Thursday, 28 August 2025

Fire Rescue Victoria

Nick McGOWAN (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (23:46): (1911) Victorians pay a fire services levy expecting protection in life-threatening emergencies, but Fire Rescue Victoria is spending record levels on lawyers and consultants instead. Fire Rescue Victoria has spent nearly $10 million on King’s Counsels and top-tier law firms in the past two years, despite having its own legal staff. Consider this: half the state has been declared high risk for the upcoming fire season. By the time the fire season peaks, two in three trucks in the FRV fleet will be past their 15-year use-by date. Right now they break down more than once a day. But it gets worse: by the peak of the fire season it will have been more than five years since firefighters have had a pay rise. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, these heroes, these workers, these firefighters – some of them mums and dads – who put their lives on the line to protect Victorians are being paid 20 per cent less in real wages than they were being paid five years ago, and they are doing it in trucks that put themselves in danger and put the public in danger too. That troubles me.

Meanwhile, blank cheques to the lawyers keep getting signed. And what are those lawyers doing? They are arguing against an independent audit of truck safety. They are arguing to make the 20 per cent cut to firefighters’ real wages permanent. They are arguing to remove firefighters’ ability to stand up for their own safety and the safety of all Victorians, even down to the safety of their equipment and uniforms. The $10 million was on top of the $32 million spent on consultants for Fire Rescue Victoria last year and on top of the $27,000 that FRV spent on one front page for their annual report – $27,000 for a front page. I do not know what every consultant did, but I know what they did not do: no lawyer or consultant ran into a burning building to rescue people without water because a pump on their ancient truck had failed. It is little wonder that 90 per cent of firefighters and emergency services workers at Fire Rescue Victoria have lost confidence in the leadership of commissioner Gavin Freeman and his team. When similar votes happened in other emergency services, those leaders recognised their positions were untenable and rightly stood aside. When will the Premier stop the attack on our firefighters – Victorian workers, many of them mums and dads; honour the Fair Work Commission statement that all EBA matters were agreed, other than wage and allowance increases; and appoint a new commissioner to clean up this mess?