The people of Casey are living each and every day with a climate crisis, thousands of families like mine have been impacted by more frequent and more extreme bushfires, floods and storms. We rely on emergency services like the SES and CFA to be there when emergencies happen. SES and CFA volunteers put themselves in harm's way again and again to keep us safe, and they don't have backup to share the load - being called upon more often and for more dangerous events. We don't have a SES hub in the Dandenong Ranges with neighbouring units in Emerald and Ferntree Gully being called out to support our community, stretching their volunteers and impacting everyone in the region. Casey is 2,624 square kilometres in size, the size of Wales, and asking our neighbouring SES stations to prioritise us over their own community is not right. We need an SES hub in place, in our community where the emergency happens.

Our energy network in Casey is unstable, it is normal for the power to go out most weeks, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. All electric is a fantastic idea to reduce gas usage, but removing gas from households and community facilities in Casey is not practical when the energy network is so unstable. With no power, gas heating and gas cooking is our back-up. Not everyone can afford to buy their own back-up generator. We need a community-wide conversation about our ideas to advocate and invest in community-led community power, including micro-grids, neighbourhood batteries and back-up NBN/satellite phones. Community energy resilience is about doing the work early, planning ahead and having the conversations before an emergency, so the community knows what to do when the power and phones go out.

Many of us live amongst trees, and they fall down. Communication networks are critical infrastructure and need to always be on. Our mobile telecommunication towers rely on diesel generators in the event of an outage - when they run out of diesel the line goes dead. In an emergency we need our phone network to work, and it doesn't. Recent storms have shown us that when the phone goes down, the internet goes down and we are left to fend for ourselves.  No mobile coverage = no phone calls, no data, no triple zero calls.