Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There have been eight reviews into emergency fire services in Victoria and not a single one of those reviews has recommended the action which Daniel Andrews and Labor took last week to split the fire services into voluntary and paid agencies. This has caused much confusion for not just many of my local residents but also volunteer firefighters and paid CFA firefighters. The whole situation has become quite messy. Neither know where they are going to be actually working in the future.

What I do know is this: local CFA volunteers have had enough. Clematis CFA volunteer firefighter of 25 years Shane Miller was recently quoted as saying:

… to have two separate organisations in the same station makes no sense [because] CFA and MFB work on different radio frequencies, they're different organisations, different training.

Ferny Creek CFA captain John Schurink, who was sacked from the CFA board last year over his opposition to the EBA, raised his concerns about surge capacity.

I know that Labor members find it quite tiresome to hear about the CFA. But on this side we actually care about CFA volunteers, we respect the work that they do and we do not just care about what the UFU does for the Labor Party. We are actually about the volunteers and not about the UFU.

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