 Welcome to the official opening of the new CFA District 8 Headquarters and Southern Metropolitan Region Emergency Management Complex. My name is Peter Schmidt, Regional Director for Southern Metropolitan Region and your emcee for today. This facility is the first purpose built complex for the provision of day-to-day administrative and operational support to approximately 3,500 volunteers and 300 staff who, by way of a network of 69 fibre gates, attend approximately 10,500 primary emergency calls a year. This makes District 8 CFA's busiest, protecting almost one million people across six municipalities and portion of another. And this will be greatly enhanced by this new District Command Centre. To our representatives from emergency service organisations, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Well, this is certainly an exciting day and it's my pleasure to be here in Dandenong South today to witness the official opening of the new District 8 Headquarters and Southern Metropolitan Region Emergency Management Complex. It seems just a short time we were standing out freezing as the soil was turned for that first time as this building was to be built. It marks a very exciting year and not only for CFA but across all emergency management services. The $5.08 million complex is an interoperable multi-agency facility which has the capacity to operate on a 24-hour basis during emergencies if needed. For the first time in CFA history, one complex will house an incident control centre, a District Command Centre and a regional control centre. It is a vital piece of infrastructure which will be central to protecting the local community and serving CFA members for decades to come. It's great to see the District 8 Headquarters which relocated here two weeks ago. It's now fully operational and that the emergency management complex will be ready in time for this upcoming fire season. I wish the CFA and the emergency service organisations well with the new building and facilities. It gives me an enormous amount of pleasure to declare the CFA District 8 and Southern Metropolitan Regional Emergency Management Complex now officially open. Congratulations. The spelling is correct. Good afternoon and thank you. It's great to be out at Danyong today and I'll take you on a little bit of a history ride I suppose because I was lucky enough to be part of District 8 many years ago. That was when we had Region 26 and Region 8 and I look around the room and there's a number of people that would understand the old 26 and 8 and we had a chief of the day that said we're going to join them together. Shock horror, some change. And that was very interesting about bringing two regions together. I'll now look at what you are and you should stand very proud not only as CFA but as organisations that truly have taken emergency management where it is.