I’m Susan Templeman the Member for Macquarie and I represent the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury. Now, 12 months ago my community was going through fires. Right now, they’re being asked to fill in complex grant applications for new facilities in their community, and that’s what I want to talk about.
 
This is what my community was experiencing a year ago, this is from Bilpin just before Christmas, and it didn’t just happen in an afternoon. It went on for days. People have been through an extraordinary trauma yet these same communities are being offered an opportunity by the government to apply for funding to rebuild or improve community assets. Now, we really welcome the funding, but what isn’t right is that these communities are being asked to do it having gone through a trauma. This just doesn’t happen to you and you move on, this changes you. This is an experience that makes people question a lot of things, and what I am hearing now is that 12 months on, people are only now trying to come to terms with what happened to them and to their communities. If their homes burned down, they are still living in largely temporary homes. Some of them are sheds, some of them are a combination of private rental, temporary friends’ places, it’s a really unsettling situation. So that part of the community isn’t in a position to fill in complex grant applications, and that means the rest of the community is trying to step up. Those people, some of them, were the people in this photo. They were the people fighting the fire and they weren’t just volunteer firefighters, although from behind I recognise several of these, they were people who were trying to protect their own properties or their neighbours’ properties. So they’re the ones now trying to do not just their own jobs but also pull together for