Dr MIKE KELLY (Eden-Monaro) (13:32): I'd like to begin my comments with a vote of thanks to several individuals and organisations, in the spirit of getting the message out to our communities that they should be proud that we reached across labels and political divides to address this situation. I want to thank the Deputy Prime Minister for all of the communications that we engaged in at the time. We were in communication with him more than with our wives, I think. It has always been that way between us; we shared some of the same turf with the vagaries of redistributions. I'm a proud custodian of the Tim Fischer walking stick for the Tumbatrek, which we hope will continue in our tortured landscape in the future. Thank you for taking on board the ideas we've passed on. And there are many others, of course. There is my good friend the member for Gippsland, another neighbour across the border. Even if you are a Mexican, you're not a bad bloke. Thank you for all your efforts. The member for Fadden helped me with the Bega Centrelink issues that we faced. And there are others who have reached out, like the member for Forde. I appreciate your care and concern. And there is my good friend the member for Berowra. I appreciate your contact as well. And then, of course, there are my colleagues on this side, particularly those who have been severely affected. The member for Macquarie has a lot of empathy on this issue, having lost a property in a previous fire. The member for Gilmore is another neighbour who did it extremely tough during all this. And there are many others besides them. We've talked about our first responders and our fireys—an amazing story. It was a privilege to have Shane Fitzsimmons in the chamber. I have spent a lot of time with Shane visiting our many RFS fire stations on presentation nights. His is an incredible story. He joined the RFS at the age of 15—sort of like I did in my time. More than that, he lost his own father in a hazard reduction burn in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, along with three other firefighters who died on that occasion. So he brings to this not only a wealth of experience and professionalism but also a deep empathy that we have seen demonstrated in the past traumatic days. I thank him enormously. What he's had to say about these fires we need to take on board. As he said, hazard reduction is not a panacea but it is important. I want to reinforce the comments by the member for Gippsland in relation to cultural burnings. We have a wonderful framework that we can use to explore taking that further, through the Firesticks Alliance. I was at a meeting with the Bega land council the other day and they were ready, willing and able to do that, and it's so important because a lot of their lands actually border national forests and coastal communities. So it can be of assistance to protect those communities and to engage in those cultural burnings. They understand how you have to tailor those burnings to the landscape. They took me through the differences in terrain and vegetation and the issues around how you manage those burnings. The Firesticks Alliance have teamed up with the RFS and are more than willing and open-minded to, and in fact do embrace, the latest science and technology around those issues. I would like to see the funding that was promised to them at the state level followed through on. There is a huge opportunity now for us to take on board these offers and this expertise that we can use in the future. There are so many people—through the Insurance Council and others—that are now quite practiced at this unfortunately, going back to the far south coast fires and others, but I want to pay special tribute to the regional general manager for Telstra, Chris Taylor, and his team. They have been incredible. We are in touch on an hourly basis—literally, even as I have been sitting here—and his teams have been stretched to the limit. Their infrastructure has been smashed; their redundancy systems tested like never before, and damaged because of the scope of what has happened across the landscape. He has done a tremendous job, and I really want to thank him and his teams who have been out there, at personal risk, from the very first day of the loss of the telephone exchange in Tumut—for other reasons, but it just snowballed from there. There are a lot of lessons to take away from that. The member for Gippsland talked about mobile communications. There are so many lessons learned about our communications that we have to take on board from this experience. It was such a central issue. Through that cooperation, we were able to do things. Senator Murray Watt was helping network our team with the minister for emergencies, and that was so important. We had situations that I'm proud to say our shadow minister for health helped out with. We had a facility not far from Cobargo, Nardy House, which deals with profoundly disabled residents. The problem we had there—it's one of the lessons learned that we have to take away from this—was there was no real protocol or disaster evacuation system in place for them. It was an incredibly traumatic, distressing situation for the nurses and the residents of that organisation. The fact was that we were able to reach out and engage with Minister Brad Hazzard—the minister at state level—who talked to me directly. He has always been fantastic to cooperate with, from my perspective, and he weighed in and helped out in that situation. But certainly those are the things we have to do a better job of in the future. I just want to emphasise the confidence people should have in our cross-party collaboration. The reference group that we've set up across our region involves Steph Cooke, Joe McGirr, Justin