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Charity begins at home

Posted on February 11, 2009, 8:08am

A charred grey blanket of horror, despair and agonising loss hangs over our Victorian neighbours.

We’ll all remember where we were and what we were doing when we learned towers of flames were eating alive Victorian people, animals, property and landscape.

“It’s just like Ash Wednesday,” a woman said at Naracoorte’s Taste Festival.

Indeed, the temperature was a sweltering 42.7 degrees at 11am in the town.

A scorching north wind slapped tents in the town square and at the showgrounds where the annual Children’s Expo was under way.

“I hope there aren’t any fires,” she said, anxious to get home to her family farm.

Before leaving she recalled surviving a fire in Victoria’s Dandenong area on Ash Wednesday.

“I just wish they’d clear all the trees from the sides of the roads and put fire breaks through and around forests,” she said.

“On days like this if there is a fire, people just get burned alive trying to escape.

“It happened last time, you know.”

We now know the death toll is climbing towards 200 people, and hideous stories of human and animal suffering are just too awful to recount.

At least 750 homes in Victoria have been flattened to charred twisted wrecks, and that’s not counting sheds and other buildings.

If each of those homes with contents inside were a conservative $250,000 each, then Kevin Rudd’s $10m for bushfire victims is equal to just 40 homes.

But the losses soar into billions if you add businesses incinerated like farms and stock, timber plantations, saw mills, vineyards, tourism attractions and icons.

More than 330,000 hectares have been reduced to what represents rolling hills of moonlike ash spotted with sticks.

This time last week, the farms, plantations, forests, vineyards and tourism attractions fed secondary industries, creating a myriad of jobs in towns.

But many retail shops, businesses, services and sporting facilities now lay as twisted black and grey shells, pumping up the financial losses.

Whole communities, now ghost towns of silence, will have to be rebuilt, from roads, and power lines to telecommunications and water supplies.

In 2007 the Federal Government handed $3.1b to overseas countries, according to figures on its own website.

It has agreed to hand out even more in years leading up to 2015.

So why does it only give $10m for bushfire ravaged Victorians?

Why do flood victims in Queensland get even less?

And why are our taxpayer guaranteed banks putting so much pressure on normally viable businesses all around the country, as alluded to by the ABC’s Four Corners program?

This week fire survivors need everything from soap, nappies, shoes and socks to undies hats, jumpers and shirts, as well as blood donors.

But in the weeks, months and years ahead, they’ll need a lot more.

So will the flood victims.

And so will many businesses cyclical in nature, but proving long term viability.

Victoria’s fires have taken headlines away from the Federal Government’s $42b stimulus package.

But in the last few days many people have said: “If I get $950, I’m going to give it to the bushfire appeal.”

Would $40b of the package be better spent on people, businesses and communities who have lost everything through no fault of their own be it fire, flood or fat cat bankers?

Would the other $2b be better spent on clearing trees from roadsides, and assisting people in fire prone areas to have generators for water in order to protect themselves, their families and homes?

At the moment there seems a whole lot of spending on pink batts, and far too little on helping to remove the grey blanket of death hanging over Victoria.

CHRIS OLDFIELD

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Comments

2 Responses to “Charity begins at home”

  1. paul and coby on February 11th, 2009 9:44 am 1

    Well said Chris, but talk doesn’t help! Everyone in Australia should get behind and help the fire victims be it an old pair of shoes a t/shirt ‚one of the spare blankets people have in the cupboard, clothes the kids have grown out of … we are setting up a collection point at the Spudway van on the cnr Commercial St East and Keegen St Thursday night from 5pm we are also donating all the takings from the night. After work on the night I will be taking all the clothes etc we collect to Victoria, so come on everyone check your cupboards and bring it down Thursday night the 12th, buy a spud or a yiros and I bet it will taste even better knowing the monies will be going to people that really need it.
    Paul Coby and kids from Spudway

  2. Maybe on February 18th, 2009 3:33 pm 2

    I’m not sure a suggestion of paying the $42b stimulus package to the fire victims makes a lot of financial sense.

    A lot of the rebuilding and replacement will surely come from insurance claims.

    I’m not saying they dont need any money, far from it, but the amounts already raised are more than enough to help get these families back on their feet.

    To suggest they need another 42 billion dollars on top of that is a bit outrageous, and doesn’t actually address the rest of Australia’s financial crisis.