 I'll go through the bits that the people in the room have already heard, but thanks and everyone. My name is Mark Sullivan. I'm going to moderate today. We have here with Craig Slipesley and of course Ewan Ferguson. Unfortunately, Michael Wooden sent his apologies late in the day, unfortunately had a clash of appointments and has had to pull out. So we've got 45 minutes put aside for this today and we're going to proceed by way of a presentation first of all by both Craig and Ewan and then of course we'll deal with some questions. Now those questions can come from the floor, I'm more than happy for that, but we've also got an SMS number and I'm pointing for those people that can't see me, where I'm pointing to that are watching this live stream. There's an SMS number that people can call through in. Please write this down at 0457-9993. I should say it's 0457-9993 and there's an email address that we're receiving email questions through on. That will be reviewfeedback, one word, reviewfeedback at cfa.vic.gov.au. So I'm going to repeat the questions that come up so that obviously people have great difficulty in hearing a lot of these things and we've had some feedback that it's good to read back the question. So try to keep the question short, the longer the question is the harder it is for people to really understand what's being said and what's going on. So I'm absolutely pleased to be able to welcome both Craig and Ewan to the live stream and what we'll do is hand over to Ewan first up and then straight into Craig. Cheers. Thanks Mark and for those on the video stream apologies if I'm looking around and for those who are in here with us, thank you for coming along. Apologies if I'm looking into the camera, I'm going to try and divide my time. Thanks for the introduction Mark and welcome Craig. I think it's important to put a bit of context in what we want to discuss today. There is an awful lot happening within CFA and if there are specific questions I can answer those. But the major purpose of today is to have a Q&A with Craig here as an emergency management commissioner because as well as a lot happening within CFA, there's also a lot happening within the sector and we're part of that as well. If one reflects back to the outcomes of the 2009 bushfire, Royal Commission, substantial number of recommendations, the majority of which have been acquitted. But some of the key findings of the Victorian bushfire Royal Commission was about setting up processes and protocols for the agencies to work more closely together, to work seamlessly in a 10 year blind arrangement. They clearly said that we needed to do better on warnings and there's been a completely new framework that's been adopted through the sector, which has not applied just to bushfires, it's applied to all emergencies. It also called for unambiguous leadership. And from that, there has been established what we call a line of control so that when we become operational, in today's terminology we have an emergency management commissioner, state response controller, regional controller and incident controller. So the line of control is now reflected at a state, regional and incident level. Something that many of you wouldn't know is that the state control team has been informed, which is comprised of emergency management commissioner, two deputy commissioners, and the chief officers of MFB, CFA, SES and Department of Environment, Water, Land and Planning. And we meet regularly. We have a regular scheduled meeting at 7.30 every Monday morning and then we sometimes have other meetings go beyond that to discuss items of mutual interest, common doctrine. We train a lot together and we also socialise together as well, probably not as much as we would all like. So my role as chief officer of CFA is quite clear to define, but there are times when I actually don't operate as chief officer of the CFA, I might operate as state response controller or I might operate as the state agency commander. But it's all part of a broader sector framework. It would be fair to say in introducing Craig that the sector is moving from just arrangements that deal with response to arrangements that deal with what happens before the event, during the event and after the event. And two of the really significant concepts which have been introduced since Black Saturday is this concept of emergency management rather than just being a fire service, we're an emergency management organisation and also consequence management. The sorts of words that you hear us commonly talking about are integration, integrated response. And to put that into the words that the community say to us, they don't care what colour the overalls are on the firefighter that comes and puts out the fire in their backyard, they don't care about the badge on the side of the truck, all they want is us to respond as efficiently and effectively as possible. Collaboration in planning and a great example of that are the common doctrine pieces that you'll see now flowing out of a project which has been running for about two years. And only this last fortnight there have been a number of joint operating procedures have come out and interoperability where we are now starting to hone in on those things which are different between our organisations that should be the same. I guess the final buzz word or mantra that we cite is that we work as one. So I think that's probably an introduction to where we sit as an agency in the sector but now to introduce Craig who is going to spell out the vision for emergency management in Victoria over to you Craig. Thanks, Ewan, and thanks for the opportunity. It was interesting and this has got a bit of a story