The CFA issue comes back to the old MFB/CFA zones now being completely out of date. IIRC, the zones were set up in the 1960s with the MFB covering a 20km radius 'limit' from the CBD and the CFA covering the rest. The idea was the MFB covers the main metro/surburban areas and the CFA covers the outer sparse fringe suburbs, regional towns and the rest of country Victoria.
Each fire brigade was set up to reflect the needs of these two separate regions. The MFB was made up of on-call career firefighters at its manned fire stations to deal with urgent urban fires (eg: houses, shops, industry complexes, etc), while the CFA was mostly made-up of volunteers made up of local residents of their communities who would respond to their local stations when needed (eg: bushfires). If further firefighters were needed by one volunteer brigade then they would call on other volunteer and manned (career firefighters) stations further away to come and help. It's how the CFA builds up what they call a "surge capacity" to fight bushfires. The CFA is volunteer brigade(s) respond first and others support them; The MFB is the opposite - career firefighters respond first.
However, times have changed. Melbourne's urban sprawl has smashed through this old 20km boundary 'limit' yet the old MFB/CFA boundaries have never been changed to keep up (typical
). In the south-east suburbs, the boundary is around Clayton which is now closer to the demographic centre of Melbourne and miles from any urban fringe. We now have large sways of high density suburbia such as Springvale, Dandenong, Frankston, Cranbourne still covered by the CFA.
In an attempt to adapt, the CFA incorporated into its ranks mixed stations of both career and volunteer firefighters called "integrated" stations. Out of the CFA's 1200 stations there's 34 of these integrated stations, mostly located in urban area. It's 31 of these 34 integrated stations which are affected by the EBA. As the urban areas spread, the CFA converts existing volunteer stations into these integrated stations (eg: Hoppers Crossing was converted to one in 1986). It's around this 'conversion' that the barny started as the EBA supports the need for more integrated stations, more career firefighters and hence more conversions.
So you'll find volunteers at these existing integrated stations are publicly in favour of the EBA (more career firefighters helps them do there job in urban areas), whereas the opposition is coming more from purely volunteer stations concerned with being taken over by careeries. The politics of rural volunteers having anti-union LNP supporting members and integrated/careeries/unionists having mostly urban ALP supporters, only further makes a mess of the issue. The Liberal party even set up a website "Hands off the CFA" to rake in donations for themselves while the Herald-Sun reporter on this, James Campbell, is an ex-Liberal party staffer. There's a reason the dispute has been divisive and has lasted 1000 days and counting - i.e. Politics!
Even if this EBA was rejected/blocked, the CFA will have to change to support even more integrated stations and more career firefighters if it wants to oversee urban areas. Time is everything in fighting and extinguishing fires and the response times of career firefighter manned stations are much faster than that of volunteers in higher density urban areas. It's not 1960 anymore.
