VFBV

VFBV’s final Open Forum for the year was held at Burwood, and was given the thumbs up by attendees, as highly engaging and well worth attending.  

The CFA Chief Officer, CFA CEO, CFA ED OT&V, Emergency Management Commissioner and VFBV President and CEO were all taking part in the panel session and talking shop with volunteers throughout the afternoon, and were able to deal with many questions and queries on the spot.  

The Forum came just a week before the State Election, so the future of CFA and the EM Sector was high on the list, and volunteer views were canvassed and discussed.

The panel session also tackled issues including female PPC, better organisation of strike teams to reduce waiting time, strike teams working in community recovery, improving communication within CFA, better access to information technology for volunteers, uniforms, and concerns with CFA’s plans for FEM administration cost recovery from Brigades.  

The Open Forums are an important link with grass roots volunteers, and provide opportunities for CFA senior management to connect directly with volunteers and discuss matters important to them. VFBV thanks all attendees to this year’s three forums and those who participated in the panel discussions.   See pictures (right) from the VFBV Volunteer Forum in November, which included speakers and a panel discussion and question session.

A message from the Board of Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria.

On Tuesday 18^th November, the Labor Party announced a policy that we believe will have grave and disastrous consequences for CFA.

As CFA volunteer firefighters with an average of over 40 years’ service each and as the elected board of the body established in Victorian law to be the voice of CFA volunteers, we feel the need to take this unprecedented action of activating all Victorians to help us stop a policy that has the potential to destroy CFA.

Our concern with the recently announced Labor policy is that it establishes external industrial interference with the CFA Chief Officer’s power to decide where and when and how he uses CFA firefighters.

We are also concerned that Labor’s policy will reduce CFA’s volunteer firefighting force by thousands of volunteers, pushing volunteers out of CFA stations and hundreds of CFA trucks off the road when we need them for major fires such as Black Saturday.

Labor has grossly underestimated the cost and impact of its policy.  Labor’s promise of $150M and an additional 350 paid firefighters actually only provides 70 additional paid firefighters on the ground at any one time under current paid firefighter rostering arrangements, and it will come at the expense of thousands of highly trained and professional volunteer firefighters.

We support and welcome additional paid support and resources for CFA, provided these resources are required and provided that the CFA determines the need, not a union.  Don’t be fooled, the plan announced by Labor is not about improving community safety in Victoria, the detail included in their announcement is about giving the control of CFA to a union.

Labor’s policy announcement includes specific provisions to surrender CFA operational decisions to an external industrial relations panel.

Instead of Labor’s policy, we need a plan that will recruit and train more CFA volunteer firefighters, provide trucks and equipment to combat fires and other incidents, investment in a modern firefighting fleet, give CFA the flexibility to deploy resources when and where they are needed and remove industrial control over how CFA uses its workforce.

Victoria is one of the most fire prone areas in the world and there are predictions of longer, hotter and more severe fire seasons ahead.  If Labor’s policy is allowed to push trained and experienced CFA volunteers out of fire stations across greater metropolitan Melbourne, Victoria will not have the fire fighting force it needs for day to day incidents and certainly will not have the force to deal with major incidents when they occur, such as Black Saturday.

When you vote on Saturday 29^th understand one thing, as some of Victoria’s most senior volunteer firefighters, we believe Labor’s policy for CFA is not good for CFA volunteers, is not good for Victoria and is not good for the future of CFA.
Signed;

All ten members of the VFBV Board. (The attached PDF copy includes all ten signatures)

A Message to the Labor Party

Dear (Labor) Member of Parliament,

This week the Board of Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria have taken the unprecedented step of publishing an open letter to the people of Victoria, to record their strong objection to Labor’s policy announcement of the 18^th November 2014 affecting the CFA.

The Board have not taken this decision lightly, and want you to understand the depth of despair and anger amongst volunteer ranks caused by Labor’s CFA policy - a policy that sweeps aside the role, discounts the work and ignores the rights of unpaid, hard-working and committed volunteers who make up over 97% of CFA’s 62,000 members and staff.