behind it which is worth telling. I suppose we think sometimes at CFA are that connected because of what Ewan just talked about. Ewan's connected to us every day and we do things. It was only a little while ago that one of our staff members from me and he was out talking to Jonathan Granger and I had a chat with Jamie Demiddish from Community Safety, that's what you call them now. And it was obvious to me that we'd moved along way and all of CFA was not with us in the sense that the journey we weren't telling the story. And that's not because we didn't want to tell the story. I think we just thought CFA was there and we spent as Ewan said a whole bit of work with other agencies as I'll explain in a moment. So it is time to come back and spend a little bit more time with some of our people with you. And that's really important because CFA is one of the key iconic agencies in the emergency management within the state and we're going to make sure that every level is connected to what we're doing. So from Jonathan and Jamie and others, it was obvious to us to come out and actually have the open question. So hopefully today we don't have to talk a lot. I think we actually get the questions and that might have been set up. What is the next discussion that we have? And it doesn't need to be me or you and it can be others that do it. You know, the deputy chiefs are heavily involved. The deputy commissioners, Tony Murphy and Jay Baphoney are heavily involved and we've got other people in our place that can be with CFA to do that. And I think there's an observation of mine and you'll tell us we haven't quite told the story and the story is a bit different in the last 12 months. Now, I'll try and make this short for you. So those listening online and watching don't get bored and those in the room don't get restless. We have in 2009, obviously, the Royal Commission comes along, points of fire service commission. The Fire Service Commissioners Act was about fire. And we knew that was always going to be a little problem because if you fix fire, what happens in flood? What happens in storm? What happens in other emergencies? And it come true about three years down the track. So 2013, the government of the day under Peter Ryan's leadership said, we've got to make it more than just fire. So take the event of the Fire Service Commissioners Act out of the game, put in a modified emergency management act, which picks up the learnings that Ewan just talked about and puts them in the new world. So state response controller that Ewan and the other chief sit in and do as a role, how we wrap that to be a broader set of agencies. And you think about this, we're lucky in this state that we run the state response controller as one of the chief officers. But all of those chief officers are able to run fire, flood and storm. So Ewan can run, Ewan did run the floods in January. And on the biggest day this year, we had Trevor White was in the seat as the state response controller. Now, those that don't know Trevor's background, he comes from CFA, strong in fire, capable to be used anyway. One of our deputy commissioners, Tony Murphy, ex-MFB chief, the other deputy commissioner, Joe Befone, that's been at SES and CFA in the journey. So you think about the people we talk about, they're able to do that role with absolute confidence and credibility. And that's really important to be able to put that team together. And I'm blessed to actually be able to lead a team of the calibre of Ewan, Peter Rowe, Trevor White, Alan Goodwin, Tony Murphy, Joe Befone. Now, those names are really important in the leadership of what this is all about. Now, leadership is not just about leading, it's about credibility. It's about confidence in communities and we've got it. We've got it because we've got good people. And the state of Victoria is giving us a good feedback about the confidence they've got, not only in the agencies, but in the leadership of what we're about. Now, we'll read from a document, which is this document. I don't know if Keith, we can see that, but it's a document that's been published. It's on the EMV website, but it talks about the vision, the goals, the roles, and the values. And the values are really important. So we've simply set a vision that is safe from all resilient communities. Now, I always say, if anyone's heard me talk about it, we had written that five years ago, six years ago, 10 years ago, it would have had something about foreign emergency services, protecting communities or something. We're now seeing the move from this to be very community focused. SES has just rebadged themselves to say, save for communities together. MFB dropped their vision and picked this up as their vision. CFOs reset themselves to be similar, but with a longer set of words, but it's the same. It's focused, it's community focused. That's a really important step in the sector. That's not about us, it's about the community. And we might say we're community focused, but sometimes our behaviors, and that's not criticism, it's a reality. Sometimes we do get entrenched in what we do in our own agencies. So it's important. There's a whole set of other set of words here, but the words you and just used the moment ago, we work as one, is the next bit about the goal. So it talks about an emergency management system. And when we say we work as one, the words in here go, working conjunction with government, with agencies, with communities and business. Absolutely critical in EM, in emergency management that we have all of those. We can't do it by ourselves. O9 proved it. O9 proved it in more ways than one. Pandemic in, sorry, heat wave in O9, 374 people lost their lives. Ambulance