Mr Chips posted:

all ~50,000 CFA volunteers? I've tried to read up on this CFA/UFU thing but it still makes no sense to an outsider.

The CFA volunteers were certainly welcome relief when they came over to SA for the Pinery creek fire a few years ago, and their skill level wasn't an issue.

Anidav posted:

https://www.change.org/p/royal-commission-petition-for-a-royal-commission-into-abc-misuse-of-funds-for-purposes-of-pushing-an-agenda



Change.org is a real scrunts nest

Whitlam posted:

I met with a bunch of firefighters not long ago for work and they said a key issue is that there's no basic skill level or training requirement for CFA volunteers, so sometimes they'll rock up to a job and get helpful people who know what they're doing, and sometimes they get there and find people whose only qualification is that they can drive and live nearby.

Bill Posters posted:

No they don't. You might be thinking of the SES.

NTRabbit posted:

Actually, I was thinking of the CFS in SA, who do use white trucks

Mr Chips posted:

Bloody hell...with the SA CFS you should at weekly meetings for skills/briefings, plus annual equipment skills maintenance. The initial training course is pretty much the same as the MFS initial training course. (Everyone in the hills thinks that Burnside CFS are knobs though.)

Mr Chips posted:

all ~50,000 CFA volunteers? I've tried to read up on this CFA/UFU thing but it still makes no sense to an outsider.

Birdstrike posted:

fire is revolutionary and anyone who fights it is bourgie scum

Inescapable Duck posted:

Honestly it's pretty sad hearing volunteer firefighters are a problem because having lived in bushfire country when half the sky turned black it's like the goddamn Rescue Heroes showing up

Dude McAwesome posted:

And then they turn up to structure fires and don’t have anyone qualified to wear breathing apparatus to go into burning structures.

Or they drive trucks to incidents, with no one qualified to use them, so the appliance isn’t able to be used. This has the added effect of stopping the appliance from being able to be used anywhere else.

Mr Chips posted:

Seems more like a few tory poo poo-stirrers claiming to speak for all volunteers while pursuing a partisan agenda.

There's no way in hell we can afford to have full-time professional brigades covering remote and rural areas.

It does sound like the Vic CFA is a shambles though.

Periphery posted:

If the services of volunteers are required to keep the community safe then they should not be volunteers, they should be paid staff who are fully and comprehensively trained with regular skills maintenance. In my experience, there's no way you can have volunteers commit the required time to get them up to the required standards and keep them there.

The end result is:

drunkill posted:

Existing CFA: 1220 brigades, 1080 career firefighters, 1000 support staff, 35,500 volunteer firefighters

Dude McAwesome posted:

CFA vols backed up Turnbull in the lead up to 2016 federal election. Turnbull forms government. Passed legislation saying that volunteers are able to object to any clauses in the CFA professional firefighter’s EBA. Hence no EBA is ever going to pass.

hiddenmovement posted:

My mother frequently complains to me about her boomer friends. Tonight she had dinner with one of them that thought it was really funny and clever that Matthew Guy had screwed over Andrews by double crossing him on the pairing issue.

There's another group she's known for 40 years that keep yelling at her about how great Peter Dutton is and at least those refugees are safe in their accommodation in Nauru.

Monthly reminder to kill all boomers

Periphery posted:

If the services of volunteers are required to keep the community safe then they should not be volunteers, they should be paid staff who are fully and comprehensively trained with regular skills maintenance. In my experience, there's no way you can have volunteers commit the required time to get them up to the required standards and keep them there.

bandaid.friend posted:

Weird to have the coat of arms on a shopping list. It's not meant to be just slapped onto something to look pretty

Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet posted:

Senators and Federal Members of Parliament may use the Arms in the course of their duties as Parliamentarians.

