Support for Victoria’s volunteer firefighters and emergency service personnel has been described as “piecemeal” and “flawed” by Victoria’s auditor-general.
During the week of memorials to the 173 lives lost in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, John Doyle last week handed down a report into how the Country Fire Authority and State Emergency Service manage their large volunteer workforces.
“The CFA does not know how many volunteers it needs and SES does not accurately know how many it has,” Mr Doyle noted. “Further, both agencies’ procedures for analysing their volunteers’ skills and qualifications are flawed, which hinders their ability to identify workforce skills gaps.”
Mr Doyle found neither agency has a coherent, documented strategy for volunteer recruitment that identifies the volunteers needed and the approaches required to address that need.
“Consequently, volunteer recruitment happens in an ad hoc way at the local brigade and unit levels, with differing approaches to when and how volunteers are recruited.”
A western suburbs SES member, who asked not to be named, said the problem was a bureaucratic one.
“It’s very disappointing that the recorded information of levels of skills and levels of field operations is not being duly collected and, therefore, they’re not able to send the right people to the right places.
“If all their acquired skills and assessments that are being done are not fully recorded that means there’s people who could perhaps do a job or be part of a strikeforce who could be overlooked.
“I think that there needs to be databases that are perhaps a bit more flexible than what’s there and, also, if another service has got a database that is doing the job, why not borrow it rather than go out and reinvent the wheel.
“There just needs to be a better handle on the administration with better means of recording the data.”
The CFA has about 57,500 volunteers and the SES about 5000.