Victoria couldn't do that by themselves. And nor should they. A week later, 173 people lose their lives. No one fire service could do that by themselves, let alone the other agencies around them. Later in that year, pandemic runs in, wasn't around at a health by itself. But if I explain that in detail, it was the GPs and the pharmaceutical guild. So the chemists of the state ran that. That was where the capability was. I was at health at the time, so we were heavily involved in those back room things of how those emergencies run. The other fundamental change in emergency management is that it's, we've got this term emergency services. The emergency service, by definition, is those that have got red and blue lights. Emergency management is the broader bit. Now the three ribbons, that little thing there, or the three ribbons we've got here, the EMV is not written as an agency, that's written as a sector. And when you read the words here, it's about emergency management in Victoria. Those three ribbons are the before, during and after. So whether you're in a local government in planning, or whether you're in the response bit of it, as CFA does and does so well, or you're in the aftermath with Red Cross or Council of Churches and all the other agencies, it's a system now that emergency management is the broad system of how we all fit together. And CFA does this extremely well. Your partnerships with Red Cross, community safety partnerships with Red Cross have been exceptional. You've done a lot of work with how you get a message into their fire-ready plans, their emergency-ready plans, all that. So the partnerships are critical, the systems what we're after. And we're miles ahead now than we've ever been. And I just, you and I were at a function this morning with the Commonwealth Government, we're down. And a gentleman walked up after and he said, hey, look in the room. If you had walked in here three or four years ago, I guarantee it would have been police, fire and SES people in the room. And today it was agencies that were broad. I think we had about 28 different agencies in the room that were participating in this readiness level. And the other thing I say, which is interesting, we don't invite them in. We're not inviting Red Cross in. We're not inviting, they have a role to play. They actually have a right to play. They have a responsibility to live or something. So that's the critical bit. And I'm not sure that part of the story has been shared as well as we could have. So that's part of what you and I certainly are trying to get across today. The other bit in here that I think is critical is values and behaviours. What are we? We're emergency management organisations. We're fire agencies. We're emergency service, whatever you think, but some people will still see us as a fire service or whatever. The people issues are the critical bit. Because we're people organisations. Who delivers it? It's either the career or volunteer staff in your organisation, whether it be Wenger, Adder or Shepardon, or whether it be in Bruthen, or Coring or Casterden, or Mildura or Merveen, it's all about people. Organisations like this and the sector, when we get the people issues right, we get it real right. Absolutely, it's about people. So the behaviours and values we've got in here about leadership, accountability, integration and agility, and I'll wrap them off real quick, but they're absolutely critical about a sector. So in good in leadership, look at Ewan. One of the strengths of Ewan is leadership. Strong leader with conviction, people believe and want to follow. Absolutely critical. Accountability. Sometimes we've seen organisations not take the accountabilities. They come out in the Royal Commission. So we've got to be strong in the accountabilities. Integrations critical, that we can't do it by ourselves, and the word agility I think is absolutely critical, in the sense if we're old fashioned and can't change, we'll get run over. We've got to be agile. We've got to be dynamic enough to be agile, and we've got to build agility. If we're living in something that we're precious about from 1970, believe me, it doesn't relate in 2015. Anyone that's got a 19-year-old child, you know it. Gen Zs are going to be the ones that push us along a bit and rightly so. So agility's got to be it. We've got to change. And I'm not saying we change for change's sake, we've got to change in a systematic way to do that. And that's not to say we've got it wrong, but it's about refreshing and transformation of what we do. And the other one's in the Bayviews about respect. Workers One, community-focused, listen, communicate, acknowledge the good, but take the opportunity. Now, I just read them off real quick. There's a lot more than those little words I just read in a sentence or a narrative, and that's part of what we're working with Ewan and Michael Wooten. And we only had a workshop a couple of Fridays ago where we had 31 depth secretaries of agency, CEOs, chief officers, EPA, health, ambulance, Victoria, CFA, all in the room to talk about what I just talked about. How do we get this to be a sector-wide set of issues that we change the way in which we have to? And like I said, it's not change for change's sake, it's something we've got to do. And no one agency can do it by themselves. An example, think about the training grounds. They're now badged Victorian emergency management training centers, VEMTEX. The reason that was badged was to give the ones that are owned and operated by CFA or the ones that are owned or operated by MFB now and who knows where else later? Because you think about these other training facilities out, they're under the banner, they're