South-west SES personnel condemn 'underfunding' and 'dysfunction'

South-west Victorian State Emergency Service personnel are speaking out over chronic under-funding and alleged poor handling of volunteers by the broader organisation, which they say is pushing people out and will soon put lives at risk.

The Standard spoke to several current and former SES personnel from across the region, including former south-west operations manager Brendan Rasmussen. They all raised the same concerns: a lack of funding for basic amenities and facilities, onerous paperwork and a culture that discourages speaking out.

They said the various issues within the organisation were compounding to make it increasingly difficult for volunteers with senior members quitting, many more weighing up their options and young potential recruits either declining to sign up or lasting mere weeks before leaving.

Mr Rasmussen - who resigned as regional operations manager in May after just eight months - said if the situation continued on its current trajectory, many smaller units would soon be unviable.

"My major concern is if we don't address this the people we could be saving won't be saved. There won't be anyone to save them," he said.

While Mr Rasmussen's ultimate concerns were the potential life and death of people living in the south-west, he said the main cause of the problem was far more mundane: administration.

"I was a volunteer first and had heard there were issues, but when I became a staff member I was fully exposed to the challenges the organisation has. I was astounded by the levels of administration," he said.

"Units are being asked to submit quarterly business activity statements (BAS), they've been asked to produce 10-year business plans, they even have to track down their own auditors to audit their annual financial statements. It's very weird."

Former Warrnambool unit commander Giorgio Palmeri said he would often spend 20 hours a week doing administrative tasks because of the size of the unit.

"Everything is in relation to the size of the unit. The more members we have, the more equipment and vehicles and larger facilities, the more administration we have to do," Mr Palmeri said.

"Every single year the administration burden increases. We didn't join the service to do paperwork, we joined to do work out in the field, helping people."

Senior volunteers from smaller units who spoke to The Standard said the administration work was regularly taking up half a day each week.

"I've got too much else to do, I don't have time to sit around doing paperwork," one volunteer said.

Another said: "We've got our own lives to worry about. I can't spare an extra six hours a week to do SES book work."

Current volunteers spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

"I'd love to put my name to it, but I'd get a kick up the arse and get kicked out of the SES and the unit would suffer," one volunteer said.

"We don't want to go upsetting anyone because we want to get more bits and pieces for our units, because our units out in the south-west are just absolute crap compared to Melbourne."

Mr Rasmussen said his former unit at Dunkeld had already received blowback because of his decision to speak out, even though he had left the organisation.

"I know that a number of senior volunteers have had direct phone calls from (senior officers in the organisation) to basically shut them up," he said.

An SES spokesperson denied staff and volunteers had been hushed. "VICSES doesn't believe there is any evidence to support this assertion and actively seeks feedback through a range of mechanisms," the spokesperson said.

Each SES unit has a "unit support team", a professional team of full-time salaried staff who are supposed to help with admin, recruitment, HR and similar support roles, but the south-west volunteers said that was only true "on paper".

"The unit support teams don't actually do anything. For the smaller units the unit commander runs the whole thing by himself," one volunteer said.

The SES spokesperson said staff had visited south-west units 62 times in the past three months with nearly two in every three visits prompting follow-up action. Mr Rasmussen said the "increased interest" in the south-west correlated exactly with his decision to publicly criticise the organisation.

"In the past two months there have been more visits to the south-west by senior SES (personnel) than there had been in the previous two years," he said.

"That's quite a coincidence."

Part two in this series looks at the organisational dysfunction and funding shortfalls that senior volunteers say are slowly diminishing the SES in south-west Victoria.