Consider the motives

WITHIN these pages, over about a month, there has been statement and counter-claim about the closure of the CFA’s prime training facility, Fiskville.
But there are back stories.
‘Fiskville closed for good, says Mick’, read the headline in the ‘Mail’ on April 7, which went on to describe Mick Tisbury as a ‘Yarra Ranges firefighter’.
As he works for MFB and Yarra Ranges in a CFA area, he is a ‘metropolitan firefighter who lives in the Yarra Ranges’.
Mick is also an active senior official with the United Firefighters Union.
In my opinion, his quotes and use of language smack of being part of a state-wide UFU campaign launched through ‘local firefighters’, with the intent of giving the CFA a black eye at the negotiating table where wages and conditions are equally ascritical as safety concerns.
Enter Ian Ireland, (‘Mail’ letters, 5 May) writing as a lieutenant in the Ballan Fire Brigade (CFA), who makes a complaint that closing Fiskville was wrong.
Part of his claim is that 60 families will be lost, and money lost, to the Ballan community.
And Ian would know, as he is a senior member of a lobby organisation called ‘Proud to Support Fiskville Committee’.
Ian and his wife also run the local Ballan newsagency, so the loss of 60 families and the servicing of the at least 3000 attendees at training courses may possibly affect the business’s income.
I have no doubt these two gentlemen have the best interests of those they represent. Have I got an agenda myself?
I’m a CFA volunteer, but in this case I am calling on my years of experience as a union PR bod and also a newspaper editor, experience which screams at me that all written recently about Fiskville in these pages just may, I repeat ‘just may’, not be what it seems.
It’s not the place itself, Fiskville, that is damaged beyond repair, it is the name.
John Nieman,
Monbulk.