those, to try to give them a badge that connected to everyone. Because quite often it was saying, no, that's CFA's facility, you know, only CFA's. That's seen as MFB's. We've tried to break that in this strategy to say, no, no, no, you might own and operate it, but let's make sure it operates for all. For example, Vic Pol using in detail the Sunrasia training ground at the moment. And it was through the VEMTEX strategy that that's really come. Even though, if you rewind back in history and John Bell's in the room, we attempted through Bang Home many years ago to do a similar thing and we did for a while and then it dropped off. So we've actually got to rebuild some of those things about the multi-agency approach of how we get this training done and done smartly. So that's there and, you know, in CFA, the heartland of training is fistful and fistful's not there. And everyone will question that and rightly so, but it's not gonna reopen, it's gone. And there's lots of reasons why it won't reopen, but the strategy to build up the land and we're looking at other strategies of other capabilities in the state to fulfill what fistful used to do is critical. And look, 25 years of my life I was in CFA and my father helped build fistful and that's quite detailed in itself, but it's gone. And there'll be a lot of people out there will go, hang on, that's taken the heart of CFA away, that's changed, we've got to move it on. I grew up in the house, I didn't live there all my life. I grew up in the BDO fire station and you know what, we left there one day and moved to a new one down the road and that was a bit hard too, but we did it. So those sort of things are the journey we've got to be on and that's about the change. The only thing I probably just mentioned probably two other things you want before we go to questions, we've spent a huge amount of time on plants. The state bushfire plan's been rewritten. There's the state bushfire plan. There's a similar plan for heat, so the state heat plan. So the state health emergency response plan. We've got a state pandemic plan and it goes on and on and on and on. Now the plans we've got now are written around multi-agency because years ago the state bushfire plan, although it's interesting we really didn't have one, which is very interesting because it's one of the biggest risks to the state was very much about what the agency did in the plan. Now we've talked about what the joined up capabilities are and what the community should do and a shared responsibility. So it's a new approach to planning and I think it's actually a very strong approach to the way we've done it and Tony Murphy leads that out of his area. Huge amount of work to get plans up that are able to be read about what the community does and what we do with the community. What's the collaborative process? What's our capabilities? And what do we communicate? How do we communicate this? Because we know on the big day it's not us. It's how you communicate and engage and connect with communities to get them in the game. And that's we're good at that but we've got to be better at that particularly in the new world of social media. So they're their plans are important. And the last, there is two things I will say the challenge of the future and I'll do these real quick and I won't do justice to them. The challenge to all of us whether it's CFA, Ambulance Victoria whether it's a local government whether it's big government or local government population change, Victoria is growing. Some parts of Victoria is declining but the aggregate is growing. Six million people to 10 million people in the next 40 years, long time. That's 100,000 people extra a year and it's on target. 84 babies are born each week in the city of Wyndham and has been the case for the last 14 months. Do the numbers, just babies alone. There's over four and a half thousand new residents in the city of Wyndham every year. So what's it mean to emergency management? What's it mean to roads? What's it mean to health? What's it mean to education? What's it mean to all those things as critical? Climate change is with us. Ewan and I were a briefing today with the Bureau. They're saying that the next event in weather is unprecedented in the sense that the El Nino is going to be very significant if it kicks in and stays in. So the massive water out in the Pacific Ocean that is hot is as big as it's ever been. Not quite now, but they believe it'll beat the 1997. Massive water that had a lot of heat in it which brings the dry weather for our summer. However, in the Indian Ocean, it's also very warm water. The bit they're not sure about is when those two masses of water come together what it will do. What it could do is see us have a fire season and somewhere in that January, February period we could turn to floods like that. It could actually turn it. That's one of the scenarios to say it'll be long, dry, hot summer and when it changes it will drop and just drop a lot of rain on us. So that could be a scenario. Well, that will be a scenario they're painting up. So you think about what I just said about the emergency management thing. It's not just all about fire, Ewan. It's all about flood, Trevor. It's actually, we've got to be able to move between these and our capabilities will be critical across the agencies to do that. The other one's urbanisation. In population growth, the trends is people live in urban areas which means they'll live in the eastern seabird of Australia which means Melbourne and those provincial cities are a bit bigger. Globalisation sees manufacturing leave, technology takeover, tourism's a growth industry, manufacturing's a decline. You've seen that with the exit of Ford and Holden in manufacturing, big impacts. Community looks are different. If you went to Robinvale today and I'll get this, I think I'm right in saying this. I'll be 90% right. 