Dr HAINES (Indi) (15:18): This has been the most awful of summers, a summer that has visited upon the nation grief and loss. Today the parliament of our nation stops to mourn and honour that loss and to honour the service. When we left this place in December many of us were fearful of what we would face. What has unfolded demonstrates that perhaps we were not fearful enough. The summer sound of cicadas was replaced by the ping, ping, ping of the emergency app. It's like the heart monitor of a nation in the intensive care unit. Our anxiety is turbo-charged. These fears and this anxiety were very real in Indi. The summer weather forecasts were menacing, so on 12 December I arranged a fire briefing by the CFA and state government, and I invited my fellow state MPs and local government mayors from our nine local shires. In my mind, it was crucial that we were informed and that we were united. I'm so grateful to Adrian Gutsche, CFA District 24 Operations Manager; Brett Myers, CFA District 24 Commander; Paul King, CFA Regional Commander, Northern Victoria; and DELWP. At the Wodonga incident control centre we heard detailed analysis of the forecasts, the risks and the emergency liaison. In less than three weeks, the faces around that table would all be confronting devastating fires across the Walwa, Corryong and Alpine Valleys zones. All our resources and unity would be called upon, and the professionalism that we saw that day we saw day in and day out in the weeks that followed. At the end of December, fires broke out around Corryong. This blaze would eventually merge with the Jingellic fire across the Murray and stretch for hundreds of kilometres, razing homes in Cudgewa and Tintaldra—394,000 hectares were lost. Our beautiful alpine towns would soon join them, with fire breaking out around Dinner Plain and Falls Creek—44,000 hectares lost. Finally, fire would break out at Abbeyard, just minutes from my home town of Wangaratta, and stretch from Carboor to Omeo—142,000 hectares lost. Driving across these fire-affected parts of Indi these last months—the traditional lands of the Dhudhuroa, Waywurru, Taungurung and Bangerang peoples—I have seen, like others here, terrible and numbing things. Tom Griffiths, an environmental historian at the ANU, said on ABC Radio the other day that we describe fires as though they were monsters: bushfires have flanks, fingers and tongues; they lick, they rage, they hunt and they devour. We call them vicious, angry and cruel. Those who have lived through fires know why we describe them like this. Paddocks blackened, homes razed, towns evacuated, camps erected, soldiers deployed, highways emptied and animals incinerated—this season has left us grasping even for the language to describe what has happened. We used to name bushfires after days of the week: Red Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Black Saturday. These fires were not a single day of devastation but a prolonged and continuing assault. Some have called it 'black January', but that's not enough, for the fires started well before January. Some have called it 'the angry summer', but this is not even enough, for the fires started in spring and it may be autumn before they end. We have always had droughts and fires but not like this. In our hotter and drier climate we need new language to describe the country that we are becoming. In my travels across Indi I have spoken to hundreds of people and heard many stories about the impacts of these fires. And this I hear: we are devastated by the loss of life. The fires are devastating for our farmers, who were already experiencing drought. These fires have wiped out Christmas holiday tourism. They are pushing small businesses to the brink. They are reconfiguring our natural environment and they are taking their toll on our people's mental health. Many people are literally gasping for breath. As we move from disaster response to disaster recovery, we cannot lose sight of how people are affected, and today is about giving respect to those people and to their stories. Indi is a border electorate. I share the border with the member for Farrer and the member for Gippsland. Their communities, I acknowledge today, are suffering tremendously; indeed, as are the communities of so many of my colleagues in this place. Indi is a border electorate, and across the Murray River 28-year-old Sam McPaul died on 30 December after a freakish weather event flipped his truck while he was fighting the Green Valley blaze in Jingellic, just 70 kilometres east of Albury—just across from my patch—in Walwa. Sam, the beloved son of Chris, whose adored wife, Megan, is expecting their first child this May. Mat Kavanagh, 43 years of age, a dedicated Forest Fire Management Victoria employee and father of two, was tragically killed on the Goulburn Valley Highway while on duty. Mat lived with his wife, Jude, and two young children, Reuben and Kate, in Alexandra, in the south of my electorate of Indi. Bill Slade, from Wonthaggi, has been spoken of many times today. The beloved husband of Carol and father of Ethan and Steph—a family I met today at morning tea—Bill was struck and killed by a tree while fighting a fire near Omeo, saving our iconic mountain country of the north-east, again on the border of Indi. They are the too many loved