Wheelbarrow Gang In Need Of A Sea Change

Newcastle Herald

Monday April 16, 2007

Cheryl McGregor

POPPY and the kids are still not back from their fishing trip in the tinny. Who d'ya call?

The Raffle Rescuers or the Wheelbarrow Warriors, that's who.

There's a funny boat up in the mangroves with funny people unloading funny stuff. Who d'ya call?

Maybe the Water Police or maybe Customs or maybe . . . look, anyone still got the terrorism magnet on their fridge?

It's a confused old world out there in Australian waters.

It's also a seriously underfunded one, which is why I've just renamed the Royal Volunteer Coastal Patrol the Raffle Rescuers and the Australian Volunteer Coast Guard the Wheelbarrow Warriors.

Look at the Lake Macquarie division of the Coastal Patrol: its 60 volunteers, wearing uniforms they've had to buy for themselves, float their Sailfish vessel, Hunter Lifeboat 1, and their shallow-water tinnie on the proceeds of last year's raffles and donations.

When they weren't fund-raising in 2006 they managed to rescue or assist 299 people, keep an eye on the coastal journeys of 5874 more, answer 8295 phone calls about conditions, regulations and so on and make direct radio contact with 14,279.

Or look at Swansea Coast Guard, where the 75 full members (average age 60) keep the expensive and technically, because of their excess mileage, unrepairable two-stroke motors on their 17-year-old craft running largely by assembling wheelbarrows for Bunnings Warehouse at $4 a barrow.

These two groups, along with the members of the NSW Volunteer Rescue Association, are the people who spend weekends and public holidays on call at their bases, who keep their services manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, who are now doing 63 per cent of marine emergency rescues in NSW.

That's on top of what one volunteer described to me as "the NRMA services": the equivalent of road services. Plus the job of training and certifying members, and some non-members, in required formal qualifications. Not to mention 100 per cent of the radio traffic for recreational boating, which they've taken on since the Telstra marine radio network was closed in 2005.

All this for, in NSW, State Government support of $764 a head, in which almost half goes in insurance.

The State Emergency Service receives $2700 a head. The bush fire brigades have similar levels.

It's not that the boaties want to see less money go to the other emergency services.

But it's not surprising that they look longingly over the border, where the Queensland Government matches marine service donations dollar for dollar and has just replaced every volunteer vessel on the Queensland coast.

The recent state election brought promises from both sides of politics of a longed-for $8 million, costed in 2003 by the Marine Rescue Services Council, as the minimum realistic budget needed to fund and, expensively, fuel, the volunteer groups. Now a federal election looms, and the promises are coming faster, higher, stronger, with a new feature that must be fascinating every volunteer rescuer: Labor wants to form a professional Australian coastguard.

The Government says that existing agencies, such as the Water Police and Customs, are already doing what's needed, via its Coastwatch program. It argues that it's insulting to the Navy to suggest that any other force is necessary. In essence, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Labor spokesman Robert McClelland counters by saying involving the Navy in such work is "like having armed tanks do domestic policing on the streets".

His party is calling for 13 new patrol boats, three capable of carrying helicopters and a single homeland security department to co-ordinate services. Labor expects to fund much of its $612 million plan from savings made by ending overlaps.

The argument is already being fought fiercely, as Williamtown firm Daronmont Technologies has reason to know. Three years ago Daronmont, with its interstate branches, provided a $20 million trial for Coastwatch of the Surface-wave Extended Coastal Area Radar (SECAR), tracking shipping and aircraft movements in Torres Strait.

The installation did its job, but in those three years the political goalposts changed. SECAR cannot track what no radar can track: vessels so small that, according to Daronmont general manager Laurie Baldwin, "there is virtually nothing to reflect a radar signal apart from perhaps a fuel drum".

So, last month, the trial was ended. The Government blamed the equipment and the Opposition blamed the Government, while Daronmont took the commercial knock for a decision that wasn't its fault.

Where does that leave poppy and the kids in the tinnie, stuck on a sandbar and hoping to be found and brought home before it gets dark?

Looks like another job for the cash-strapped, under-equipped, all-volunteer services that run on raffles and wheelbarrows.

© 2007 Newcastle Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home