47 different nationalities live in a town of 6,000 people today in Robinvale. That's quite, that doesn't reflect every country, town in Victoria but we had better get used of very diverse communities across Victoria because it's coming. We're going to have very diverse communities if we haven't already. Marutner, you do the profile there, quite a different community, so on and so on. So community looks in bulletin. Generational change, understand Gen Zs, understand Gen X and Ys of how they participate. Won't go into it but Gen Zs are really interesting. Great kids, 19 year old children coming to the workforce today, they see it different than we see it as in a little bit older dads and mums, don't we you? Apparently. And I can tell a good story about, I've got a Gen Z at home, it's a Ripper story, but I've told you a couple of times it was to do with the fire truck. And the last one is diversity. Diversity in our workforces. I look around the room here now and there's probably 50, 50 men and women. Our workforces across the sector do not reflect that. So don't whip yourself CFA about that. That's across the sector, that we are male dominated. They're not only male dominated, we're Anglo-Saxon in the way we see it. So the diversity issue is on the table and Ken Lay is ex-Chief Commissioner of Police is doing some work for us at the moment. Been with Ewan and Michael about what that means in CFA and we will work that through to say some things we're doing really well, let's keep them going, but there's other things we've got to be better at. And some of the ways we actually recruit and look will change to fit the community norm. Now it's probably me without going too far, I've probably said too much Mark. And just before we head over to Mark and I think it's relevant, we've currently got seven people in the United States as part of a 71 Australian New Zealand deployment. And then prior to that, we had I think around 100 something people in Canada last summer season. We saw CFA or Victorian resources going into New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia. So when Craig was talking about all those incidents and so on, one of the other things that we talked about this morning was cyclones and potentially tsunamis. So the world is a shrinking place and our role in the world is certainly there. I see John over there, you saw train, you know, you saw training, we can potentially run a whole range of incidents and responses and supports, not only interstate, but also to other countries. So it's another way in which we're changing. Thank you, thank you gentlemen. Actually first, for those people watching live online, I'll be moving around a little bit. So I'll be out of camera but you're still hearing my voice. So what I'll do is, yeah, you'll see me walking around the room a little bit. I'm going to ask a couple of questions and probably the first one, which is quite timely. This is posed as a bit of a leading question with a why, but we might just change that. Is specialist response being removed from CFA volunteers? And I might ask you and to take that one. No, specialist response is, well, I'll perhaps go back to first principles. We have some principles around resource allocation. One of those principles is there will be no role discrimination between staff and volunteers. So that's the principle. When we come down to the practicalities of it though, what we see is that for a number of the specialist response schools, the degree of training and the currency of that training means a lot of volunteers simply don't have the time and commitment. But we know that and I was up at Wangaratta on the weekend. We've got both staff and volunteers in around Wangaratta who are trained up in Ripe Rescue, for example. We have Hazmat. We have Craig's actually a member of Base Water Brigade who do BA support. It's an area where we need to be more progressive in opening up opportunities for volunteers, but there is no discrimination. Got it. I think Mark, it's a bit, if I may, we can't provide the service in the state if we're going to actually bring it to one group or the other. You have to have both Korean volunteers capable to do this, to provide the service across Victoria. And that's to me a no-brainer. What the mix is, how you get it. You think of CFA runs 23 rescue appliances. They are critical to the state to provide rescue and the majority of them are volunteer rescues. So if it's out there as a question, I suppose I wonder why the question's there, if there's some level of uncertainty, but you can't provide the service to the state without a career volunteer model. Thank you. I think there's a number of questions that have been asked online in relation to this. So what I might do is I'll wrap those up in another question a little bit later. This one actually is for Craig. And it's about when do you see all ESOs using a common and unified command channel network instead of the existing CFA Delp command channel? Good question, eh? Look at that. You had got the briefing. I'll give my, you give the detail. We've got some big contracts about how we actually bring radios together. So some of them are the big contracts. Some of them are 2016, 17, 18 contracts. The long-term comm strategy gets us there, but it's not an overnight fix in all equations. So there's an evolution of it. You and I might be able to fill in the detail. Well, late last year, there was a launch of an emergency services communications blueprint, I think it was called. And in