 Today I wanted to talk to you about some of the learnings that I've found coming into this portfolio over the last 12 months. One of the real learnings for me has been the inconsistency of a lot of our training across the state and the minimum skills wildfire is a classic example of that. It's been 17 years since we introduced the minimum skills wildfire and what we've seen for a whole bunch of good reasons is the consistency is no longer there. In a lot of areas of the state they've adapted it to suit themselves, to suit their situations which is a great thing but what I don't see sitting in my role is consistency across the state. A couple of our instructors have come to me to talk about a review of the minimum skills program and have come up with a concept called the general firefighter program. Put simply the general firefighter concept or program is actually about getting consistency back into our training for all new members of CERFA. It is training that can be run by brigades but at a very high level I set some pretty clear intent for the team who reviewed the minimum skills and that intent is we need to be consistent and all new members that are coming into CERFA need to have consistent training. We need to make sure that our people are trained to a standard that is safe for them to be put on the back of a truck and experience firefighting operations under supervision and we need to go back to applying the principles of 10% theory 20% watching other people do it and 70% learning on the job. That's a high level intent for the general firefighter program. I'm now going to hand you over to our instructors to have a bit of a look about the detail of the general firefighter program and what it means to you as a brigade. The general firefighter program is really an update of the original minimum skills. It's been 18 years since minimum skills were introduced as a result of the LinkedIn tragedy where we lost 5 firefighters and over that time there hasn't been any major reviews we figured that let's just have a look at it, let's get it back to its original intent and the original intent was to prepare a firefighter with the skills and knowledge necessary to attend their first incident under supervision. It's probably between that 8 to 20 hours depending on the level of the skill of the participant, the newcomer. So that will be a variant. The online stuff will take about 6 hours and the face to face will be currently pretty much like it is around about 3 sessions and a couple of hours each. So what we're aiming is instead of having to wait months to go to courses or whatever they can actually start virtually immediately. The assessment is probably the main one, that will all be arranged with local agreements and how the local districts want to run their assessment process but the assessment will still be done they will be face to face with our credit assessors The big components ready at the end of the week actually all the practical skills, we're calling them foundational skills which are exactly the same skills as per the minimum firefighter minimum skills. What we've done is we've just made the training packages for each of the brigades really really consistent. They'll be supported by videos they'll be supported by an online pack plus there will also be hard copies going out as well. We've started building the online component and from that will come the face to face materials so they'll actually mirror each other so you won't be disadvantaged and in fact you know you can do this program any way you choose. You can do part online, you can do part face to face, whatever works for you. Our role is to support brigades. We'll be doing a train the trainer for brigade training officers, skilled people within the brigades we've got a really good facilitator guide on how to run the training drills with all the tools and equipment that they need so skilled brigade members will be able to train the new firefighters When the assessment is done our thinking behind it is if you it's been a while since you've been in a brigade and you're rejoining after a number of years away from it you can just do a challenge chest also to the videos that every drill will have a video which shows you what right looks like so the idea of that will eventually they can have them on their phones so if members want to practice themselves they can actually keep going back to that video on their phones to practice. If you have a general firefighting program it's going to bring some consistency back into the organisation. It's going to ensure that new members of CFA are trained to a safe standard in a minimal period of time and get them on the back of trucks under supervision. What it doesn't do though is it doesn't take away from what you as a brigade you as a training officer in a brigade or group expect your people to do it a local level. All it does is by a minimum criteria, a minimum standard that ensures that we have a consistent approach to dealing with training for new members and then they're all yours to do with what you like in terms of the standards you need to train them at. The other important thing about this is brigades can run this training and we recognise the important role that brigades play in delivery of this sort of training. So good luck for the summer and hopefully we look forward to your feedback on the new firefighter program.