Make no mistake – this policy is a direct attack on CFA as a statutory volunteer based fire and emergency service where volunteers are supported by sufficient paid staff as expertly determined by the Chief Officer and who form a fully integrated workforce to deliver CFA services.

In 2011 Labor, Coalition and Green MPs in the Victorian Parliament unanimously voted to amend the CFA Act to explicitly recognise this long known fact.

Critical aspects of the amendment bill included:

• Statutory recognition of the Authority as a volunteer based organisation in which volunteers are supported by employees in a fully integrated manner ;
  
  
• Statutory recognition and acceptance of the Volunteer Charter which requires amongst other things that the Government and the Authority commits to meaningful consultation with the VFBV on behalf of CFA volunteers on any matter that might reasonably be expected to affect them;
  
  
• The statutory requirement that he Authority in performing its functions have regard to the commitment and principles set out in the Volunteer Charter; and,
  
  
• The statutory requirement that the Authority is responsible for developing policy and organisational arrangements that encourage, maintain and strengthen the capacity of volunteer officers and members to provide the Authority’s fire and emergency services.

The reason and purpose for these amendments were to set aside industrial arrangements introduced in the final years of the Brumby Government. Those arrangements failed to recognise that CFA and its services to the public are volunteer based and that the role of paid staff is to support such volunteers services as and when determined by the CFA’s Chief Officer and the Board of the Authority according to their statutory obligations.

Since these amendments, the CFA has fought and won cases in the Fair Work Commission and Federal Court that uphold its managerial and statutory responsibility to determine paid staff numbers and allocations within the organisation including its brigades on a needs basis as determined by the Chief Officer.

The CFA model recruits and integrates paid firefighters into volunteer brigades where they are needed to support the delivery of CFA services.

Labor’s policy axes this approach - it takes away the Chief’s role of determining these matters based on expertise and transfers it to an industrial board of reference. Further, it eliminates local volunteers and their state representatives from having any input into these decisions, despite their knowledge and experience.

This new Labor policy will have significant impacts upon CFA’s future and inevitably lead to a dramatic increase in costs to Victorians without any increase in public safety.

VFBV are deeply opposed to your support for the reinstatement of the previously short lived industrial board of reference. It changes the successful nature of the CFA as an organisation (which was consistently lauded by the Bushfire Royal Commission). It is an egregious attack on the independence and statutory powers of CFA’s Chief Officer. Decision making on key staffing issues is perverted from a critical operational matter to a matter of industrial negotiation.

To be clear, volunteers consider the office of the Chief Officer to be sacrosanct, and any attack on the independence and statutory authority of their Chief will be met with fierce and unrelenting resistance.

VFBV met with shadow Minister Wade Noonan last week following the announcement to express its concern and dismay at the policy. Nothing was provided during or since that meeting to allay our fears and we remain deeply concerned.

It was under the Bracks Labor Government that the Volunteer Charter was negotiated and signed by Steve Bracks as Premier, the CFA Chairman and the volunteer representatives. We now find that you have turned your back on the principles and values you told us were an enduring commitment. Volunteers have every right to feel aggrieved. Quite rightly, as the word spreads - volunteers will see your Party’s policy as a betrayal to the trust and respect afforded to you by CFA volunteers.
Sincerely,

Andrew Ford
Chief Executive Officer

THIS SATURDAY AT BENALLA: There are still some places available at VFBV’s Open Forum for Volunteers at Benalla this weekend - see below for details and how to book - and plenty for the forums at Hamilton and Burwood East.

This is your chance to talk shop with senior CFA and VFBV personnel, raise an issue, ask a question or make a comment.

Dates and locations are;

THIS SATURDAY, 4 October - Benalla Bowls Club, 25 Arundel St, Benalla, with lunch at noon and forum at 13.00hrs.