QUACKTASTIC posted:

Mr Chips posted:

I'm pretty confident the majority of volunteers would be fine with a full time professional firefighting and emergency service covering rural and remote areas. Not having to spend 2 hours at the shed on a Monday night or do a 3am callout because someone rolled their car into a gully is a pretty easy thing to sell. The average SA CFS brigade spends ~1000 hours responding to all calls each year, yet at any given moment has a full crew on call. Going by the SA MFS Enterprise Agreement, to cover that with professional firefighters would cost at least 1.2 million per annum. There are about 400 CFS brigades in SA.


Yours and Dude McAwesome's CFA anecdotes are the polar opposite of my CFS experience. Our small brigade had two 3000l appliances, each with 2-4 breathing apparatus, and >95% of the time we had ~*volunteers*~ available who were competent and certified in their use. We used the breathing kits less for for structural fires than we did for chemical spills (we had 3x as many dangerous chemical spills as structure fires). In my time we spent more 4x more hours on more floods or on vehicle crashes than actual grass fires (and nearly all those fire hours were at one big fire), and always had crews on pager duty who were current in all of the apparatus.

holy poo poo that's a lot of resources, SA CFS has ~130 salaried staff total, and pretty much none of them are front line firefighters.

Sparticle posted:

Solemn Sloth posted:

Matthew Guy literally looks like one of those post-mortem posed photos Victorian families took.

Periphery posted:

Sorry, I should have been clearer: my experience is with the Vic SES, not CFA. But I would think there's a pretty big cross-over between the two in terms of training and time limitations of volunteers.

From my point of view, I see pretty much nothing that the SES does that couldn't be rolled into either the professional firefighters or police duties - assuming you increase their resources as required. You might need to enlarge the scope of the pro firefighters so they are more of a disaster response agency (which would include man-made and natural disasters) but it shouldn't be a big issue imo.

The only part of SES that I think might benefit from volunteers is the real labour intensive things like missing person/evidence searches (actually the polices responsibility but they are way under-resourced most of the time) or things like sand bagging/door knocking during major floods. But you could easily reduce SES volunteers to people trained in that real basic stuff (who would be overseen by paid professionals) and replace the current unit structures with a less time intensive and more spatially dispersed system to cover training etc.

DancingShade posted:

It'll come down to more jobs vanishing from the bush and that's not politically viable despite any other good & sensible parts of your plan.

quote:

Throwback Thursday: Dutton Rocks The Three-Quarter Cargos From His Undercover Cop Days




As excitement brews in the office of Home Affairs about a possible leadership spill, Peter Dutton MP has today thrown on what he calls ‘civilian clothes’ in an attempt to prove to the Australian public that he is in fact a normal human.

It is believed Dutton went searching through the basement of his Canberra rental this morning to find a pair of quadruple-pocketed three-quarter cargo shorts – an outfit staple from back in the day when he was arresting homeless people for marijuana possession on Brisbane’s Ferny Grove line.

As a former undercover drug detective from Brisbane, Peter Dutton’s entire understanding on ‘casual wear’ is related directly to clothes that cops try to wear to look like they aren’t cops.

Commonly seen undercover cop attire includes three-quarter cargo shorts, three-quarter denim shorts, Quicksilver button ups and New Balance sneakers.

As the embattled Prime Minister faces yet another unflattering newspoll survey, his only far-right-wing ally in the Coalition looks to be making a move on the youth vote, by rocking up to Parliament in his funky casual threads.

It is believed while getting dressed for work this morning, Dutton was unable to find a t-shirt that didn’t have a ‘marriage alliance’ logo sprawled across the front of it, and had to settle for a work shirt with rolled up sleeves.

“Haha. Gotta catch the last of the warmer weather” said the Minister, while bending over to fold up the hem on his groovy shorts.

“Because, like any normal humans, I enjoy summer”

“I also like footy ball and white people”

“Aussie Aussie”

“Oi Oi!”

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

http://www.betootaadvocate.com/entertainment/throwback-thursday-dutton-rocks-the-three-quarter-cargos-from-his-undercover-cop-days/

Mr Chips posted:

The long weekend is off to a good start. Today I learned from an age pensioner that the age pension is not welfare.

Dude McAwesome posted:

What was their reasoning for this? “A lifetime of working hard”?