people whom we speak of with grief and whom we honour today. Many survivors bear scars. In the immediate aftermath of the new year firestorm, I spoke with an elderly dairy-farming couple at the Corryong relief centre. They were dazed and grieving. They sat in a rudimentary school basketball stadium, a stadium that had been packed with 600 people only a couple of days before. It was a refugee camp effectively, littered with mattresses and bedding and tables of donated goods—a supply of food large enough to see the Antarctic mission through the winter. The couple had been rescued from their dairy farm, their home burnt to the ground. They told me they'd run for their lives and had only survived because two young blokes had rescued them. Their home had contained all the furniture and history of their great-great-grandparents, who were early settlers in the upper Murray. They told me they'd seen a few things in their 50 years of farming together but nothing like this. They uttered the words that have become the chorus of this disaster: 'We are luckier than some. Many others are worse off than us.' There are dozens of stories such as this—kindness, counsellors, chaplains, departmental officials, tired CFA personnel, police, cups of tea, noticeboards, briefings, forms, updates, too much information or not enough. I thank everyone for everything that happened in those relief centres to support these people. In the Towong shire alone, over 6,000 stock died and 926 hectares of field crops, 33,800 hectares of pasture and 20,000 tonnes of fodder were lost. The Mayor of Towong, David Wortmann—CFA volunteer, farmer and local leader, a calm man in a crisis and not one for hyperbole—told me that day: 'Helen, we need the Army. We simply cannot bury this stock alone.' The local health service at Corryong, led by Dominic Sandilands and his team, were evacuated because the most fundamental infrastructure—water, power and communications—could not be guaranteed. The frail and aged, dialysis patients and pregnant women were loaded onto buses and sent to other towns for safety. Staff were working around the clock in between defending their own properties. The water did run out. The power did fail. So did the radio transmitter; there was no ABC there. And the mobile phones—well, they rarely work, and they were gone that day as well. The Cudgewa pub miraculously survived after heroic efforts from the CFA. The proprietors—Tracy, Carol and Ralph Fair and community worker Kate Fair—provided food, shelter and companionship for weeks to all who walked through their doors. The one mobile tower in town was destroyed, and roads in and out were closed for days. In all, 30 homes were lost in just that small district. Fires raged through the alpine high country. Close to 30,000 tourists were evacuated in a day. But we were lucky in Indi. We could get them out safely and quickly. We didn't have to leave them on the beaches. But not everything could be saved. Stef Antonello runs a family-owned grape-growing business in the Alpine Valleys. They were not physically touched by fire, but their vineyard, like much of Australia, was blanketed in smoke for much of the summer, and smoke spoils grapes. They're looking at losing 100 per cent of their crop to smoke taint, meaning almost half a million dollars in lost profit. That affects not only Stef but his family, including his brother, his two kids and his 82-year-old mother, who proudly tells me she has never taken a pension in her life. Small businesses across the region have similarly been hit hard. My office is inundated daily by business owners in deep distress. Shane and Ashlee Laing run the cafe Teddy's Joint in Tallangatta. They've seen an 80 per cent drop in income since the onset of the fires in December. Teddy's Joint employs five people, so if they fall over so do five jobs in a very small town. Some of the damage we will not be able to see. I've spoken in this place before of a University of Melbourne study called Beyond Bushfires, into the impacts of the Black Saturday fires. That study found in the worst affected areas that six years down the track one in four people showed signs of unmanageable mental health problems—one in four six years on. There are scores of stories of PTSD and anxiety among people who survive bushfires. Recently, one farmer wrote to me saying he suffers PTSD from a previous fire and that his trigger is dead animals. He has lost his cattle again and he's not doing well. But the Beyond Bushfires study found that it was not just the fire event that affected people but the knock-on effects, the lost income, lost homes and lost way of life, that affected people. Countless people have written to me saying the experience of negotiating complex government assistance packages with labyrinthine eligibility criteria is 'traumatising them again'. We need to radically simplify the process of delivering assistance in crises like these. It must be fast and it must be effective. Much has been said today about the community response to these devastating events, and my community, like those around the nation, stood up to the test. Our CFA volunteers and professional firefighters acquitted their duty with valour, professionalism and endurance. Victoria Police, Ambulance Victoria, the State Emergency Service, the