Saturday 18 October – Hamilton Performing Arts Centre, 113 Brown St, Hamilton, with lunch at noon and forum at 13.00hrs.

Saturday 22 November – Whitehorse Club, Burwood Highway, Burwood East, with lunch at noon and forum at 13.00hrs.

Book now by contacting VFBV on (03) 9886 1141 or emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

See below to download CFA's update on the Latrobe Valley Open Cut fires

VFBV NOTE FOR VOLUNTEERS – 20 February 2014

Latrobe Valley Open Cut fires

This note is intended to provide a general update on the operations under way in the Latrobe Valley, in particular in the Hazelwood open cut and the Yallourn open cut.

Large numbers of CFA personnel, both volunteer and career, as well as personnel from MFB and other agencies, and mine contract staff, are currently deployed in rotating shifts to these hazmat/fire incidents.

The predominant deployment is to the Hazelwood brown coal open cut mine.

This is a high risk incident environment and CFA has initiated a number of precautions, along with safety management procedures, to manage the risk to personnel and in particular manage any effects of exposure to an identified carbon monoxide exposure risk.  Being a brown coal fire environment, there is potential for exposure to other gas and substance-specific risks dependent on the location of the firefighter within the open cut, combustion patterns, and resultant gas/substance concentration pockets and conditions impacting at the time.  These exposures are hard to predict or identify, which is no doubt part of the logic underpinning CFA’s decision to treat this incident as a hazmat incident.

At VFBV’s request, the Fire Services Commissioner has engaged an independent monitor to review the safety procedures required and in place, at and around the open cut incident.  VFBV has also requested a transparent process to keep us informed of the results of the audit.

The audit was requested last Friday morning by VFBV, and approved and actioned by the Fire Services Commissioner by late Friday/Saturday morning.  We understand the monitor has been onsite for much of the intervening time and is providing advice to the Fire Service Commissioner.

VFBV representatives have also visited the site both as observers and as operational volunteers, confirming to us the importance of best possible safety procedures and confirming our desire for independent monitoring.

In the meantime VFBV has also requested that significant improvements be made to CFA’s communications with members, to ensure that anybody considering deployment to the incident is aware of; the incident situation, the potential exposure, particularly to high carbon monoxide levels, and the precautions that should be taken.

At the minimum, our advice to members is that those with any respiratory vulnerability should consider whether it is appropriate that they deploy to this incident.  CFA has also advised that there is heightened risk of impact to unborn children and therefore that women who either are, or could possibly be, pregnant should not attend the incident.

There should be specific advice and instruction about these matters in CFA’s incident action planning and deployment arrangements, and members should refer to this or seek this advice formally from CFA before being deployed.

CFA has implemented procedures at the open cut site to monitor carbon monoxide exposure levels amongst crews, and carbon monoxide gas detection units are being deployed with each crew.  VFBV has raised a concern about the adequacy of this arrangement, requesting consideration of individual allocation of gas detection for all personnel entering the open cut.  We will continue to pursue this issue.

Work arrangements are in place based on a risk assessment of the various zones being worked within the open cut, and where a particular zone is considered to be of a certain risk level, then CFA advises that BA equipment is on immediate standby for each person working in these particular areas (on a one-for-one basis).

CFA has instigated work rotation cycles for personnel being deployed into the open cut and we expect these are going to be continually reviewed and refined in light of the ongoing carbon monoxide monitoring trend results.  Once again, any person being deployed to the open cut should ensure they are made aware of these procedures and follow them.

We have asked CFA to provide more specific and reliable regular updates of communication to members about the incident, the risk exposure and the safety precautions in place.

There are also potential impacts on the general public near the open cut and in areas impacted by smoke from the fires, and VFBV has expressed concern and asked CFA to ensure that the public messaging about the situation and potential exposures is reviewed to ensure it is adequate.

For more information, see www.cfa.vic.gov.au - Should you have any concerns to report, contact VFBV at (03) 9886 1141 or on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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