Bendigo firefighters have welcomed the Andrews government’s proposed legislation to split the Country Fire Authority into separate paid and volunteer services, but say the current building is “bursting at the seams” and may not be up to hosting both.
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“Build us a new station.”
That was the message the acting officer in charge of the Bendigo CFA took to a parliamentary inquiry investigating the proposed changes, which would see paid firefighters carved off into a new organisation, Fire Rescue Victoria.
Read more: On duty with the Bendigo Fire Brigade
Mick Lavery was responding to a question from Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party MP Daniel Young about Bendigo firefighters’ list of priorities, regardless of any legislative changes.
“Forget this legislation, forget this bill — if someone came to you and said ‘What do you want, what’s your wish list of things that you want to make you able to do your job better and provide a better service?’,” he asked.
Mr Lavery’s response, “from a purely selfish Bendigo point of view” – “build us a new station”.
“That is pretty much the basis of what we need,” he said.
“Our district headquarters is upstairs, they are in the process of moving out, but it is a long and slow process.”
“If we can move them out, have a new station to work out of and bring us into the 21st century, that would be spot on. We would be wrapped.”
Mr Lavery said the current building, which was built in 1984, was “bursting at the seams” and would struggle to accommodate two separate services if the government’s plan to split volunteer and career firefighters went ahead.
“If we introduce more equipment and more appliances to make the volunteers a separate brigade, I do not know how we would do it at the current location,” he said.
But Mr Lavery said he had received no information from CFA hierarchy about whether a new station would be forthcoming or about “how the new structure will work at all” if the changes went ahead.
The man who would oversee FRV and the new volunteer-only CFA, Emergency Services Minister James Merlino, would not confirm whether there were any plans for a new station at Bendigo, but said the CFA was looking at future options for the facility to ensure it best suited current and future needs.
“Bendigo is an area that is growing and we understand that changes will need to be made to ensure the demands of the region are met,” he said.
“That is why we are taking the action to reform and modernise our fire services.”
As for the proposal to split the volunteer and paid services itself, Bendigo fire brigade chairman Peter Polwarth, also speaking at the inquiry, said volunteers were “generally pretty happy” with the proposal.
Mr Polwarth said the integrated station model had “worked really well” at Bendigo, despite getting off to “a pretty rocky start”.
“We are of the opinion in the whole brigade that if we move and co-locate, it will be a good thing because nothing will change except the badges that we are wearing on our uniforms,” he said.
Mr Lavery agreed, saying the paid firefighters had “a great relationship with our volunteers, both at Bendigo and at surrounding brigades”.
“We recognise that integration probably [didn’t] work very well at the start, but now we have got plenty of staff so we turn up to fires and incidents and we get the job done in plenty of time, and the volunteers barely get a look in, I am afraid, and they tend to drift off into other areas,” he said.
“So if we do have [separate services], it will be great. The volunteers will have their own identity, their own stations, their own equipment, their own appliances. They will have ownership. They are the masters of their own destiny.”