Wednesday, 30 October 2024

 Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (19:05): (893) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Emergency Services, and the action I seek is to urgently fund a new Charlton CFA station. The original station in Charlton was built in 1931. As you can imagine, there is not a lot of room for female members of the Charlton fire brigade to get changed. What is even more crucial is that in 2021 the brigade was lucky enough to receive a new tanker, and this addition the brigade is very happy with, of course. In Captain Walsh’s words, it has all the bells and whistles they need. However, it does not fit in the station; it has to be parked offsite. That, as you can imagine, creates all sorts of problems. One, it decreases turnout times. The CFA in Charlton do a remarkable job when responding to storms and when responding to, obviously, fires, but because the tanker is parked offsite in the captain’s yard, that is an issue. It is a huge issue. This has gone around in circles a few times. Some land was purchased. The land is actually now sitting there. The original land purchased was not suitable because it was in a flood plain. Cast your mind back a couple of years and there were a lot of floods that happened, so more land has been purchased now.

I was actually talking to the district commander about this at the Red Cliffs fire brigade centenary dinner on Saturday night, and he said that it is their highest priority across the entire district, the Charlton CFA fire station. That demonstrates, when you have the captain writing to me – and I have gone to visit so I could see the lack of facilities. To be fair, the changing area in this station is a partition, and that is it. The toilet is outside. It was built in 1931. It is a lovely old building. It would make a great space for the historical society, but it is not fit for purpose for a CFA brigade in Charlton that does such a wonderful, wonderful job. As I have said already in this place this week, the CFA in rural and regional Victoria are the backbone, the heart and soul and stomach of regional and rural communities like Charlton. They do such an incredible job. So the action I seek this evening is to urgently fund – urgently; it is absolutely critical, because again, if a new station is not funded, then it will start to cost lives because the turnout times will be dramatically decreased if we have to wait for the captain, who does have a life outside of the CFA, to open his yard to get the tanker out.