NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons has rejected calls for volunteer firefighters to be paid, saying the very idea falls outside the service’s long-standing spirit.
“Overwhelmingly in my decades of service and even getting around some of these fire grounds in the last few days, the volunteers don’t want payment. It doesn’t make them volunteers,” he told Sky News on Tuesday.
“They have given me that message loud and clear again and again. Its what I’ve grown up with as the sentiment across the organisation.”
Calls have grown in recent days for compensation for volunteer firefighters, who are stretched after weeks of bushfires.
On Tuesday, Mick Holton, the president of NSW’s Volunteer Fire Fighters Association, said members had racked up expenses, including for petrol to drive to fire fronts. Others had used up annual leave to fight the bushfires that have stretched resources across the country this season.
Volunteer firies queuing up at Bunnings to get much needed gear, paid for out of their own pockets. I could cry.
— Claire Connelly (@_ClaireConnelly) December 20, 2019
Mr Holton said volunteers had resorted to crowd funding to pay for smoke masks.
“Why aren’t we picking up the tab for legitimate expenses, like we do for paid people?” he said.
Mr Holton said the situation was “out of control”.
But NSW Emergency Services Minister David Elliott rejected the idea that volunteers should be paid.
“Anyone who is arguing we have to pay them doesn’t understand the ethos of the volunteer in this country,” Mr Elliott told The Australian.
On Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that whether it was fighting fires, or patrolling beaches, or supporting Meals on Wheels, Australia’s system “has always and will always depend on having a large volunteer force to deal with these issues”.
“What is particularly taxing during this fire season is the length and that’s why I’m taking advice from fire commissioners on what is best needed to continue to support access to that important volunteer force that is out there,” he said while visiting an evacuation centre in Mudgee.
“I’ll take my lead from them.”
Opposition leader Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said there wasn’t one volunteer he’d spoken to “who hasn’t said that some form of compensation is required”.
He noted Paul Keating’s government in 1994 had made an ex-gratia payment to volunteer firefighters who’d been in the field for more than seven days.
“I haven’t been prescriptive about what support should be required,” Mr Albanese said on a visit to the Blue Mountains.
“I have, however, been very clear that people who are fighting fires, not for days or weeks but for months, still need to put food on the table for their families, still need to pay their rent and mortgages.
“It is the least that can be expected that this should be looked at by the government and the government should act.”
-with AAP
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