Plenary address by Cr Lisa Price, Latrobe City Council, Victoria
E&OE
Anthony Albanese, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, Members of Parliament, fellow mayors and shire presidents, ladies and gentlemen I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we are meeting on today and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
My task today is to talk to you about building resilience in local communities in the context of bushfires.
Just to let you know a little bit about my community, Latrobe City forms part of the beautiful Gippsland Region and is located in the south east corner of Victoria less than two hours drive from Melbourne. It is made up of four urban centres, some of you might recognise the names - Churchill, Moe/Newborough, Morwell and Traralgon and has seven smaller townships of Boolarra, Glengarry, Toongabbie, Tyers, Traralgon South, Yallourn North, and Yinnar and has a population of 71,000 people.
For us the fire emergency began on the 30th of January when a fire which was deliberately lit destroyed 32 homes in the Boolarra and Yinnar area. Of course this was then followed by the tragedy of Black Saturday a week later when on the 7th of February we lost 11 lives and another 179 homes and many other sheds and pieces of community infrastructure.
In putting this speech together I thought I really should do my homework first so I thought I'd look up the meaning of resilience just to ensure that I was not presuming that I knew what I was talking about. The meaning of resilience as defined in the dictionary is the ability to recovery quickly from illness, change or misfortune.'
So how do you build resilience into a community to withstand the type of devastation that impacted our community in late January and early February?
In my view, and as a result of the bushfire experience, I believe there are two key elements. The first one and look I don't know that I can emphasize this strongly enough, is the strength of relationships. It is just vital that you have really good, strong relationships in your community in the good times because when the bad times come, as it did for us, it will be those relationships that will be the difference between a successful outcome and a disastrous outcome.
When I talk about building relationships I'm talking about building strong relationships with every sector of your community because until something like this happens you just don't know who those key players will be. Of course there are the obvious relationships that need to be strong such as with the local, state and Federal Government departments and agencies, neighbouring municipalities is another really important relationship, police, CFA, but it's sometimes those other relationships that perhaps might not be so clear.
So let me give you a couple of examples. We are very fortunate to have a campus of Monash University located with in our municipality. For those who don't know or don't come from Victoria, Monash is one of the eight elite universities within Australia. Our Gippsland campus is located in Churchill which was pretty much the centre of the fire affected communities although it wasn't directly impacted by fire.
Monash University played a significant and vital role in our response to the fires in those initial days and weeks after the fire. Being early February students had not yet arrived at the campus so the student accommodation was utilized to house those who had been evacuated and those who had lost their homes. Being a university it also had extensive catering facilities so those who had been displaced were also able to be provided with meals.
The staging area for CFA, the Country Fire Authority, was also established on the grounds of the Uni where meals were provided around the clock to volunteers. And then just to test our relationship, six weeks after the fires when Uni life had returned to normal and I think they thought they were pretty much off the hook we asked them whether we could use the auditorium to host an ecumenical service for the fire victims which of course they agreed to.
Now this wouldn't have happened so easily and so seamlessly if we didn't have a strong relationship with the University and our response to the fires in those initial days could have been very different.
Another example where strong relationships played a significant role was our relationship with the Boolarra and District Community Association. As I mentioned earlier this community was impacted by fires a week prior to the Black Saturday fires.
Our initial response to the Boolarra fires was to put teams of people on the ground to go and speak with all those who had been impacted and assess their needs as well as establishing an emergency relief centre. Just after the Black Saturday fires the Boolarra Community Association said to us that they thought they were okay for the short term and that we should put our immediate resources into assisting communities who had been severely impacted on Black Saturday.
Now without a strong relationship with the Boolarra community one, we would not have been confident in their ability to be able to cope in the short term and two, I don't know whether they would have been prepared to forego significant short term support if they didn't feel confident that we would be back with significant support as soon as the immediate threats to the other part of the city had eased.
The second key element in building resilience in communities is understanding that sometimes leadership is about stepping back.
Governments at all levels don't do this very well and don't get me wrong, it's only natural when something such as a major disaster happens that we want to step in and take control.
There are times when this is absolutely necessary but it is also vital that we know when it is appropriate to step back and let the community take control. An example of this is Callignee community hub.
Callignee was one of the communities hardest hit during the Black Saturday fires as well as the loss of a number of lives, numerous homes and all existing community infrastructure was lost. This included the CFA shed, the community hall, the old school which had been used to house the local playgroup and some club rooms adjacent to the recreation reserve.
Within a week of the fires the community had drafted a plan of what the replacement community facility would look like and they wanted to get moving on it. As you can imagine the design and the construction of the Callignee community hub was not foremost in our minds at this point in time. However it had become very clear for this community that ensuring that those members of the community who had been displaced had somewhere to return so that they still felt connected to that community so this was an extremely high priority for this community.
So instead of trying to convince the Callignee community that perhaps this could just be on hold until we were at a point where some of the more immediate issues had been addressed, we stepped back and facilitated a process that has now seen the final plans of for the Callignee community hub presented to the Premier John Brumby a fortnight ago and I'm pleased to say that the Premier agreed to fund it so that was wonderful.
So how do these examples help to build resilience in local communities? Having existing strong relationships with sectors within our communities ensured that our immediate response to the fires was more coordinated and required less energy to establish.
This in turn meant that we were able to respond to the community's requirements quickly and in turn lessened the already traumatic impact that the community had experienced. Stepping back and allowing the Callignee community to drive the community hub project has returned a sense of control to the community.
It has also allowed the community to focus on something positive in the weeks and months after the fires and will see the culmination of the opening of the hub hopefully on Australia Day 2010.
In closing, let me again reiterate the importance of strong relationships with your community. Don't get me wrong, I'm not for one moment saying that we have perfect relationships with all sectors within our community and I could say that some of those relationships have certainly been tested over the past couple of months.
However I do know that our response to the fire emergency would have been significantly diminished if as a community we were not able to support, assist, guide and collaborate with each other through this terrible tragedy and that doesn't happen without strong supportive relationships.
Thank you.
