Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At 11.47 am, 7 February 2009, our world, our communities, changed forever. From a little strike that started on a powerline in a paddock to Australia's worst natural disaster, 173 people lost their lives and 440 were taken to hospital, and there have been many more since. After the 10 years from that day, we still fight day in, day out with the trauma from that particular time. I'm not going to go through all the stats, because we know them. Over the last 10 years we've learnt all the stats about what happened. But there are people who probably don't get the recognition they deserve. Their work and their effort is second to none. They are the 19,000 CFA volunteers who fought the fire and our DELWP firefighters who went out there and gave their all—people who were in communities day in, day out and saw the worst of it from the start.

One of those people I think of quite often is Cameron Caine, who was the policeman at Kinglake. Cameron is a good bloke. He has bad political judgement—he ran against me in 2010—but he is a good mate. I think about what he has been through and the troubles he faces even today. I particularly want to think about one person. There are many that sit under the spotlight; many just go and do their job and get on with it. Ben Hardman was the member for Seymour at that time, and nearly all of that Black Saturday fire was in his electorate. He worked tirelessly. I'm sure the member for Murray knows that Ben Hardman is a decent bloke. He just gets on with his job, but he has always been very unassuming about it. I think quite often we forget these people who just get in there and do it. I think of people like the Strathewen Bushfire Relief Company—David Brown, Malcolm Hackett and Mary Avola.

I went to the 10th anniversary at Strathewen the other night. It was just an amazing evening. A few hundred people turned up. There were some very interesting stories told from that day—where people have gone, what they've done, what they've lost. I think one of the best stories I heard was from a young fella who was one at the time. He gets up to speak and says, 'I can't really remember much about the fires,' which was understandable at one year of age, but he talked about life in Strathewen since. He was talking about how the best present he ever received was on his ninth birthday, because mum and dad bought him a jersey cow and calf. Now he's learnt to ride the tractors through the bush and check the fences and use the bobcat. There was another young family there that had bought after the fires. The thing that came through all these stories—including from Mary Avola, who talked about the loss of her husband—was the strength and the unity that that community and the region has got since those fires went through.

I went down to Wandong, which is another place that really was the start of it. I still remember the day that it happened. I'd finished painting the engine bay on a car, as you do on a hot day, and I got a phone call saying, 'The fires are happening,' et cetera. So I flicked the radio on to 3AW—3-Always-Wrong as it's known. They reported that the town of Wandong had gone. So I rang Ben Hardman and said, 'Ben, look, I've just heard the township of Wandong has gone.' He said: 'Gee, I hope not, Robbie. I've been on the fire truck here fighting the fire at the school for the last three hours and it still looks good.' You think about that community that was getting cut off and everything put away, but people stood strong and still stand strong today—people like Karen Christensen, Allen Hall and Buffy Leadbeater. You head to Clonbinane, another little town that was heavily impacted, and you meet people like Janelle Morgan, and you just think, 'Wow, how lucky are we to have these sorts of people in our community, day in, day out?' Wherever you go across the region, you know that these communities started at 11.47 on that morning facing a new normal.

Premier Brumby was criticised by the opposition, who said that he was being melodramatic and over the top in the days leading up to that fire. Mr Brumby is owed an apology. He warned us what was going to happen and he was right. Communities paid a very heavy toll. But they've come back. The bush, like the people, has scars that will never go away and will never be healed. But they've come back bigger, better and stronger. Through every tragedy we face, there is an opportunity. The opportunity for this nation was to learn from those bushfires. Since those bushfires, people who were heavily involved at the start have been able to go on to other natural disasters and help our communities in need.

We learnt some lessons that day—some very, very important lessons. They say that the cream rises to the top; we're full of cream, because there are a lot of people who have risen to the top and shone. Some of those people today are starting to feel a bit weary of it all. It has been 10 years of hard slog, rebuilding communities, rebuilding families, growing—that sort of thing—and they're getting tired. My hope is that we can see some real action to bring in more mental health services for people. Professor Robert Gordon—if you ever get the opportunity to listen to what he's said—has been spot on, all the way through these 10 years.

I've been very lucky and blessed to be able to go through those communities. I lived in them. We were very lucky the fire didn't get to our house. It got across the road. It's fair to say the old heart rate goes up a fair bit when you watch this wave of flame come in. It was like when you go to the beach and you have those little rolling waves. That's what it was like. But then the red trucks turned up and people put the fires out, so we were lucky. Where we have been lucky is to have the strength and resilience that we've got, as people and as communities, to rebuild and to make them so much more special. We'll never forget, but we don't stand still. We don't stand still where we were. We keep going, and going forward, because that's what we have to do.

As I said, it's a new normal that we've woken up to. There's not a person in those communities now who doesn't get up in the morning when it's a hot day and the winds are blowing and, first thing, look up in the sky. Is there smoke? What's going to happen? And you get prepared. We still don't know the full impact it has had on children. Many children have dealt with it, like adults, in different ways—some better than others. But even today there are still those who face difficulties from when they were young, and they're young adults now. When you go to the anniversary events, you get to see the people who were there day in, day out, and you see just how much our communities mean to our people. There is no normal. There is no textbook on how you deal with this. Some people go at different speeds to others. Some stay. Some move away. But, when you go to the anniversary events, they all come back together.

There is a shared bond that can never be broken. It can never be broken because of what they went through and how they reacted. You could never write a full list of all the people that did everything in those bushfires, right down to the people who just drove in to relief centres and said, 'What can I do?' From all over Australia, people came in to help our communities. These people will never forget this stuff. That's why, when there have been other disasters, our communities have rallied very quickly to help. We've gone through that and we know what it's like. As I said, 10 years on, things have changed but the new normal is here to stay. We continue to keep growing and getting on with it.

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