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

I might remind the member for Lindsay that she was directly responsible for those cuts. It was her government that did that, not us.

Tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the Ash Wednesday bushfires, considered to be some of the deadliest fires in Australia's history. On that day, 40 years ago tomorrow, 180 fires tore through large parts of Victoria and South Australia, including our community of McEwen. It is a tragedy that seared itself into the memories of all Victorians. I remember being a young boy living in Broadmeadows, having just turned 15 at the time, and how the sky turned orange. We could not see through the smoke, the ash and the embers coming forward. We weren't anywhere near the fire front—we were kilometres away—but we could still smell it, and it still impacted our families and our households. This was the smoke that enveloped the entire state.

For electorates like McEwen, anniversaries like this are incredibly important, and, sadly, they come all too often. We have had 75 per cent of the electorate burnt over the past 40 years, and it has suffered in every major bushfire season. Our communities are shaped by fires we have experienced, as we have been brought together in shared trauma and then the shared path to recovery. We all know the devastating effects of fires and we rally around those who have been affected. Earlier this week, I had the honour of introducing a motion to the House commemorating the Black Saturday bushfires and the awful impact they had on our communities. But, before Black Saturday, there were the Australia Day fires, the Kinglake fires and, of course, Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday was a result of months of the driest conditions on record at the time. Romsey firefighter Ralph Hermann described how the grass would crackle when you walked on it and the soil and the air were so dry. It was a tinderbox ready to explode, and that it did. Graham Simpson, then a fire brigade captain at Cockatoo CFA, explained the pain in his stomach when he felt the wind change and heard those fire sirens ring out. In the drought-stricken landscape, the fire tore through it, with places like Macedon catching fire as people attempted to escape. Seventy-five people lost their lives that day. Some were found having tried to escape the fast-moving fires. Others had been defending their homes.

Of the 75 people who died, 14 were Victorian CFA firefighters and three were South Australian firefighters. I want to pay tribute to the Panton Hill CFA crew who lost their lives in the service of the McEwen community: Bill Marsden, Peter Singleton, Maurice Atkinson, Stuart Duff and Neville Jeffery—people whose names should never be forgotten for what they were prepared to do as volunteers. On the eve of this anniversary, I encourage members of our community to visit the Panton Hill Memorial, where their names have been immortalised due to their service to the community. We should take this anniversary as a reminder of those who put themselves in the line of danger every day.

I've talked before in this place about the bravery and heroism of our firefighters—the volunteers who step up, the average Australians who become heroes to protect communities. Ash Wednesday came after a long campaign by the CFA, which had responded to 3,200 fires during the period. A lot of the volunteers' families remember their loved ones being gone up to two to three weeks fighting fires—two to three weeks of giving everything to protect not only their own communities but the communities across the state. Our volunteers gave everything for weeks to protect average Victorians, and they have done so ever since, whether it's in the Black Saturday fires or the Black Summer fires or every fire in between.

We also know that events like these are not just over when the last fire is put out. Over 3,700 hundred buildings were destroyed or damaged, and 2,545 individuals and families lost their homes. The recovery cost then was at $400 million. This kind of event is something that stays in communities' minds for years to come. The fire burned itself not just into the landscape but into the collective consciousness of our communities. In Woodend, for example, 250 people sought shelter on the oval. Later, in response to all the damage, temporary housing was set up on the oval. Some people were forced to stay there for up to two years.

Tomorrow will be a hard day for so many members of our community, including those in, and those who have served in, the CFA. So my thoughts are with all those who were affected by these fires—to all those who will find it that bit harder to get out of bed tomorrow, to all those who had to rebuild from the ground up and to all those remembering the mates they have lost. In our communities of McEwen, we can stand together and be proud of the resilience and the ability to come together when our friends, our neighbours and our communities are in need.

House adjourned at 19:59