Damian Drum (Murray, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Certainly, Black Saturday 2009 was a horrific time in Victoria's history. Prior to 2009, we were often told you had two options if fires were in your particular area: if you want to leave, leave early; if you want to stay and fight, make sure you plan well and make sure you prepare your property so that you can stay. I think the statistics are that roughly 90 per cent of people who lost their houses in fires prior to 2009 lost their houses in the 10 to 15 to 20 minutes once the fire front had gone past. The embers would slowly take hold of leaves in gutters. The embers and sparks would take a little while to actually take on and start the burning process of a house. It was a slower process after the event.

What we found out though was that some of the people who decided to stay, at Kinglake in particular, quite simply didn't have a chance. Whilst they were very well prepared, the force and the brutality of the fire front came through from Kilmore—it started at Kilmore earlier in the day—and hit the townships of Kinglake West and Kinglake in particular. The people there were extremely well prepared, with houses that were cleared, houses that were hosed down, fire pumps at the ready and a good supply of water to keep the lawns wet. Ultimately, the fire went straight through those properties. The individual anecdotal tales are horrific. The speed with which the fire moved and the winds on that day have been well reported. It was a perfect cocktail of incredibly high winds mixed with about four days in a row of incredibly high temperatures. It tended to follow the bush, the trees and the timber associated with the roadways as it found its way from Kilmore all the way over to the heavier bushland of Kinglake and Kinglake West.

As a member of the Victorian parliament at the time, I was escorted onto the mountain on the Monday. I was very conscious that there were reasons not to go up there, but there was a need, as a representative of that region, to make sure we had an understanding of the devastation. When we went up there, it was quite shocking. It was confronting. The destruction and the loss were quite startling. On that day we saw not only the physical destruction of the materials up there; we also saw that the survivors had a very distant, faraway look in their eyes. They weren't quite sure what they had in fact lost, what they were going to be able to salvage out of the rubble and how they were going to be able to pick up the pieces and carry on. There was this very distraught, distant look in their eyes, and we weren't quite sure of how they were going to handle the oncoming days, weeks, months and years.

I think Premier Brumby and his team handled the aftermath really well. They put in place high-quality individuals as staff who were given the task of liaising with the victims, the survivors, who had a whole raft of questions about how they could clean up, what assistance they were going to get to clean up, what they could salvage, when they could get back up there on the mountain, what was available in the way of state government and local government assistance and how long they were going to be able to access the temporary accommodation which was set up at Kinglake. Many of the people were there for over 12 months, and it became its own little village over time. The survivors also wanted to know what services in relation to mental health and counselling were going to be put in place and how they were going to be accessed.

It was an incredibly dark period in Victoria's history. It was something that was totally shocking. As the member for Mitchell and the member for Bendigo quite rightly stated, it changed the way we now prepare for fires on those atrocious days when we are looking at the highest fire ratings. We no longer give people the option to prepare well and stay. The advice is quite simply: leave and leave early and make sure that your valuables are in a position where they may be able to withstand the fire. Certainly we have changed our warning system significantly, predominantly based on what happened on Black Saturday.

I am happy to make my short contribution on this. It is something that we will never forget, nor should we. We should acknowledge those people who came into the aid sphere immediately after the fires. The donations were quite significant—of clothing, bedding, mattresses. People were donating every type of appliance that they could afford to donate, because they knew that so many people were going to be in need of these household appliances. I just want to thank all of those people who did donate and the people who gave up their time to help with the distribution, to hand out some of those things and to make all of that process work over the ensuing weeks, because it did take weeks, months and years before people were able to rebuild and get back on their feet. We will never forget the contribution of those people. We will never forget the rigour and the strength shown by the survivors. We acknowledge them at the 10-year anniversary and hope that we never have to go through that again.

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