Clancy, Andrew Constance, John Barilaro, my federal colleague the member for Gilmore and I doing regular phone hook-ups and regular phone hook-ups with the recovery committees. There have been no labels; we've all just been gathering information about the needs for recovery and better disaster response and feeding that into that process. It has been working very well, so people should feel reassured about that. Across Eden-Monaro we have lost 11 people, and these are people who, in our kinds of communities, as many will understand, we cannot afford to lose, frankly. I think people would be familiar with the Salway family story through the Four Corners program. Aaron Salway told that story last night. Robert and Patrick were absolute pillars of that Cobargo community. They come from a traditional dairy farming family that we're very proud of in the Bega valley—that's my own family's story—and they have been there since 1870, engaged in that industry. Beyond that, they have been so involved with their community throughout that family history—the show society and all community activities—and their loss is going to be felt deeply by that community. They'll never get over it, but we hope to do honour to their memory with how we carry ourselves and recover from here. Janelle and Aaron, all our thoughts and our heartfelt condolences to you and your family. We will be there for you as that community is always. Beyond that, we've had a number of other losses, whose names haven't been released, in Belowra, Coolagolite, Batlow, Nerrigundah and Cobargo. Reference has been made to the brave US firefighters in the C-130 crash that took place in Peak View. We've talked about the wildlife issue and, ironically, those firefighters were helping to fight the fire in the Two Thumbs Wildlife Trust area where a lot of koalas and sanctuaries for koalas were being maintained and sustained. Unfortunately, that's all been burnt through with tremendous loss of wildlife. Those firefighters are now part of our local family. We embrace them. We will always remember them. I've talked with local colleagues, and we will establish a memorial in their memory in the Cooma-Monaro area. I know there are colleagues in this chamber who have served side by side with our US brothers and sisters in many foreign lands in the past. They were here with us during World War II as well. In fact, the 1st Marine Division's anthem is 'Waltzing Matilda'. In my own family history, every generation has served shoulder to shoulder with the US. These three brave men—Ian McBeth, Paul Hudson and Rick DeMorgan Jr—have added their page to what is one of the proudest and most important stories of our nations together. I pass, through the ambassador, the grateful thanks of all of Eden-Monaro for their sacrifice during this disaster. We've had across Eden-Monaro over a million hectares and counting of country burnt, every day, every hour that goes by, more and more. We are a long way from being out of this. This disaster, we are told by the Bureau of Meteorology, and the conditions that have been at the heart of it are likely to continue through to May. We are just gut-wrenched at what we have experienced. It's been a massive kick in the guts to our entire economy. There is no aspect of the economy of Eden-Monaro that has not been devastated. The hit that businesses have taken and the loss of the timber industry will take 20 years to recover from. For a lot of our orchard growers in Batlow, it will take maybe 10 years to recover from that damage. These are longstanding hits that will take a huge recovery effort. Seeing the courage of those communities facing those hits has been one of the most enduring moments I will take from this. The economic hit extends not just to the businesses damaged by fire but has a ring-barking effect. Every business, whether it was near a fire front or not, has been devastated by the loss of the tourists and the damage caused by power outages et cetera. I think of the brave general store owners in Quaama, Ellie and Alex, who, during the heat of this, were donating their stores and stock to the fireys while suffering damage from power loss and threat from the fire itself. Alex stayed behind at one moment during the evacuation to fight the fires to save the general store. It has suffered some damage but not enough to qualify for the insurance that would normally kick in. They are crying for help, for quick-hitting action that will assist all these small businesses. Many suggestions have been passed, including perhaps tax relief for people, engaging in accommodation in fire affected areas taking holidays. We need to look at a whole range of measures. We'll be saying more about that and talking more about that in the days ahead. Across all 42,000 square kilometres of Eden-Monaro, which is bigger than 66 countries, we have been under siege and still are. With our fireys out there, one of the big takeaways from this mega disaster has been the holes and gaps in the system that we need to take on board as a lesson learnt. I think Mark Binskin is a fantastic appointment. He's a good friend who I've served with for many years. He's a constituent, so he'll be empathetic to all of this. He's a fine leader, a competent officer and also a very empathetic person in his own right—a wonderful human being. We need to do a deep strategic analysis of the holes in our system. As part of our gratitude I want to acknowledge the ADF, proudly. I'm grateful to the government for responding to our calls to get them out there on a wider scale, because we were so familiar with the sorts of capacities that they could bring to this—the skills and relevant capabilities; the ability of the engineers to do break cutting with heavy plant; the