Mr CLARE (Blaxland) (17:23): Words can't really explain what has happened over the last few months, not like those images of the blood red sky over Mallacoota, of kids wearing smoke masks to help them breathe or of people huddled on beaches with their dogs, cats and horses just to escape the fire; the anger in the voices of firefighters being interviewed by the media; or the photo of the little boy having his dad's service medal pinned to his little chest do. This is a nightmare that's going to take us all a long time to recover from. We've had bushfires before—and we give them names like Black Saturday—but we've never had anything like this. This is 'black September', 'black October', 'black November', 'black December', 'black January' and now 'black February', and it's still not over. Just to put this in perspective—about as many square kilometres of Australia have been on fire over the last few months as have burned across the whole world in the last year. People have been forced to run to beaches and to jump on boats just to stay alive. People have died hundreds of kilometres away from the fires—in places like Canberra and Melbourne—just from the smoke. The time will come to look at what we did and what we failed to do. Today is not that day, but that day will come. A couple of weeks ago I went to Buxton, just south of Picton in south-west Sydney, and on the side of the road there there's a makeshift memorial—a few helmets, bunches of flowers and some messages. It's where Andrew O'Dwyer and Geoff Keaton died when their truck rolled over, back in December. It's an eerie place. And it makes you wonder, when you visit there, what happened, and what must have gone through their heads in those final moments—what those final moments must have been like. It made me wonder why RFS trucks don't have roll bars on them and, if they'd had them, whether the outcome might have been any different. I don't know. Up and down the street, out the front of people's houses, there are signs saying things like 'Thank you, RFS' and 'Thank you, superheroes.' In our own way I think that's what we're trying to do today—to say thank you to those heroes: the men and women that wear those yellow uniforms that stood between us and those awful fires. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Down the road from Buxton there's a little town called Balmoral. Balmoral's got about a hundred homes. Twenty of them were destroyed by the fires. In the local hall, which has become a recovery centre, I met a woman named Kim. Kim runs her own business, but for the last few months she's been running the recovery centre there—handing out everything from food to nappies and power tools: anything and everything that the community needs. She's also in the RFS; she wears the same yellow uniform. I asked her whether she was getting the compensation payments that the government had announced. She told me, to my surprise, 'No.' She said that because she's not considered frontline, she doesn't get those payments, even though she's there and has been there for more than a month helping the people in that community to rebuild their homes and rebuild their lives. It strikes me that it's just wrong; it's stupid, and it's something that could be easily fixed. Today is also an opportunity for me to thank my local community for everything that they've done over the last few months, big and small. We weren't touched directly by the fires, but all of us in the local community have been affected. We've seen it in the sky. We've breathed it in and we've felt it. Almost every church, mosque, temple and community club has done their bit—run a raffle, raised money, held a fundraising dinner, done something to help their fellow Australians. I want to give a special shout-out to Dr Vinh Binh Lu, who organised a dinner three days before Christmas for Andrew and Geoff's family, and raised an incredible $84,000. I also want to thank the guys behind Maronites on Mission. They donated $10,000 to the people that live in Buxton and Balmoral. I want to give Jihad Dib and Bilal El Hayek and the team at Bankstown PCYC and Lighthouse Community Support a plug. Back in November, these guys put out a call to our local community asking for donations. They got inundated with food, water, toys and toiletries, and they ended up delivering five trucks' worth of goods to different parts of New South Wales. And then in January, they did it all again and took three trucks and two vans to Cobargo and to Braidwood. A week later they took a van full of donated things to Adelong, and they've just taken another truck up to Taree. They're just a couple of people; they're just a couple of organisations. This country is full of good people and great organisations like that. They don't do it for a medal; they don't do it to get their name mentioned here in this place. They do it because they care about this country and the people who live in it. About two weeks ago I drove from Batlow to Cooma, and it's hard to describe what I saw. Everything is black. The trees are black, from top to bottom. The dirt's black—everything. It was pouring with rain, and the smell of ash and charcoal was thick in the air. It felt like a scene out of TheLord of the Rings, like the end of the world. Driving along that road for a couple of hours had a big impact on me. I can only imagine what it's like to drive that road every day, to live in that community, seeing that destruction and smelling it every day. This disaster's affected all of us in different ways. I've had mates who had to be evacuated. I've had members of my family who almost had their house burnt down. But what I keep thinking about—what I can't stop thinking about—are those two men, Andrew and Geoff, and their two little kids. They were dads. Their kids weren't much younger than my little boy. And I keep thinking about that image of Geoff's little boy, Harvey, getting that service medal pinned to his little chest at his dad's funeral, and Charlotte, Andrew's little girl, wearing her dad's helmet at his funeral. I keep thinking about the questions they must be asking their mums: 'Where's Dad?' 'When's Dad coming home?' How the hell do you answer those sorts of questions? I keep thinking about all the other boys and girls whose mums or dads wear the same yellow uniform as Andrew and Geoff did and what they must be thinking, and maybe not even telling their mums and dads, and the fear that must run through them every time Mum or Dad gets called away. There is so much that we need to do differently. There's so much we need to learn from the last few months. We owe it to them, to those little boys and girls, to make sure that next time we're better prepared, that their mums and dads are better prepared and that we here do everything we possibly can to keep their mums and dads safe. If we do anything, if we learn anything out of this nightmare, then please, please let it be that.