many service clubs, church groups, schoolkids, nameless volunteers—they are still at it as many fires in my region continue to burn. The staff of our local councils have worked with minimal respite and the most stretched of resources. The local councils are the frontline of this. Food, fodder, shelter and compassion from near and far have supported us. ABC broadcasts: I'll add my voice to those who have gone before me in this place speaking on the ABC. What an extraordinary service. In my electorate, local rural ABC journalist Ashlee Aldridge was on location everywhere, supported by an equally dedicated crew. Matt Doran from here came over to help. Yesterday I read that since July there have been 900 emergency broadcasts across our nation from our ABC; the year before there were 371. Community relief centres were spun up on a dime in Wangaratta, Tallangatta, Wodonga and Corryong. Volunteers poured forth to staff them. Friends and strangers alike all helped, and I thank them. Our communities are humbled. Our communities are exhausted. In our bushfire ravaged communities the question being asked is: 'What now? Where do we go from here?' Well, when I stood for election last year I promised to fight for three things: the regeneration of our regions, a national action to mitigate and prepare for climate disruption and to return integrity to our broken politics. Renewal, action, integrity. We will need each of these if we are to find the phoenix in this fire. I believe the tasks that follow this disaster are actually quite clear. We must work together to find what I know can be our common ground. First, we need a national disaster response plan suited to the new threats we face. This plan must tackle the realities playing out before us; a new compact on how the Commonwealth government and Australian Defence Force should assist states in responding to emergencies; a standalone aerial firebombing fleet which does not depend on aircraft from North America; sufficiently trained personnel to fight longer and fiercer fires; and to support health services and local councils. We can't keep our volunteers on the ground for indefinite periods. Second, we need a nationwide plan to adapt our country to a changed climate. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that adaptation needs greater attention. Well, let's work together to match these words with action. Restore funding to research organisations leading this work, adopt my calls from last September to introduce an adaption plan for the agricultural sector and develop a plan to make sure our regional communities are resilient in the face of a changing climate. This means greater investment in fundamental infrastructure that sets us up to succeed. These bushfires have exposed the brittle skeleton of years of underspend in rural Australia, and we cannot wait for disasters to hit before we start investing in regional Australia. Third, we need to deal with the underlying driver of our worsening fires: our climate is changing. We here are responsible, we are responsible for turning this around, and we can and we must do something about it. There's a simple truth which people out there in the community have already accepted and which we, as political leaders, must now address. People in my electorate who have never approached me about climate change before are now coming to me, passionately wanting us to address climate policy. They know that as long as greenhouse gas emissions continue then our temperatures will rise, our rainfall will fall, our bush will become dryer and these fires will get worse. We have to reduce the likelihood and severity of these disasters by cutting carbon emissions at home and abroad, and to say this should be as controversial as saying, 'Water flows downhill.' To do nothing from here is to sign up to a future where we lose more lives, our mental health suffers more, our small businesses suffer more, our farms suffer more, our once incredible natural environment suffers more. Imagine if our firefighters were seized by indecision, by complacency, by infighting when fires crested the hills of our towns. Our leaders have praised firefighters a lot this summer. I think the time is right not just to praise them, but to start emulating them. We cannot be indecisive. We cannot be afraid to change. We cannot be complacent. We must come out of our corners and find our common ground, just as we have this fire season. I've been contacted and offered support by my federal parliamentary colleagues of all stripes. I thank them. And I thank the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, the Victorian emergency services commissioner, Andrew Crisp, and the many ministers, both state and federal, for their support of me and my electorate. In conclusion, today I join with my federal parliamentarians to honour and to mourn the people who have lost their lives to this terrible fire, to pay respect to the brave people from all walks of life who protect our country in its time of need. And I believe the best way to respect that sacrifice is by remembering the lesson that they have taught us—that when our home is under threat, Australians will try everything to save it. This has been the summer that has broken our nation's heart. Let it be the summer that forges our resolve.