Page 1443 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 1993
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Mr Connolly: No, no role in road rescue. This is the emergency service - the orange-overall guys, the volunteers who put the roofs on in a storm.
MR HUMPHRIES: The fact of life is that this person is a fairly senior person in the administration of the Territory. This person obviously believes, on the basis of what he has heard, either officially or unofficially, in his job - I assume that it is a he - that road rescue service is only the first step in the ACT Emergency Service acquiring control over other aspects of emergency services. I am referring here to off-road rescue, cliff rescue, forest, bushland and waterway rescue in the Territory.
The Minister says that that is wrong, that this person is misinformed. How does this person come to be misinformed? This is a very senior officer in your administration, Minister. How is it that he does not know that you know of no proposal to amalgamate police rescue services together with the fire rescue service? How does he not know about that? Or is it the case that you do not know about any decision to make that transition but others do, that your assurance that there is no proposal of which you are aware does not apply to your colleague Mr Berry, who does know of such a proposal or is aware that such a proposal is being developed? I would like this Minister to satisfy the concerns we have raised by saying, "It will not be the policy of this Government to provide for a closing down of the police rescue service and the transfer of off-road rescue to the Fire Service or anybody else in the ACT".
Mr Connolly: It will not be the policy of this Government to transfer rural off-road rescue to anybody else.
MR HUMPHRIES: Can you guarantee that that will not happen in the life of this Government?
Mr Connolly: Yes, I can guarantee that.
MR HUMPHRIES: I am reassured, but I wonder whether you speak for Mr Berry when you say that. Madam Speaker, the argument has been posed that the Fire Service should have control over other emergency services because it has surplus capacity, and there is no doubt that it does. I wonder why it is that we provide for police to work during unsociable hours and to actually work that time, whereas we allow firemen to work that time and to spend the time sleeping. There is a real question about the work practices of our Fire Service. (Extension of time granted) I have to ask myself whether that really is in the best interests of this community.
Mr Connolly: That is right. They should be doing something useful, like road rescue, and that is what we are going to make them do.
MR HUMPHRIES: This is the stupidity of the argument. They have surplus capacity. Other services are tightly stretched. It would seem to me that we should make some step towards reducing that surplus capacity rather than filling it up with things for which those people are not appropriately trained. You might discover that we have a shortage of cleaners in our schools. Let us send the firemen out to clean the schools at night; they have nothing else to do. That is an extension of the illogicality of this argument.
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