Page 1442 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 1993
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That must raise a question in all reasonable people's minds. Is the ACT's service essential? Is it what is expected as a national standard - if it is, it clearly is not being following by places such as Newcastle and, I suspect, many other communities - or is the ACT the beneficiary of a legacy of overprovision which we simply cannot afford to continue to provide? I am obviously very grateful for the fact that if my house caught on fire there would be a fire truck somewhere in the vicinity. But I have to ask who pays for that and whether we can afford to sustain that level of service. My leader has made the observation that we are making those sorts of decisions already in respect of other services - services such as ambulance, police and the provision of hospitals. We cannot avoid them there, and I submit respectfully that we cannot avoid them here either.
There are many inefficiencies in the arrangement the Government is proposing and many questions that have not been answered. I think the Government, in this debate, needs to make some attempt to answer them. For example, it has been asserted in the proposal to take over road rescue services in the ACT that the ACT Fire Service is an efficient service, with all of its 287 members trained in road accident rescue, and I am quite certain that they are. All of us would have been, at various times, to demonstrations or graduation classes, and they show us their capacity to do some work in that respect. It is true that they are trained to what I understand is called rescue 3 status and that they are all engaged actively in retraining from time to time. But the question has to be asked not only what level of training they are receiving but also what level of experience they are achieving on our roads.
Members of the road rescue service of the police rescue service are rotated throughout different arms of the ACT Fire Service. This means, I am informed, that the actual hands-on experience they will get in road rescue is very limited. With 287 members, perhaps on average once every two years will a fireman be engaged in a road rescue. With 13 members of the police rescue service dedicated, at least on the south side at the present time, to road rescue, we can expect a much more frequent encounter with people lying seriously injured on roads or in car wrecks.
Madam Speaker, if you were lying in a car wreck and you were seriously injured, perhaps with spinal injuries or something of that kind, would you rather have rescue you someone whose last rescue had been done 18 months before, and that had been his or her only encounter with such a situation, or who had never before done a road rescue? Or would you rather have a person who had done this for a living for some time, who was familiar with it and had done it many times before? That is what I am talking about when I say that in these economy measures of the Government there is a trade-off between quality and cost, and we have to ask ourselves whether that is an acceptable trade-off. Experience adds up to expertise, and I have to say that I have grave doubts about whether an expertise can develop in a service as large as the ACT Fire Service.
We have heard also today about a bid, and it is obviously characterised by this Government as an ambit claim, by the ACT Emergency Service for control over not just road rescue in the ACT but off-road rescue as well. The person that wrote the letter I earlier tabled in the Assembly is the controller of the ACT Emergency Service, North Canberra region - arguably, the person principally directly responsible for road rescue which is not conducted by the Fire Service.
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