 Thank you for coming. I'd like to read a brief statement. My name by the way is Professor Rob Joy. I'd like to start off by acknowledging the hundreds of present and past CFA staff and their families who participated in this inquiry. Many of them shared sensitive personal information with our investigators and I want to thank them very sincerely for the trust that they showed in us. The overwhelming majority of these people simply wanted to contribute to a full public understanding of what occurred at Fisfield. To give you a sense of the scale of this investigation we searched over four million documents, some of which dated back into the 1970s and interviewed over 300 people. Essentially the investigation was historical in nature. It was dealing with what are called legacy issues at CFA training sites rather than with present day practices and in particular it was focusing on training practice at Fisfield from the 1970s through into the mid-1990s when a major redevelopment of facilities was accompanied by a shift to use of safer fuels and training practices. I believe the report provides a comprehensive base of information for any future investigation of the materials and training practices and exposures during staff training at CFA. Finally I'd like to thank my team and also I'd like to commend the CFA for accepting all the reports recommendations. Thank you. If I could follow Professor Joy's comments. If I could thank him and his team for the work they did in producing the Fisfield report. This report has taken six months to deliver. It's something that could have taken twelve or more months and I know the pressures were on that team were quite phenomenal. It's a four million dollar exercise to produce this report. That's how seriously we take the welfare of our people at CFA. Following on from that I need to be able to tell you that of about 90,000 people who have gone through Fisfield in the period of 1971 to 1999 that in the professor's report there is an indication of some classes of people at the site who would have been more exposed to risk than others. In the higher category we're probably talking about a couple of hundred people. Many of the people are at low to negligible levels of risk. It's important for our members at CFA to understand that and to take up the opportunity to look at the report and see where they might be positioned in that qualitative table. And I do thank Professor Joy for that table and for other information in his report which is essential for the comfort and understanding of our members. Secondly when I look at the report it confirms without any equivocation the fact that chemically chemicals donated to CFA were used in live firefighter training. There is no doubt about that. The practice predated Fisfield as a training facility and ran right up into the 1990s. That practice no longer continues and the major risks at Fisfield were eradicated when a new training area was developed in 1999. So from about 96 to 99 those practices ended. In respect to those, the board of CFA, the executive of CFA regret the practices that occurred in that time. We deeply regret those practices and the impacts they may have had on CFA members and others who used the facility and others who worked at the facility and those landowners that had joined the facility, we deeply regret those practices. For us this was a major step forward but the next step is equally as important and equally as big and that's a step to determine whether we can get an adequate health impact study that can give even more confidence to our members as to whether they have been impacted in any way or of likelihood of impact in any way from the activities that took place at Fisfield. The good news is the site is safe. The Fisfield site is safe to operate. Business as usual will continue but improvements to that site and our field training grounds is underway. We will deliver on the 10 recommendations that Professor Joy has outlined and we have developed 11 other initiatives that we'll be taking to ensure that these things can't happen again. Thank you. Can I ask you what's going through your head when you read the report particularly about the fact that management were aware of this back in 1980 and didn't do anything about it? When I read chapter 9 which is the chapter that deals with the management's response to the issues at Fisfield, I was extremely disappointed to some extent upset that matters that could have been dealt with that could have brought about an end to practices that were draconian at a much earlier point in time had not been taken. It is a responsibility of management more than it is a responsibility of the Board of Governments to ensure that those practices or practices of that nature don't happen in the organisation. So what's that negligence that you've said? What I'm saying is that if there is a duty of care and I believe there is, if there is a case for breach of that duty you would suspect that that is contained within Professor Joy's report. If you're the CFA that's not a comfortable report to receive. It does tell the truth. It does put the facts down and it does tell us and lead us to a position about what did happen there at that time. What it can't tell us is what I've just mentioned before is have those practices impacted on health. That's a very difficult question to solve. We've been in discussion with Monash in respect of a health study and with other experts around the country. We'll continue that work over the next couple of weeks. Would you expect compensation claims now? I think the issue of compensation is one that's going to be alive in the minds of people for a good while. Yes. So we don't deny that that's a conversation of current time. We say however that the steps forward from this are about the welfare of our people in an informative sense. This fiscal report provides facts and a line of truth about what happened. A health impact study will provide evidence and fact around whether there is impacts to health or otherwise. We need to work through that study after that point in time. At some stage there's likely to be another discussion about compensation or otherwise. Will the organisation resist compensation? So if we think about what we've been doing to date and if we think about responsibility and it's the Board and the current management including Chief Officer Euan Ferguson who's here with us today who are accepting the responsibilities for the actions of the past. In accepting those responsibilities we did put a large amount of resources four million dollars into the independent investigation by Professor Joy. So not many organisations that we're going to dodge the responsibility would do that. We then go one step further and say that we're willing to have an independent organisation take this report and the information in it and see if we can shape a health impact study from that. That won't be something CFA controls. That will be something that CFA resources. We'd like to see a group of people advising around that. We'd like to see the unions involved. We'd like to see the VV who support our volunteers involved. We'd like to see some past staff and current staff and volunteers involved. So we want a very open process so that we understand that. And at the end of the day if that brings about obligations for us to equip financial or otherwise then we'll take responsibility for that. Do you think though, you mentioned the figure before of 90,000 trainees or firefighters put an open and paid door response on compensation costing the state millions of dollars, many millions of dollars? It's a fair question to talk about what the consequences of compensation could be but that's all it is, is a fair question to ask. The answer to that's not known. Further work, work in respect of a health impact study is the only way that we can take those next steps. Professor, as an estimate, how many people came to you or how many did you hear about that would claim that they have been sick as a result of this or members of their family had died and were sick as a result of this? We interviewed a total of 324 people. Most of those people came forward voluntarily. We sought some out and they volunteered then to talk with us. A subset of those certainly did were concerned as probably the best way to put it that illnesses which they or family members were suffering or had suffered may have been associated with fiscal. The numbers probably in the order of 20 or 30 would be my guesstimate. Do you think there's wider implications for other training facilities who are using similar sort of or have had the past years to set out single training? Well if you look at the six other training facilities, regional training facilities around the state only two of them were established prior to the 1990s. That's the facility at Wangeratta and the facility at West Sale. And certainly they did use similar practices and similar materials to those at Fiscal but in much lower quantities because the number of trainees going through those facilities was very much smaller. So we've got no indication there that while there may be site contamination issues to deal with them CFA is going to be addressing those. No indication that there were very drums or large quantities of drums stored.