Page 2538 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 October 1992
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So, what is an alternative view? There is an alternative view held by some in the fire service that the police should be totally excluded from the road rescue role and it should be totally a fire service role. Madam Speaker, that tends to ignore the other roles of the rescue squad. The AFP rescue squad has responsibility for cliff rescue, building rescue, river rescue, industrial rescue, domestic rescue, snow rescue, bush search and rescue, disaster victim identification, animal rescue, natural disasters, aircraft emergencies and underwater search and rescue. I am just reading through their list of specific areas. They also have clear roles and responsibility in particularly dangerous situations - hostage situations and potential suicide situations. You need to have a police capacity that is trained in that rescue role. So, you need a police response which has the rescue equipment and which has the training. Again, would we not be foolish, as a community, if we said, "We have that resource, but we will not use it for road rescue"?
As a matter of fact, the police rescue squad spends a very small proportion of its time on road rescue. I might add that these are the sorts of details that one would have thought that members who were particularly concerned with this matter may have probed for at the Estimates Committee, but they did not; so I will give them to members in this forum. During the 1991-92 financial year road accident rescues represented only some 14 per cent of the tasks allocated to the AFP rescue squad. The squad attended a total of 1,354 tasks during the fiscal year and, of those, 130 were related to major vehicle accidents and 34 to minor vehicle accidents. I do not have with me an equivalent breakdown of the fire service response, but it would be very similar. Road rescue is not the major response of the fire service, but it is an important adjunct.
The cost of the AFP rescue squad, Madam Speaker, the all-up cost, was $622,000 in 1991-92. Given that only some 14 per cent of that is allocated to road rescue work and given that we need the capacity anyway, I think it is clear that there are no particular savings to be achieved in avoiding this so-called duplication. The cost of the Fire Brigade comes out of the Fire and Emergency Services program. The overall cost of that program is some $10m-plus. But, again, we have a resource which must be in place to provide community protection and which sensibly should be utilised for other purposes when they are not out there actually putting out fires.
We have two trained professional organisations, both able to serve the community. After repeated Estimates Committee opportunities, no member of the Opposition or the Independent groups has been able to come up with any sensible method whereby we could avoid duplication.
Mr Wood: It is easy to take a run.
MR CONNOLLY: As Mr Wood says, it is easy to cast cheap shots, particularly when you have an editorial written for you to give you your main ammunition. What this Government has done in relation to road rescue is to grasp the nettle. We inherited the north-south divide from the Alliance. That was an agreement signed between Mr Duby and Mr Collaery. We said that that was overly rigid. We said that it was foolish for us as a community to have a rigid north-south divide. It was clearly unacceptable to the community to have a Liberal Alliance regime which said that if there was a motor vehicle accident outside the Greenway Fire Station the trained professional fire crew should stand idly by and watch a trapped victim while waiting for the police truck to arrive from Weston.
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