fact, yesterday, Shane Franklin, Tony O'Day and myself met with someone who is progressing the discussion about that long-term plan. We've certainly put on the table a couple of things. One is in particular the other Metro ring, which currently uses analog radio for dispatch and fire ground communications. When is that going to be digitized? And we also put on the table the need to move to digital for both our dispatch channels, but also our incident management channels with the introduction of the regional mobile radio system, which CFA started transitioning to about 12 months ago. That provides a platform and the hardware and the system to do that. And there is a plan to move to digital command channels over the next 12 to 18 months. There are a couple of other initiatives that we've put on the table. One is obviously the move to automatic vehicle location, which is currently being discussed for CFA with the move to digital radios. And the other thing we've put on the table is the replacement of these little jiggers, which in about 18 months, we need to determine whether we want to have a replacement of a pager or do we go to some other type of alerting communication device? So, we've put on the table, it could actually be an enhanced smartphone or it could be some other bit of hardware. And I actually said, it could also be something that you swallow a pill and it tells you how your heart rate's going and how your body temperature's going. So we have started to put on the table what our agency needs are. And this person who is actually acting under the instructions of some people who work for Craig is going to initiate a process where that will develop into a more detailed strategy. Thanks for that. I've actually got, there's a couple more that I'll wrap up into that again towards the end if we've got some time. But I'll have noticed a couple of questions coming through from people that are around data terminals and live tracking and what have you. So we'll see if we can get to those. A couple of quite important ones here, interoperability. Now as the statement up front, interoperability is very important to the sector and across the whole of Victoria. We now have a high level committee focusing on this. And the question from one of our listeners is how are volunteers involved in this process and decision making? I'll have a go at this first. This is a little complex. So just bear with me. We've actually formed a interoperability committee which you and I sit on along with the chief of MFB and the secretary of the U of U. That committee is to advise the two mechanisms of consultation. One is EVIC, so CFA, Enterprise Bargaining Consultative Committee. And the other one is called MUC, which is the MFB U of U Consultative Committee. Two consultative committees in structure by the mechanism of the industrial arrangements. So they're there by law. So we've put a mechanism in the middle where the two chiefs, myself and the union secretary, are attempting to make sure that we get consistent outcomes from those two consultative committees. And it's working. We've been able to get in there and have discussions during and about uniforms, gloves, helmets, trucks, all sorts of things, all of the things that are sometimes the thing that keep you apart. The bit that's not in there is the volunteers and we use the structured consultative committees that are in CFA together now, which are the joint consultative committees that I think Alan Slipovic and other deputy chiefs chair, and we're using that mechanism. Now, that doesn't mean that we haven't got them all together. We've just got different pipes of consultation. So you've got an MFB consultation mechanism. You've got a CFA staff consultation and you've got a CFA volume consultation mechanism and we're trying to get a number of things tied together over the top. So it is complex and we've got commitment from the chiefs to actually take that forward. It doesn't mean that career are getting a different level of outcome than volunteers, but the consultive mechanisms are separate. And that's a fact. I can't change the industrial mechanisms of what is federal law and in federal law, they ought to have consultive committees that are there and they are there. So MUC's there, an MFB and EBIC's there for CFA. They don't have the provision for volunteers to be represented in those. They are industrial committees and CFA has its own consultative committees, which are the volunteer joint consulted committees. They're there in structure and obviously there's a mechanism of how you and in particular has got to work between a couple of things to get them right. And this has been a subject of discussions at that interoperability leadership group. And I've made it quite clear or I hope I've made it quite clear that there will be things that MFB, or UFU or even Craig might have a position on and be able to say, yes, we're gonna run with this. And because I'm representing both staff of CFA and the volunteers of CFA, I may have to go back and say, I've got to seek the views from VFBV or from those joint committees. Now that's not us being a dam in the river of progress in integration and interoperability. It's more that at a high level, there'll be some things where I can say, yep, I can lead our people to that. I can agree to that now. But there are other things that I need to go back and consult. And a recent example of this, a government commitment around the additional 350 firefighters, the introduction of emergency medical response. There has been some dialogue with the United Firefighters Union and obviously EMV and government around what that looks like for CFA. And about 10 days ago, we convened