mum and dad did, we had to call the CFS to help us when the fire broke the containment lines around what had been lit. Probably the most memorable was the one that happened at about half past nine or 10 o'clock on a Saturday night, which also happened to be the CFS wind-up for the year. They happened to be having a black tie show, so the whole CFS rocked up on the trucks dressed in their black ties to put out our fires. Mum really felt quite embarrassed. She did not want to show her face for weeks because a lot of them ruined their dinner suits as they were fighting the fire at our place.

My next big memory was a 1,000-hectare fire, or thereabouts, that was only five kilometres away from our farm. It was quite scary. It was during the school holidays, and I was in year 7 at the time. Luckily, wind conditions were never going to bring it to our place, but it was burning in some fairly horrible terrain with very steep gullies. It was very hard to control, particularly with the fire assets that were available to crews back then. The volunteers at that time certainly risked their lives. We are talking about fighting fires with knapsacks as well as some trucks, but certainly nowhere near the number or the sophistication we have today.

One example of that was a burn-off fire we had. The truck they left with us to look after the fire was a Ford Blitz truck, with no roof on the cab. It was very accessible backwards and forwards, but that made you very exposed to any fires. That was still being used right through to the 1983 Ash Wednesday fire. That truck was destroyed in those fires. Luckily, the crew on the truck survived, but the truck itself was burnt and destroyed. The crew was very lucky to be rescued by another vehicle. The 1983 Ash Wednesday fires I certainly remember very vividly.

During the first lesson after lunch at St Peter's College I was in the second storey building, room 12A, that looked out over the foothills of Adelaide. Looking out of the window, it looked like the most atrocious fire that you could imagine. It seemed like you were standing right next to it but it was kilometres away. The Hills were a glow of orange in amongst the black and brown dust and smoke that were blowing at the time. It is certainly an image that I will never forget.

I realise the trauma and damage that that sort of fire can do and the difficulties in actually stopping a fire like that. Air support that day would not have helped because it would not have been able to be in the air.

That year, the family of one of the boys who was a year older than me and in year 11 lost their farmhouse at Kalangadoo, down in the South-East, when the fire went through. He did not know about it until the next morning, when communications were able to get the news to him. It was a very difficult time for people.

A farmer close to us at Mount Magnificent, just on the other side of Mount Compass, also had his dairy farm burnt out. He did not lose any of his major infrastructure, but he lost most of his herd not because the fire killed the cows but because it burnt their udders. Once the cows' udders and teats are burnt, they are no good because the teat scars over and the cow can never be milked again, so he lost his whole herd through that.

Fires are very devastating to communities, but they also very much strengthen them, and the CFS in Mount Compass and their shed is an example. Probably 30 or 40 years ago now, they built a new shed and decided that they needed some more land. They did not worry about the fact that it did not fit on the CFS-owned piece of land. The shed that is currently there now is actually three-quarters on community land and only one-quarter on the CFS block, but that is the sort of community reaction: 'Don't worry about the approvals you need for where you actually put it. Just put it where it's logical to put it.'

That is the whole thing about the CFS: let's just actually make it work and let's get what we need. I think it is really impressive the way we have supported the CFS over the years. I was reading a bit of information this morning, looking back into the history of the CFS in my area. Back in the 1950s, it was established around the Middleton and Port Elliot areas and known as the 'emergency fire service' at that time. My grandfather was a member of that EFS, as it started back then, and he was key driver in that community. At that stage, they had no trucks. They started with just knapsacks, and they talked about buying their first knapsacks for the brigade.

A few years later, they decided to buy some tanks that would be on stands, which they could drive their own farm trucks under to set up as firefighting vehicles. It gradually progressed, but it was not until the seventies that they got their first truck, so for 20 years they operated without a truck within the EFS itself, as it was then, and it just gradually evolved over time. I read that even as late as the 1980s and early 1990s they bought a four-wheel drive CFS truck for the first time from the Coonalpyn brigade and shifted it up from the South-East.

We have had many important volunteers. There is one I certainly had the privilege recently of presenting an award to on behalf of the minister, recognising the CFS national medals that people receive. Bob Wyatt has just received his 50-year service medal for the CFS and is still involved to a limited extent even today. It is wonderful that these people have committed so much of their lives to the CFS and to protecting the community.

I was really pleased to see the brigades of Finniss help in the Yorketown fires, as well. We saw the Hindmarsh Valley and Victor Harbor-based trucks head across there to help, and we saw members of the Hindmarsh Valley brigade, as well as members from Port Elliot, head over to New South Wales to help in those fires and in others as well. I very much thank them for the work they have done in those particular fires.

After last Wednesday's fire in Yorketown, on Thursday night I went to the Tatachilla valedictory service, which started at 7.30. I was talking to the principal and he told me that at 3.30pm he was still in Yorketown. He had been over there as a volunteer and he decided he should get back for the speech night and he got himself a ride back to Tatachilla school to make sure that he was there for the speech night. Cain McDonald, as the principal, going over there even though he had a very important event of his own, thought protecting the community was more important than that, so thank you very much to him for making that effort.

There are many other brigades, likewise, in some of the adjoining areas that have done wonderful jobs. Some of the Yankalilla people in the neighbouring seat, likewise, have gone across there to help. Many members of the CFS from the Fleurieu have gone over to help in these fires and it is always wonderful that we have this great community support to see this happen. Thank you to those people who have helped. Thank you very much to those people who have helped us in the past. We have had three fires on our farm in 40 years. We have probably had about 10 within five kilometres of the farm and every single time those volunteers were out there helping, making sure that they protected people and the assets, etc. of the area.

