Page 1448 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 1993
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In relation to the report we did have, this report and the further ongoing consultancy created the emergency services bureau we now know. Why do we need a report and a further consultancy? Because some mischievous people were running around the ACT trying to stir up massive trouble about this report. I can recall, a couple of weeks before the last election, Mr Humphries standing on the front of a rural fire truck at the big meeting at Tuggeranong. We had a couple of hundred rural firefighters, virtually every rural firefighting vehicle, sirens and lights flashing. They were all being stirred up. Mr Humphries jumped on the truck and said, "This is a terrible report. This is a takeover by the urban fire service. This report is a waste of time". I jumped up afterwards and said, "Mr Humphries, I am interested that you say that it is a waste of time, because it was your Government that commissioned it". That was the problem about this report. We had to spend a lot more money on this consultancy because people were out there stirring up the various interests in the emergency services.
The emergency services comprise a very complex group of people and organisations, all of them fiercely proud of their expertise and competence, and rightly so. I have always said that, rightly so, they are all proud of their expertise and competence. It was unfortunate that Mr Humphries today decided to attack the decision to rationalise road rescue by attacking the competence of fire officers. The fire officers are very well trained and very well equipped to handle road rescue. That is not just my view; it is also the view of the Assistant Commissioner of Police, who said that he would not have handed over that function if he did not believe that the Fire Service was competent to perform the job. It was unfortunate that Mr Humphries chose to denigrate those fire officers, to suggest that they lack expertise and to make a jocular point about, "We have firemen sleeping at night". We do have firemen at night. They have to be there. Let us give them something useful to do. Let us get them up from their beds, if they happen to be in their beds, and allow them to respond to road accident rescues. This is a sensible use of resources.
The point is that each of the services have a real pride in their expertise and a pride in their service. The Hannan inquiry, which was headed by a range of very senior people in fire and emergency services throughout Australia, recommended that we merge the Urban Fire Service, the Rural Firefighting Service and the ACT Emergency Service into one organisational unit. Mr Humphries was out there stirring up the rural firefighters, stirring up the rural volunteers, and saying, "This is a terrible document. This is a takeover by that terrible Urban Fire Service". Those rural volunteers, who give up their time to protect the community, were being agitated and terrified about the consequences of this recommendation, which is why we had then to spend a lot more money on a further consultancy to settle everybody down and to convince them that we could amalgamate the urban and rural fire services under the single emergency services bureau.
That is now happening. We are just getting that bedded down, and what does Mr Humphries want us to do? He wants us to have another report. I could accept that, if it were not for the fact that when we last had a report Mr Humphries was out there standing on the truck at the meeting - it was in a pre-election context, so perhaps he did not really mean it - stirring the rural volunteers against this report, against the amalgamation which we now have in place and which is proving very effective. That is precisely the sort of thing that will continue to happen if Mr Humphries's recommendation is carried.
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