Incentives needed for emergency volunteers

AS MAGNIFICENT as the response from our emergency services has been, especially from CFA and SES volunteers, at Mirboo North, and other areas impacted by last Tuesday’s storm, a couple of issues stand out.

Response to climate change and the importance of our emergency service volunteers.

Of course, there’s also the need for a public briefing and report on what went right and what went wrong with the response, at Mirboo North in particular, as a learning experience, rather than a finger-pointing exercise.

But two things stand out from the event last Tuesday.

If there are going to be more of these extreme weather events as a result of global warming, and there certainly seems to be something in that after many people said they haven’t experienced such a destructive storm cell in South Gippsland before, then we need to be better prepared.

Bureau warnings need to include information about the potential for destructive storm cells to develop, with updates on where and when these events may impact.

The community needs to be better educated about the potential impact of these extreme storm cells and how to be prepared, and local government needs to look more closely at the varieties of trees which survived this event, consider what varieties are planted and where in built-up areas, and their density close to houses.

The other issue is that we are going to need a lot more  volunteers for our local emergency services, especially the fire brigade and SES, but also the likes of Red Cross.

But how can this be achieved in these days of falling volunteerism due to a range of factors, including cost-of-living pressures, competing interests and the pandemic changing our approach to community involvement.

One way to increase volunteer involvement in emergency services may be to offer tax breaks based on time committed to training and callouts, while also including a component of emergency service training and service, along the lines of jury duty or something similar, as a way to introduce more people to this vital work.

These may simply be thought bubbles, but government has to come up with a much more comprehensive response to climate change, including planning policy for coastal areas, that goes well beyond the photo opportunities around solar farm projects and multi-billion dollar offshore wind turbines.

And it’s time the government came clean on how it intends to manage the transition from the Latrobe Valley’s coal-fired power stations to renewables set to ramp up in earnest just four years from now with the shutting down of 30 per cent of our capacity at Yallourn W in 2028.