Page 2537 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 October 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
That leaves us with the underlying issue of how we best provide community resources here. We have heard a fair bit of political bleating on this. Mr Moore in the past has made this an issue and has said, "Shock, horror; there is waste and duplication", but he has been totally unable to provide a better system. Mrs Carnell was on the media last evening again, bleating about this, but without even going close to providing an alternative. Let me set out the Government's objectives on this. The first thing that must be said is that this is not an area where we are savings directed. This is a government which is committed to providing a more efficient ACT administration, all Ministers approving that; but in relation to lives, in relation to rescue services, we are concerned primarily with providing the best service to the ACT community, not looking only for dollar efficiencies.
We have, as was acknowledged by Ms Szuty, two very highly trained professional services in the ACT. Mr Moore is fond of saying that there is duplication; but I would have to say that at the Estimates Committee, where he had the opportunity to test not just me as Minister but the relevant senior officers of the police and the fire service, he was quite unable to come good on his claim of duplication. The facts are, Madam Speaker, that we have two services which must have a capacity for, amongst other things, road rescue, and it is sensible to use both services in that capability.
Let me take first the fire service. Ms Szuty referred to a number of representations from the Australian Federal Police Association. The AFP Association view is, quite clearly, that the police should have sole responsibility here and the fire service should concentrate on fighting fires. Madam Speaker, our fire service fights fires very well. This community is a community which, through good planning and good building standards, is fortunate in that it does not have that many fires. Nonetheless, we need a fire service with certain response times. There are Australian standards for response times to fires. I am sure that neither Ms Szuty nor the Opposition would suggest that we should fall under those standards. So, we need to have a fire service essentially as a form of insurance. That means that for most of the time the fire service, by definition, is not putting out fires. That is a quite happy result, one would have thought. So, one should be utilising those highly trained professionals for other purposes.
Given modern building standards and given standards of safety and protection, in both commercial and private buildings, the fire service needs to have training capacity in certain rescue techniques. Every fire tanker is equipped, Madam Speaker, with jaws-of-life equipment - the hydraulic cutting equipment which is obviously useful for road rescue, but which also has utilisation, for example, in cutting through burglar protection on houses or commercial premises, cutting through other security devices, and generally getting to the seat of a fire. Given the risk of flammable material and given the risk of chemical materials that the fire service has prime responsibility for, every fire officer has a level of rescue training. It would be foolish of us, as a community, to say, "We have this trained resource and we have equipped every tanker at each of our eight fire stations, which we must maintain with rescue capability; but we will not use them". The community would be properly annoyed at a government which said, "We have this trained resource sitting there, but we will not use them". So, the argument from the AFP Association that the fire service should be right out of road rescue is, on any view, unsustainable.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .