A FRIEND received a rather disturbing notice in his mail box recently - one that cannot be allowed to pass without comment.
The notice was from his local Country Fire Authority Brigade, and its purpose was to solicit donations towards the cost of a replacement state-of-the-art twin-cab tanker valued at $300,000.
The plea was framed as follows:
“Whilst our members are able to give of their time, you too can contribute to our community by supporting the Woodend CFA with a donation towards our equipment upgrades so that we can maintain the finest possible service.’’
According to the notice, more than half of the brigade’s fleet vehicles are wholly or partly funded by the brigade itself.
I was staggered to read that.
The CFA is one of the finest volunteer organisations in Australia, if not the world.
According to its website, the organisation includes about 60,000 members who are volunteers and a further 400 paid fire fighters.
Every Saturday morning during the cooler months, I see CFA mem
bers in uniform selling raffle tickets outside my local milk bar to raise funds for the local brigade.
More than once I have ruefully noted that these community-minded people spend more time selling raffle tickets than they do fighting fires.
We may be glad for this to be the case, but that does not make it right.
In an era when multi-million dollar handouts have become the accepted practice for governments, more needs to be done to support the organisations whose membership would place their lives on the line to protect the rest of us.
And most of them do so free of charge.
Our society seriously needs to question itself as to whether it is appropriate that emergency services personnel have to sell raffle tickets to fund equipment that will be used for protecting the lives and assets of us all.
Certainly, and at the very least, we should all be buying more raffle tickets.
Most Victorians who bother to look at their insurance premiums and notice the levies applied to the bottom line are unhappy about the way this initiative is used to tax them.
But it provides the CFA with a significant amount of its income.
Again, we need to find a better way of supporting such an important organisation. If we all stopped insuring property the CFA would very quickly be starved of cash.
The future of firefighting - and the emphasis on fire prevention, planning and awareness - changed forever after the tragic events of Black Saturday. The ongoing royal commission hearings will provide eventual findings that can be used as a basis for further refinements, but the way financial support is provided to the CFA in the first place also needs to be scrutinised.
CFA members I have spoken to say they are proud to be active in the community doing whatever is required to help out the brigade, but I am not sure volunteers sign up to become fundraisers.
The amount of funding provided to the CFA by the State Government has increased substantially in recent years, but more needs to be done. This is an organisation whose wages bill is for about 400 people. The 60,000 volunteers come free of charge but offer so much more than might be expected of them.
Some in the CFA may think this article is critical of the CFA, its hierarchy or the State Government
It is not - it is simply asking the question as to whether our community, which relies so much on organisations such as the CFA, is satisfied with how such an important service is funded.
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