Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge all of those involved in the recent Uduc bushfires in my home area of Harvey in Western Australia. I want to thank all of the firefighters, whether they were career professionals or volunteers, but in this instance I also really want to mention the local farmers.

It was the local farmers with their utes and their fire units who worked solidly throughout this fire; farmers with discs on the back of their tractors, discing around the neighbours' properties to try to prevent this fire from spreading any further than it did. There was significant aerial support as well. That certainly was of great assistance during these days.

But one of the greatest enemies of people in this situation is the sheer exhaustion. That was the same for the career firefighters, the volunteer firefighters and the farmers themselves. I really wanted to thank everybody involved in that for a number of reasons, but this particular one came within a paddock of our own farm. I want to thank every single farmer who was out there. There were 13 or 14 fire units, and those farmers were running up and down the face of that fire, doing everything they humanly could to assist their neighbours and their fellow farmers in managing what could have been an absolute disaster.