VFBV Newsletter - June 2024 (2024)

The most frequent questions I am receiving is about the state of the CFA budget. You would be forgiven for thinking that after thehanding down of the Victorian State Budget for the 2024/25 financial year last month, that we would all have clarity around the CFA budget for the upcoming year. Sadly, it is impossible to determine what the CFA budget is through the budget papers.

In case you thought that was a typo, let me be clear. Believe it or not, trying to determine the level of fire service funding through the budget papers is an exercise in futility. One cannot help butreach the conclusion that this is by design. American revolutionist Patrick Henry puts it best: “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”

The reality is – the budget papers do not detail the funding allocations to the fire service, but rather obfuscate and hide these budgets by lumping them all together under ‘Emergency Management Capability’ within theDepartment of Justice and Community Safety. In addition to CFA and FRV, also lumped into this category are expenses for EMV, SES and Triple Zero Vic.

And because EMV’s budget is secret – there is no transparency about where that funding goes to.

But we can infer some outcomes from the budget papers, and I’ll try to walk you through what we know so far. First, let’s start with the goodnews.

The Government has continued its support for the popular Volunteer Emergency Services Equipment Program (VESEP), recommitting $15 million for this year’s program. The budget also allocates $18.58 million spread over the next three years to replace 15 CFA pumpers. We certainly welcome and commend these additional allocations.

Unfortunately though, that concludes the goodnews.

Let’s start with the capital budget. There was no new funding announced for any CFA tanker replacements. So when you hear announcements about MPs posing in front of new tankers – they were the tankers promised back in 2020.

Given VFBV’s estimates that CFA needs to invest at least $30 million a year just to stop the average fleet age going backwards, this year’s commitments are woefullyshort. This is yet another year where presumably the problem is just tucked under the rug for somebody else to sort out. What won’t go away is the 700 creaking old single cab tankers that still force firefighters to ride on the back of the truck separated from the driver and crew leader.

Some of these are now 35 years old, almost double their useful lifespan. The reality is as these tankers get older and older and are extended so far past theiruseful life, when they do become inoperable there will be no trucks in the pipeline to replace them. Given it will cost more than $350 million just to replace these aging vehicles alone, the seriousness of the chronic under funding to the fleet becomes clear.

And due to historic under investment, there is limited capacity in the local manufacturing industry to handle large urgent orders for new trucks, even if the agencies decided to order themall tomorrow. So, our warning to government continues to be it is approaching a cliff with potentially catastrophic outcomes if this problem continues to be ignored.

Then we get to CFA base budget. Again, the budget papers offer very little detail, but we can start to make some educated guesses. The budget has allocated the exact same amount to “Emergency Management Capability” for the 2024/25 period as it did for the 2023/24 budget. In otherwords, not a single extra dollar has been provided in the upcoming budget than was budgeted for in the previous year.

No new money means the budgets have not even been indexed, meaning CPI increases of everyday expenses will have to be absorbed by existing budgets. Using the current CPI means this is an effective cut of 3.6%

Further, it also means any wage increases negotiated into staffindustrial agreements have not been budgeted for, meaning all annual increases to wages already approved in current agreements will need to be absorbed. In other words – agencies will need to make cuts elsewhere to afford increasing employee costs.

Then we have the government’s emergency service razor gang. This gang was established by the government last year and is made up of each of the departmental secretaries from the Department of Justiceand Community Safety, Department of Treasury and Department of Premier and Cabinet. Calling themselves the “Emergency Services Organisation Finance Board” their job is rumoured to be to identify cuts to achieve another 10% in savings. Given the budget cuts already made to CFA over the last three years, and the historic chronic under funding, this represents one of the largest threats to emergency services in decades.

One can only hope this grouplooks very closely at the $24.7 million dollars the government has found over the next three years to flush money down the toilet by replacing the current State Control Centre Workforce with a new fulltime EMV public service workforce.

If that weren’t outrageous enough, the cherry on the cake comes from the government announcement that it is hiking the annual fire services properly levy tax to pay for FRV overspends. The increased levy isexpected to collect an additional $186 million in taxes from property owners. Given CFA has not received a single extra dollar in their budget, and the levy can only be used for CFA and FRV, it does not take Einstein to figure out that residents in CFA areas are now cross subsidising FRV’s out of control costs for the 85 fire stations they operate, vs the 1,211 stations that CFA operates on just a third of the funding.

Now we get to what I callthe long con. The government’s narrative for increasing the FSL is that it has been under collecting. Again it hopes Victorians have very short memories. Remember in 2017 during the height of the controversy over the government’s fire services reforms, and the exodus of CFA and MFB senior executives who, along with VFBV, warned anyone that would listen that the proposed reforms and generous deals would send the cost of delivering paid fire services through the roof?

To divert attention from these predictions, the government back then announced a temporary ‘freeze’ in the FSL, an obvious ploy to trick the general public into thinking the proposed reforms would have no impact on future fire service levies.

Throw in another freeze conveniently attributed to COVID, and then in 2020 it announced it was scrapping differential rates for CFA and FRV (MFB) areas and moving to a new“streamlined” system. In the same year, CFA’s budget was slashed. Under the “old” FSL system – these savings would have been passed onto residents living in CFA areas. But under the new system – these savings were evenly distributed to include residents in FRV areas that were now using the most expensive fire service in Australia.