It is quite daunting. I certainly remember one of the fires coming through. I would have been in about year 8 or 9. It started not long after we had gone down the road, and we got out of the car and looked back and this fire is coming and it is heading straight towards the hay shed. Dad said, 'Get a wet bag, jump in the ute and we will go and save our hay shed.' We were battling, my brother, dad and I, with wet bags. When the CFS arrived they just went straight past us and put it all out and saved the shed. It was very much needed, we thanked them very much and it was well deserved. I would like to finish by saying that they are always there to protect us and we should help them and protect them. So thank you.

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (17:47): I also rise to wholeheartedly welcome this motion from the Premier. It is at times like that which occurred on 20 November that communities are brought together, and it brings this house together as well, because we recognise the work that is done by volunteers. We know that volunteers in many communities provide the fabric of the community, but not all volunteers put themselves in harm's way in the way that our Country Fire Service personnel do, and plus the other emergency services that also assist during days like 20 November.

The fact that on that day there were seven districts with catastrophic fire warnings and 65 fires throughout the state this early in the year is a source of really deep concern. We can all be thankful that there was no loss of life during that day because the risks were huge. But there were losses. People did lose their homes. They lost crops, they lost stock, they lost personal property beyond homes. That is always hard to get over, but communities rally around and provide support at times like that.

I had the privilege of being on the select committee that looked at the fire and emergency services amendment bill, as did the Deputy Speaker. We had the opportunity to go to different parts of our state. One of the focuses was on the CFS and the question about whether powers were delegated to that grassroots level for CFS personnel to stop harvesting. The committee—and I think we will speak about it tomorrow—made a series of what I thought were very sensible recommendations on where that power should lie.

One of the things that select committee brought home to me when we listened to the witnesses—and I guess it was brought home to me because I come from an industrial community that experiences very little in the way of scrub fires or bushfire—was the strength of the grassroots organisation that happens, built on voluntary effort. One of the things that became clear was that communities—farming communities, farmers and others—had in place in most of the state very sensible and increasingly sophisticated approaches to ensuring the protection from and prevention of fires. I look forward to speaking on the select committee findings tomorrow.

I have a number of Country Fire Service units in my electorate. In Whyalla itself, the SES has a very strong presence, and Whyalla has retained fire officers. But Quorn, Hawker, Coober Pedy, Iron Knob, Kimba and Cowell all have their Country Fire Service, which provides, year in year out, a fantastic voluntary contribution. Looking out from Whyalla, the nearest fire we had of any significance, if we do not count looking across the gulf to the Flinders Ranges in terms of as-the-crow-flies distance, would have been when the Mallee went up back in the early 1990s, just south of the Iron Duke iron ore mine.

That was a very significant fire at the time and it took significant voluntary effort to get it under control. No-one was hurt in that, no property was lost, and the Mallee being the Mallee regenerated very well indeed. In other parts of my electorate fire is a constant threat. In the Flinders Ranges, Quorn and Hawker are incredibly dry at the moment. There are real risks there, and you know that if anything was to happen it will be volunteers who will be there first and foremost.

One area that is not often thought about is the APY lands. Sometimes they have fires in the APY lands that do burn out of control until they essentially extinguish themselves, even though there are people up there who help to fight fires, especially as they come close to communities. One of the issues in the APY lands has been the rapid growth of buffel grass in the area, which burns at a very high temperature, so it represents a real risk in that area.

She probably does not want me to mention this, but the husband of Simonne Reid, who works for me down here in Adelaide, is employed by the Metropolitan Fire Service, and he has just come back this evening from six days of fighting fires in New South Wales. The fires in New South Wales and Queensland have been horrendous. When we talk about those catastrophic fire warnings, they are increasing in size and intensity.

Some fires we have seen burning in areas that have not burnt before. We have seen fires burning in what are essentially wet forests, subtropical forests. A year or two ago, in Tasmania we saw forests that had never burnt in the past. There are indications, but not necessarily the direct cause, of the way the climate is changing. Senior people in the emergency services have flagged time and again that it is changing. That is going to put enormous pressure on volunteers, given the intensity and the extent of these fires, so more resources need to be provided—more heavy duty resources when it comes to appropriate aircraft being provided.

We have had the sharing of resources between different parts of the world, between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere. We have seen, through this season, the fires in California, as an example, overlapping with the start of what is an early fire season here in Australia. These things are going to get worse. The World Meteorological Organization today put out a press release on the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, which continue to track upwards. So there is no respite.

We are on track for an increase in average global temperatures of anywhere between 3° or 4° over the coming years, which will have an incredibly profound effect upon the globe that we live on. In countries like Australia, those inexorable trends, coming in on top of our climate variability, are going to have potentially devastating consequences, and we are only in the early days of those changes.

The success or otherwise of what happens with policy at the global level, the national level and the state level when it comes to addressing climate change is ultimately going to have an impact on those people we call upon: those people who volunteer their time and their effort to fight fires. It is going to get worse unless we seriously mitigate on a national level and ensure we have policy on a local level. With those few remarks, I will conclude, except to say well done to all the volunteers. The effort that you put in, year in and year out, and the time that you give to your communities and your state are to be commended.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Pederick.

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT