Page 1444 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 1993
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The question has to be asked equally, with the solution you have just proposed, Minister: Why should we not think about reallocating and restructuring our fire services to ensure that we have a standard something akin to what other Australians are enjoying? Is that not the question we should be posing to ourselves? Has it ever been posed to this Minister and to the colleague who sits in front of him? I have my doubts.
Mr Berry: This is the biggest stunt.
MR HUMPHRIES: Everything we do is a stunt as far as you are concerned, Mr Berry, so what is different, I ask you? You will have your turn later on. Mr Connolly implied yesterday that if we did not have eight stations we would not be complying with the Australian standard. Apparently Newcastle does not comply with the Australian standard; nor do many other communities in this country. I find that hard to believe. I asked the Minister yesterday what the extent of the saving would be when the police rescue service was phased out or surrendered its role in southside rescue. He asserted that there would be a saving of $400,000. Yet he appeared to think there was no basis at all for the claim made here for over $200,000 by the emergency services in the ACT; he indicates that there is no basis at all for that claim. I wonder where that claim will end up.
It seems to me that, if there is a serious accident with, say, injury or major damage, the first service that ought to be involved is an ambulance service. It would clearly need to be there to attend to sick people. There would almost certainly be a requirement for the presence of a policeman because those scenes will almost invariably be crime scenes. As a third priority, in my humble observation, there is a requirement for the presence of a fire appliance. In fewer than one per cent of cases, I am advised, do motor vehicles involved in a road accident actually catch fire. Obviously in other cases they will spill petrol, or whatever, and require some care and attention, but that again involves a minority of accidents.
The question again has to be asked: Is it necessary to transfer all operations to do with rescue to the one of those three services which is demonstrably less important than the other two? I do not need to point out that an accident scene is also often a crime scene. You will have to have policemen present or, under the new multiskilling rules of this Government, we can start to train firemen to be police investigators and work out whether a crime scene needs to be taken care of in a particularly sensitive way. I am advised, for example, that there was an incident in the last 12 months where there was a serious accident and firemen arrived first on the scene, which is not unlikely, given the arrangements I have been talking about. A person had been killed as a result of the accident; but, because the firemen were not trained in making sure that they knew who was behind the wheel of the car that was probably at fault in the accident, it was not possible subsequently to lay any charges against a person for dangerous or culpable driving. There was simply no training to back that up.
Mr Berry: Would it have been possible anyway? Who knows? It is all guesswork, Gary. It is trumped up.
MR HUMPHRIES: I would submit that there is a clear need for the presence of policemen in those circumstances. If that is the case, ought there not be the capacity for police rescue to attend on those occasions as well? You are going to
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