SES staffing a ‘disaster risk’

Andrew Mathieson
STATE Emergency Service could be dispatching unqualified volunteers to battle natural disasters including bushfires, according to Geelong staff.
Community and Public Sector Union claimed the SES needed to “at least double” its workforce in the region to meet training requirements and increasing workloads.
SES’s four Geelong staff comprises a regional manager, a volunteer support officer, a technical trainer and an administration worker.
CPSU organiser Emily Castle said a skeleton staff of just six employees covered Victoria’s south-west region from Geelong to Hamilton.
“There’s been no change to staffing in almost 20 years,” she said.
“They (SES) haven’t actually increased their operational capacity in any shape or form. They actually need to have a dedicated resource for operational duties because at the moment they haven’t.”
Ms Castle said the union’s call for a staff increase was in line with Victoria’s recent Bushfire Royal Commission.
Country Fire Authority had been awarded $850 million for extra staff but the SES had “got nothing”, she said.
Ms Castle believed the SES was now “cutting corners” with staff training volunteers.
“At the moment the trainers are being used operationally to subside the responsibilities of the regional manager and consequently they haven’t got time to train up the volunteers, so it’s a bit of an insidious little circle.”
Ms Castle said the SES’s response to demands for more workers had been “deafening silence”.
“We’ve been agitating for a number of years before we decided to go public with it.”
SES claimed a 40 per cent increase in full-time-equivalent staffing throughout regional Victoria in the past four years to free up operational staff for emergencies.
An SES spokesperson said increasing operational responses had “certainly impacted our workload”.
The SES has adopted many of the recommendations from the Bushfires Royal Commission on warnings and command and control changes, the spokesperson said.