Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Department of Treasury and Finance

Budget papers 2023–24

Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:24): I rise to speak on the state budget 2023–24, which raises the money to fund our fire services in Victoria, and particularly I want to talk about the crisis that we have in fire services, in fire trucks, in this state. We know that this week Shepparton has been told they are not getting their new pumper platform because it is going to Sunshine – actually it was last week they were told that, but it is going to be diverted to Sunshine. This is an absolute disgrace, and this is because this government has underfunded the fire services. I actually passed an ambulance the other day that had some very clever graffiti on the back of it. It said: ‘In an emergency, dial 000. Dial 1 for an overworked paramedic, dial 2 for an underpaid policeman and dial 3 for a fireman with a garden hose, due to underfunding of equipment for the fire services.’ That summed up exactly what is going on in our emergency services in this state. This government have mishandled the state finances and they have created –

David Davis interjected.

Wendy LOVELL: As Labor governments always do, Mr Davis – that is right. They have created a crisis in the budget and a crisis in the funding of all of our services. This state is in a dreadful financial position, thanks to Labor’s incompetence and mismanagement.

But what we know is that we have an ageing fleet of fire trucks, both throughout the CFA and throughout Fire Rescue Victoria. I remember that during the CFA inquiry one of the assistant chief officers told the inquiry that we were asking young volunteers to drive trucks that were older than they were, because some of the trucks were 30 years old, and that is true. These trucks were in operation before the firefighters were even born. These vehicles are now well and truly at the end of their life span and not exactly safe or fit for operation.

We recently had the ladder platform in Bendigo break down, on 29 August. It only came back online last Friday. It broke down while the firefighters were fighting a fire above a shop. It had lifted a firefighter up on its platform, and the firefighter had to scramble to safety because the mechanics that operated the platform failed, so he was stuck up in the air fighting the fire but he had to get down somehow. He had to risk his safety to scramble down from the platform because the truck could not lower the platform.

The ladder platform that was to come to Shepparton was to replace an old aerial appliance in Shepparton, which is just basically a truck that has an extendable arm with a hose on the end of it – a stick with a hose on the end of it – on top of the truck. There was a risk assessment done by the CFA, prior to the fire services reform, that deemed Shepparton to be the highest risk area in the state, due to the large metreage we have at our food processors – for which there needs to be fighting from a height – the number of coolstores and hydroponics in the agricultural sector there but also because we have multistorey buildings like our hospital, our school, our law courts and our art gallery. If there needs to be rescue at height, they cannot do it with a hose on a stick, they need a ladder platform. So Shepparton was deemed to be the highest risk in the state.

The CFA ordered three of these new trucks. It takes some time for these trucks to come online by the time they are designed and they are ordered, and it is a couple of years before they are delivered, and then people need to be trained. The highest risk was Shepparton. That was followed by Warrnambool, and the third was to be advised, but it ended up being nominated as Mildura. When the Shepparton firefighters met with FRV last week, they were told that the platforms were still going to Mildura and to Warrnambool because of their remote locations – not because of their risks, their remote locations, so that is a new criterion – and that Shepparton would miss out. This is an absolute disgrace. Every single firefighter in Shepparton has been trained to work on this truck. It could be put into operation today. None of the firefighters at the Sunshine fire station have been trained to work on this truck. I believe that very few of them, if any, would have the prerequisite for training anyway because they do not have the Mills-Tui 2017 accreditation. They need that before they can even be accredited to fight on the pumper platform. Without that accreditation and without the pumper platform accreditation, that pumper platform will sit in the fire station at Sunshine unused.