Country Fire Authority

Dr Diana Barker, President of the Australian Veterinary Association, speaking with Country Today's Gabrielle Hodson.

The Country Fire Authority has a new Chief Officer, Garry Cook, who's taking over the role just as the Victorian Auditor-General released a damning report that says Victorian fire authorities need an estimated $1.5 billion to meet critical fire truck replacement and upgrade needs.

and that the agencies currently have access to only around one quarter of the necessary long-term funding.

Country Today's Gabrielle Hodson asked Garry Cook how his first week in the job has gone.

Just encourage people to connect with their local fire brigade, get advice, get information from them.

and be in a position to make wise decisions on the day that you need to do that because there's nothing worse than not having a plan and being completely reactive when we've got a dangerous situation unfolding in front of us.

The new Chief Officer of the Country Fire Authority, Garry Cook, speaking with Gabrielle Hodson.

Without bees, our key agricultural crops would not be pollinated.

We'll delve into some of the details from that Victorian Auditor General's report, looking at the fire services provided in this state.

Now, look, previously, we've spent a lot of time with the CFA and We'll continue to report on problems, perceived problems with the CFA, concerns from members about what it means for their ability to fight fires.

One area for regional Victoria we haven't spent a lot of time with that this report spends a lot of time on.

is forest fire management, the DECA firefighters, right? The government professional firefighters that fight those fires on public land, the green overalls you see on firegrounds.

Let's talk fire services now.

and a report from Victoria's Auditor-General's office found the state's fire authorities are facing funding shortfalls when it comes to planning and maintaining their fleets.

That report, tabled yesterday in Parliament, looks at whether Victoria's firefighting fleet is meeting the state's current needs and its future needs and found fire authorities, including CFA, Fire Rescue Victoria and Government Department, DECA, firefighters, which manages bushfires on public land, need an estimated $1.5 billion... to address critical fire truck replacements in coming years and other upgrades, but they only really have a quarter of that funding required.

The Auditor-General found gaps in DECA's fleet planning and development processes led to cracking and safety risks with G-Wagon trucks from 2017 and Unimog fire trucks from 2020.

Size season down here started off very slowly.

It was looking very dry, but on the... 1st of October, the Country Fire Authority announced that we're going to have fire restrictions starting on Monday, the 5th of October.

And, of

course, on Friday, the 2nd, and Saturday, the 3rd of October, it started raining.

So Victoria had two fire services, as do most jurisdictions.

The Country Fire Authority, the CFA, is mostly volunteers, tens of thousands of them in this sunburned kind of country where we need so many volunteer firefighters, plus about a thousand kind of paid career firefighters in those bigger regional centres and the outer suburbs.

And then the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the MFB, covered metropolitan Melbourne and is completely career paid firefighters.

Both sets of firefighters and both of those, I suppose, agencies are represented, the staff in those agencies are represented by one union, the United Firefighters Union, the Victorian branch, and it's affiliated with the Labor Party and it has been run since 1995 by one person, Peter Marshall.

It's a very different way of choosing a leader than a lot of the other ways when we talk about leadership.

So paying conditions are set by an enterprise agreement, so an EBA.

And there are two of them, one for the CFA and one for the MFB.

Government doesn't sign them directly.

A major protest is happening in Melbourne today.

In fact, right now, Spring Street outside of Parliament is lined with trucks and CFA vehicles.

We've been here before.

We've broadcast from it.

What can you see? What does it look like?

Well, it's very colourful.

There's a lot of CFA jackets and pants.

There's a lot of CFA tankers.

Ah.

Um, so in order to deal with this, we had to also, um, require, uh, Fire Rescue Victoria and the CFA, who don breathing apparatus to enter the silo, along with one of our, um, highly trained, uh, HEMS paramedics.

I sh-

It adds that complexity too, because now on top of that, we also now have to care for those people donning the breathing apparatus.

And I'll give you an example down here in Victoria is our emergency services tax that we're faced with at the moment.

So out our way, we're all volunteer firefighters, so Country Fire Authority down here.

we volunteer to go out and fight fires on behalf of wherever the fire starts.

And everyone does it as the right thing to do by your community.

This isn't about that.

None of that tankers.

tax is about actually going back into the community and back into the country fire authority that's because the victorian government here the labor government's over 200 million dollars in debt it's going into consolidated revenue they're just trying to make money off farmers on that on that one tax thing and um that's that's not the only one i think um I heard 12 months ago, Victoria's had over 52 new taxes.

There's land taxes, there's, um, uh, CGT and all that sort of stuff that are coming in now.