Late last year I attended the 150-year celebration of Horsham fire brigade. Horsham town hall was filled with volunteer firefighters and emergency services workers, acknowledging the many disasters that they had attended over the past century and a half. Little did I know that less than two months later it would be the same assembly of emergency services workers and volunteers – tired, feeling the load of firefighting and the loss of property – that would be in that exact same hall.
It was a huge acknowledgement by Terry Fradd from the CFA to not just acknowledge and thank the CFA volunteers but also acknowledge the work of the private appliances, the people who turned out and turned towards fire and smoke rather than turning away from it and the people who had slip-ons, fire pumps, speed tillers and the disk ploughs to build firebreaks. I will note that Terry said it is those farmers that turned out to build earth fire lines that saved Horsham. They have not been acknowledged nearly enough. In fact, those people that stayed behind to build those firebreaks and to fight those fires, without whom we would have faced catastrophic outcomes had they not turned out, are not able to access any support funding because they did not evacuate.
We must thank those people that turn out when things are tough. This courage cannot be underestimated. For our region, it was not just the disastrous winds and hot conditions – catastrophic fire conditions. Those conditions meant that we had no air support at all. We had no line from the sky to understand where the fire front really was. This was compounded by the fact that the CFA comms are located on the Telstra tower on Mount Arapiles. Power was lost to this tower very early on in the fire. The power switched over to the battery, which after two hours ran out, and it failed to go across to the third line of power, the diesel generator. This meant that not only did we have volunteers by themselves on the ground with no air support, but they also had no comms.
It was smoky. You could not see anything. It was chaotic is what I have heard from people on the ground. There were vehicles going everywhere trying to put this fire out to save lives and save property. I commend these volunteers, because they turned out not just for this one event; they are the same volunteers who turn out to every single fire, no matter where it is across Victoria. I was moved on the day of the fire when I saw the Victoria Valley CFA truck coming through the northern part of my electorate. This is the same area of course that was hit so hard by bushfires just last year.
They are the same faces; they are the same volunteers. They are the same people who have been turning out for a long time to fight against the unfair and unjust emergency services tax, and if the Premier is true to her word that she will stand by these volunteers, then I urge her to scrap that tax. It is our communities that turned out to donate fodder. They offered their homes and spare bedrooms. They turned up with food and slabs of water before they were even asked to. They offered to look after pets and horses. They offered a shoulder to cry on. They offered a hug to say thank you. I thank absolutely everybody who chipped in.
Unfortunately, we are like a well-oiled machine in far western Victoria. We have had many fires, but that means that when it comes to the crunch we have leaders in the community who can stand up and rely on one another. They do not have to make a hero of themselves. They know where they fit and they do their role, and everyone respects them for what they deliver for our community. It is a voice of confidence and control when everything else for the community feels lost. I commend the communities for their incredible work to support one another. I will make note of course of the Streatham fire, which started in my electorate and then quickly skipped across into another. For some reason borders matter sometimes, but in this case they did not. Bruce McKenna was one of the many volunteers who were on the back of a fire truck over that fire. It was chaotic, as I said. At the end of the fire Bruce needed a rest. When he needed a rest, he thought, ‘I’m going to head home,’ and then he was told, ‘You don’t have a home to go to.’ He had lost everything aside from the shirt on his back. This is the story of so many of the volunteers in far western Victoria in particular. They are Parks Victoria employees, Forest Fire Management Victoria employees and people working within the CFA and other emergency services who lost their homes. They still turned out to save other people’s property, even though their own homes were at risk. I thank them for their support and service to the community. We will stand by you. We will stand by these communities as they recover and rebuild.