Wednesday, 15 November 2023

Firewood collection

Emma KEALY (Lowan) (19:04): (443) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Agriculture, and the action I seek is for the minister to ensure that sufficient firewood allocation is made available for the coming year. I have had a brief conversation with the minister over the table, and she will work with – I will not put words into her mouth, but I understand that some of this may roll over into the Minister for Environment’s role as well. However, I do put my adjournment matter to the Minister for Agriculture.

We have got a really big challenge coming forward in regional Victoria in particular, where firewood allocations have been cut back to nothing. There have been some changes, as we know, to the sustainable native timber industry in that that will not be going ahead from 1 January next year. What that has inadvertently resulted in is that no longer can we have firewood collection allocations in those native timber areas. Many people who do not have a lot of money have problems in terms of affording to put in a gas heating system or an electric heating system – often they are in remote areas also – and they rely heavily on being able to access that level of firewood. It is so often pensioners who come to us wondering where they can get firewood from. I had recently in my office Geoff Evans. He goes out and collects firewood as a business, but it is a very, very low-cost business. Really a lot of what he does is just providing a community service of delivering firewood to elderly pensioners in the local area. He has a commercial licence. That will end in March of next year, and he has heard nothing about how that will be renewed, if it will be renewed, and he is very, very concerned not about what he does, not his business, but about the people that he supplies firewood to.

We have also heard recently, and the government gazetted, that it will no longer be possible to salvage firewood from fire grounds after a bushfire has gone through. This is something that has taken place for a long period of time. Often it is to remove trees which otherwise would be at risk of falling, so it is seen not just as the collection of firewood for heating homes but as the collection of wood to make fire grounds safe. This is not just something that is of interest in my part of the state, in the far west; it is also something that my colleague the member for Gippsland East has raised on multiple occasions in this place and in his local community. It is something that goes from border to border. We are the bookends of the state, the member for Gippsland East and me. I ask the minister, for all of those reasons, to ensure this important allocation of firewood is made available for the coming year to make sure that through these cost-of-living pressures our most vulnerable older people can afford to heat their homes next winter.