a meeting with the OICs and the first-left tenants or a senior volunteer from each of the integrated brigades. And we talked through what that 350 firefighter deployment might look like and EMR implementation might look like across our integrated stations. Now, that was an important plank of our consultation with both our staff and our volunteers, which enables us, based on the feedback, and there's a lot of feedback we got from that day, based on that feedback, we're able to then go back into UFU, back into EMV, Department of Justice, and also to the minister and say we think this we can live with and we can have broad support within our organisation. Thanks, Julian. I'm going to ask the room now, because I've taken a lot from online, questions within the room. I'll see you show of hands. Future of the Kangaroo Ground, ICC. Yep. So, Brian Sainolent and Brian Wicks for CFA and he's an ex-group officer of an ill and big group. So, we should declare who Brian is, a well-informed person on the subject and a good person. It's probably an answer that it's not to do with Kangaroo Ground in the initial stages. We've just actually got consultants in, so we've gone external to do this, to look at what is the capital works or what's the future investment in ICCs across the state and regional control centres across the state. So, we currently run 42 ICCs, I think, Julian? Yes, sir. 42, 43. Kangaroo Ground's one of those. Separate of that, we've also had the Adam Metropolitan Leadership Group and the one that did lead it was Darren McQuade, who's an acting assistant chief fire officer at MFB. To look at what the Metropolitan footprint of ICCs is. That's on my desk at the moment and we'll share that with the chief shortly. But the bigger bit is what do we do with ICCs in general and what's the investment across the footprint of the state? So, I think that's an important piece. Don't get over fussed Brian by Kangaroo Ground because there will be an ICC in that footprint somewhere. It is a risk profile that we've identified need to be there. The next one around is that challenging about the grassland interface which starts about the Hume Highway or to the west of the Plenty Gorge. What ICC do we have over there? Craigiburn comes up. Do we build one in Craigiburn? What happens with Gisborne? The Sunshine one. So, there's a bit of a challenge in there that's got some debate in it and that will be worked through. But the footprint that Kangaroo Ground operates now is a footprint, but whether it lives at Kangaroo Ground or somewhere else in that footprint will be the challenge that we have to answer and obviously that'll be consultation with all the agencies because the ICCs aren't just about fire as well. So, we've got to look at one of the other issues. So, hopefully that gives you a part of the answer in process but not the solution. Thank you for that. Another question from the room. We've got a couple of minutes left. And if there is, and I'm going to go, oh yes. Probably a question for both Craig and you. Is lots of tall rumours or what it was called about and what our manager's going to look like in the future? I'll do it for you. The minister's been very clear. There's no amalgamation of MFB CFA. There's no change to borders. What the fire service review, and if you read the review about resources management structures, it will challenge the way we operate it. I've been very clear in the submission that I've put forward that we have to be better at interoperability and we have to be able to deal with what is the growth in the fire service review. So, I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. And we have to be able to deal with what is the growth in particularly the metropolitan area better. It's got our volunteers in it. It's got our career staff in it. Your badges aren't going to change. We're not pulling CFA down. We're not pulling MFB down. And we're not creating one is the footprint. What happens in years to come? I can't predict, but that's today's position by this government. And I'd suggest it's the position of the previous government. So nothing's changed there. What will be the issue in the review is how we actually deal with the growth we've got in the future to provide the service. And Ewan deals with it every day. Where's the next need to supplement a volunteer brigade with staff? Wins the right time to do it? How do you do it? And what's the consultation mechanisms to allow us to do that? We need volunteers in the metropolitan area and we'll need an urban volunteer of the future because of what I just talked about before. Declining real population will see urbanisation. That means we've got to be very good at having volunteers and career staff to provide the service. And perhaps I can add to that, well, hopefully add to that. I'll give an example. A couple of months ago, we had a situation where we didn't have a leading firefighter at Milton Fire Station for the night shift. And we'd run out of leading firefighters. So Craig and I have had a round and had about... They offered me over time. No, no. I think we had about 15 telephone calls and the union were part of that. And what would have been ideal would have been, for me to be able to ring up Petter Rouse, I'd say, I need a leading firefighter to do a night shift at Milton. He might say, yep, I've got one. And then when he or she arrives, basically, they're trained in the pumper. They understand the basic fire ground, radio procedures, able to work in our team environment. But the other thing is, whilst the badge on the shoulder might be different, the uniform might actually be very similar. And we see that in our protective clothing, where there is a high