James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

r STEVENS () (): I thank the nearly 1,000 members of my electorate who have signed the joint petition that I established with two of my state colleagues—Jack Batty, the member for Bragg, and John Gardner, the member for Morialta—calling for appropriate levels of investment in fuel load management coming into the bushfire season in the upcoming summer period. Regrettably, the Labor government have not put the appropriate resources towards the management of fuel load and other important initiatives for bushfire preparedness. We are running a community campaign calling on them to put those investments in place, because we know in the foothills of the Adelaide Hills—not just in my electorate and Jack's and John's electorates but throughout the Adelaide Hills—there is an enormous bushfire risk. It has been the case in decades gone past that there have been very tragic bushfires that have gotten out of control out there, particularly the Ash Wednesday bushfires that we've spoken about in this chamber before. This is something that should be bipartisan.

We need to back our CFS brigades in particular, who have the on-the-ground knowledge and expertise. They merely need the resources to make sure that they can do the job they want to do, which is manage fuel load, make sure that fire access ways are cleared as the season approaches and make sure that they've got contingencies in place and they've got all of the intel and information that they need.

We also need to make sure that we're supporting communities to have bushfire action plans. Everyone that lives in a bushfire risk area needs to have a plan for what they will do if the unthinkable happens and they get a communication that indicates they need to be wary of that risk and probably have a plan to leave their property. No-one should be coming up with a plan for what to do when they get that text message or hear about it on the news; they should have a plan ready to go. I think that is the case broadly in the communities of the Adelaide Hills, although, obviously, when people have recently moved in there and haven't had that level of experience, we want to keep the awareness up. Thank you very much to those that have joined this campaign. Thank you to my state colleagues that are a part of this important awareness initiative.

It's a community initiative. Government plays a part, and we want the government to be investing in appropriate resources to make sure that our community brigades have got what they need. We also want to work together as a community, not play politics with this, and to do everything we can to make sure that we're prepared. We hope nothing catastrophic will happen this summer, but the most important thing is that we prepare for the worst, and that's how we can avoid it.