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Jacinta Allan is the latest Australian politician finding out that when bushfires rage, leaders get burned.
Former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon was scorched for taking time out for a hairdo and dinner date at the peak of the deadly 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Former PM Scott Morrison was excoriated in 2019 for having the temerity to be overseas on Christmas holidays when deadly bushfires struck NSW. Morrison was further roasted for saying, truly enough, that he ‘didn’t hold a hose’.
(Hypocritically, the only Australian PM to ever hold a hose, Tony Abbott, who has been a volunteer firefighter for decades, was sneered at as a ‘grandstander’.)
Like Abbott, Victoria’s Country Fire Authority firefighters are volunteers. Proudly so (a former CFA firefighter myself, I well remember vols’ outrage when a government mooted even a one-off payment after a big bushfire). They’ve also got a helluva bone to pick with Victorian Labor.
When Dan Andrews first led Labor back to power in 2014, he did so in large part thanks to a sweetheart deal with the paid, urban firefighter’s union, in return for giving city-based professionals complete control of the fiercely volunteer rural CFA brigades. Despite mass protests and the resignation of his own minister, Andrews rode over the CFA in his trademark dictatorial style.
Following another summer of bushfires, CFA vols are in the mood for some long-overdue payback – and the barnstorming One Nation is sensing an opportunity.
One Nation star recruit Barnaby Joyce will meet with disaffected Victorian farmers and volunteer firefighters as a bush revolt against the state government starts to take shape in the aftermath of the state’s bushfires.
Bushfire preparedness is just one of the axes country Victorians have to grind.
In the lead-up to this summer’s devastating fire season, [the Across Victoria Alliance] campaigned with the CFA Volunteers Group and the United Firefighters Union over CFA resources, ageing fire trucks and what it claims is “all-time low morale of volunteer and career firefighters”.
CFA Volunteers Group president John Houston confirmed his members would seek to influence the outcome of November’s election.
“We are not going to tell people who to vote for,” he said. “We are going to ask people to look at the candidates and tick the box of the one who is going to support the CFA the most.”
But the simmering anger in the country is not just about under-funding leaving many rural brigades with tankers over 30 years old. A long-smouldering grievance in the bush is that country people are being forced to deal with the realities of ‘Net Zero’ that Climate Cultist city dwellers never see.
The Across Victoria Alliance is a loose political movement formed last March which rails against the Allan government’s Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund, the transition to renewable energy and land access issues related to the resources industry […]
Andrew Weidemann, a Wimmera grain farmer who founded the Across Victoria Alliance to protest the government’s tax increase on regional property owners, confirmed the former deputy prime minister would travel to Horsham next month to address the organisation’s first conference.
He said alliance members would seek to stand as One Nation candidates in November’s state election […]
“There is a lot of angst out there at the moment, and it has all been self-induced by government.”
Barnaby Joyce likewise points to Victoria’s rollout of wind and solar farms and transmission lines, which has proceeded with all the concern for rural peoples’ rights as a 19th century American railroad baron.
“In regional areas, we are infuriated that we have once more become the default penance for inner-city privilege,” he said. “Intermittent power, for us, is a scourge. There is no upside for us. People are looking for those who, in an unequivocal and forthright way, are going to say enough is enough.”
Yes, but as long as Tarquin and Hyacinth Hyphenated-Surname can boast that they’re saving the planet, who cares about a bunch of hicks?
