Thursday, 6 February 2020

Polwarth electorate bushfire preparedness

Mr RIORDAN (Polwarth) (17:22): (1845) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, and the action I seek from the minister is for her to immediately facilitate the active management of roadside reserves, public land and public spaces in and around the communities of Polwarth in order to minimise significantly the risk of out-of-control wildfires.

The six shires, numerous CFAs and town action committees across Polwarth have been on high fire alert now for quite some months. The electorate of Polwarth of course covers the beautiful Otway Ranges, which to date have only had a few spot fires, and the massive western Victorian plains, which have had a bumper season. We have had a particularly good season this year despite what has happened in the rest of Australia, so our part of the world to date has been free of fire but sits on the precipice of what could be still a very disastrous time between now and Easter.

We see across Polwarth vast roadways with 2- and 3-metre-high grass. We have got the scourge of the dead and dying cypress trees that are a legacy of plantations and plantings of 100 and 150 years ago. Together they are culminating in a very, very high risk factor across our region. With increasing tourism there are more cars on the road, and the increasing use of catalytic converters and other low-emission technologies in vehicles provides a greater risk. We saw only in the last two or three months a brand-new police car fully combust and ignite as it pulled over into long grass. This is a real risk.

This is something that my communities have for a long time been wanting and are quite happy to manage proactively and actively on their own behalf. They are not asking for a lot of money from the government; they are just simply asking for the regulation and process to be as it has always been—a matter for communities to use their common sense, their initiative and their own volunteerism and hard work to keep their communities safe.

We see our roadways particularly and many of our smaller parks and nature reserves left literally abandoned. The government and local government spend a lot of money prosecuting, following up with and working with private landowners, reminding them of their responsibility to keep their land in a fit and safe manner, yet if you are a neighbour to a Crown reserve, a roadway or any number of government-controlled land spaces right across my electorate, your home, your community and your family are at far more risk having the Victorian state government as a neighbour than you are having good private neighbours on your boundary. It is something this government and this minister can fix.