combat engineers, whose job in life is to do root clearance and mobility facilitation; bulk water carriers; transportation; logistics—there are so many skills. The feedback I've had from the community as I move around is that they've found that Defence Force presence so reassuring. That is a contributor to the mental health issue that we have talked about. It has been important to do, and the lesson that we need to take away from this is: how do we do this better and in a more efficient, effective way as soon as we can do it? How do they coordinate that? We've seen some disconnects in issues of communication and coordination. These are lessons to be learned. There's no blame to be handed around here. There is so much we can do better from what we've learned. A disaster on this scale has really revealed a lot of the problems that we are facing now with the extension of the fire season. As we know, since the seventies it's 19 per cent longer than it used to be, and that's just increasing. We're overlapping with the Northern Hemisphere with these fire seasons, as we saw in this situation with the fires in California and the fires in New South Wales, so we need to be more self-sufficient in our air assets and we need to take urgent steps for the fire seasons ahead to make sure that happens. We also need to explore the possibilities of drone technology. This is happening in Israel and the US as we speak—things like Project Maven in the US, which is applying military technologies to their disaster response. We can use that during high-risk periods in high-risk areas and around population centres to detect ignitions as early as possible so we can vector to them before they become mega disasters—deploying our assets and rapid response teams and the like. These are key prevention approaches that we can possibly take. I urge that we do look at that in this process of review that we're about to launch into. We do need a national plan that embraces all this and hopefully that will emerge from the process that we're about to launch on. I will also comment on the climate change issue, because it is a bipartisan position that climate change is real and that there is a human-induced factor in this issue. We agree wholeheartedly, I believe, across this chamber on the steps that we need to take to embrace the mitigation of and the response to what we know are going to be worsening conditions with each year that passes. I also urge, and this is just me speaking—I'm begging and pleading for this on behalf of my tortured, bleeding region—that we now work across this chamber to create a mechanism for forging bipartisan policy for what more we need to do on climate change and how we can then take that to improve our advocacy internationally to get this done, so we can give our fireys a fighting chance into the future. I'm talking to them now and getting feedback where they say: 'Look, Mike, with our team and our brigade, our record for rotations has been four weeks. We're out there for eight weeks now. We are buggered.' The numbers are just not there to respond to these mega disasters in our RFS structure. One of the things we're going to have to do is review the whole framework, the whole model, for how we respond and how we can incentivise volunteers into the RFS. How can we support them better? I've suggested things like looking at the ADF Reserve structure that we may be able to wrap around them to help them and incentivise voluntary participation in this scheme. They need a lot of help. They need funds restored to them and they need mental health support and support to those stations across the region. I've noticed so much logistical and other support that they really do cry out for. I've asked the Queanbeyan RSL branch to invite our fireys to participate in the next Anzac Day parade, and I'm very proud to say that is happening. I know they're doing that in Tumbarumba. I urge all of our fellow RSL branches to invite their fireys to march with them. I know as veterans we're going to be very proud to have them alongside us. The sacrifices they have made well and truly earn that honour. But to honour that memory particularly I think it's incumbent on us, as well as all of these practical measures, to tackle this strategic issue for the future. I urge us to go forward on this. It has happened in every other OECD country. Boris Johnson is out there calling for zero net emissions by 2050, reaching out to Australia to do more, and hosting the next COP. He'll be talking to us about that. It doesn't need to be about politics; it needs to be about the facts. I'm hoping that we begin this analysis, as the New South Wales inquiry is doing. They're having a scientist in there. Let's get the facts and the projections on the table and listen to our agencies. The Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, Academy of Science—those are the people we have to listen to. Get the facts right up-front and then go forward. That is sound military procedure. We call it the appreciation process: you start with objective facts, you go through a process that eliminates subjectivity and you get to an objective result. I'm begging you to engage now in that sort of process. Finally, to finish: I could not be more proud of this community, Eden-Monaro. They have shone in this. They have discovered wells of inner strength and compassion and love for each other that have brought me to tears as I've been out there amongst them. That is the strength of this country. That is the basis of our voluntary spirit. We should all be proud of that, but we should all pay tribute to it by responding now as we should. What we do now will define us to future generations. We must honour the spirit that exists in our rural communities.