degree of similarity. And we actually had a discussion at the last Interoperability Committee, whether we continue with MFB on the back and CFA on the back, or we just say, well, this is what firefighters have. Our station wear, day wear, and currently CFA is on the cusp of providing a similar looking garment, which will be available for volunteers. That might look, it might be exactly the same for CFA staff and MFB staff, but simply have a different badge on. So we're, and I think this is one of the reasons why the chiefs are sitting together with the union, because there are some things where it just makes good logical sense that MFB shirt and CFA shirt should look the same. And incidentally, getting in a bit of detail, MFB have said, we kind of like the CFA shirt. It's got a firearm. So it doesn't make us look like coppers, or do you respect the police? And the feedback we've had from our people is we like the MFB trouser. So we think there's some percentages there. And there's a lot more of that to be done. Just to mark, I know you're going to wrap it up. In about three minutes, I will have three minutes. There's two things I wouldn't mind to say just quickly. One is James Dullard's in the room here. James will be hiding in the corner, he can't see me, so I can say it. James currently is on succumbent to a position that works for Ewan and I and Peter Rower collectively. And it's called the director of the Fire Service Enhancement Project. He's actually replacing Ken Brown, who's an MFB assistant chief officer, while Ken's on leave. And that is to do what we just talked about. That's the person that will pull it all together and say, hey, how do we get joint training? How do we get joint recruit training? How do we get the shirts sorted? How do we get the same BA cylinders? How do we get the same BAs? How do we get the same, the same, the same? And we've got to do this. This is, and James has only been in two and a half weeks, I think now. He's got another seven to go. So he's got a fair bit of time to deliver lots of things. And from that, really critical. But you think about it, yeah, we had an MFB senior manager and now we've got a CFA senior manager to lead this for CFA and MFB to get the right outcome. And it's not going to hurt people, it's the right outcome. And the second one is Ewan's leaving and I just got to say, well done to Ewan. There's plenty of times to say farewell to Ewan. But I, in particular, the amount of people that know Ewan in CFA is across the board. And I spoke this morning about Ewan and I won't go into the details today on this, but you're losing a good person because Ewan's got one of the best hearts if you'll ever have. He's got some of the best leadership skills and he's been able to do it and get out and do things that he's actually hard yards. And he works eight days a week, he works 25 hours a day, I'll explain it today. And it's going to be a big gap that CFA will get a good person back in because CFA is a great place. So well done, Ewan. Thanks, Craig. Thank you for those comments. Yeah. Thank you and hopefully they're all clapping on the other end as well. I did want to just close by saying the CFA board has put a submission into the Fire Services Review. And without going into any detail, it reinforced the significance of volunteers in the service delivery models that CFA has, the significance of volunteers on our culture on what we call the Distributed Leadership Model or Mission Command, Empowering of Local Leadership. And it also reinforced the importance of CFA members in their communities and that the strength of CFA actually represents a strength in community resilience. There's a whole lot of other stuff in there as well. I think it's a particularly good submission in that it describes a lot of the strategies that we've been working on for the last five years. But it also puts forward, and we have had dialogue with David O'Burn, who's the reviewer. The board met with him for two hours yesterday and it was a good discussion. So we are looking forward to the results of that review eagerly and we think it will be a good opportunity to pay day joint vision for the future in addition to what Craig's been talking about today. Thank you, Chief. And thank you, Commissioner. Round of applause next to everyone. Thank you. APPLAUSE Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached the end of our time. Those people live streaming can't see me, but I'm speaking off-camera and I'll stay off-camera for the moment. But I'd like to thank you for being here, asking questions. There were a lot of questions that we didn't get to. Obviously, there's a lot of people out there watching. A lot of people got a lot of things on their mind. We were submitted questions beforehand as well, but we got through a number of those by, if you like, the responses being rolled into a number of themes there. What I will say is that we're going to be running more live streaming sessions and we'll be notifying via the formal and informal channels over the next few weeks. And those live streaming sessions, they're only as good as the questions that we're getting from people. We're sure we can talk down the line, but it'd be a very good idea if we could get a lot of questions beforehand. So we'll promote what the subject matter's going to be. I'm moving in now and I'll be turning off very shortly. So thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. Your questions, they've been great. I think that's really tested them. And on that note, I'm going to wrap it up. Thank you very much. Cheers. Thank you. There you go. Did you do a lot of this? Did you do a lot? Look, we have done, though, must admit it's...