Page 1450 - Week 05 - Thursday, 13 May 1993
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Government to take. What you now want is another report. Mr Kaine a few months ago said, "Minister Connolly, do not just hide in reports. Do not hide in consultancies. Get out there and make a decision". I made a decision. Now you want me to have another report. You are impossible to please.
Madam Speaker, Mr Humphries's final attack on the competence of fire officers related to an allegation that there was a situation some time ago where, as a result of fire officers performing a rescue, valuable evidence was lost and a charge was impossible to bring. I will accept for the moment the validity of that allegation. I would say, first, that, if it comes to the question of whether you should extract an injured person from a motor vehicle or preserve evidence, I am sure that nobody - fire officers or police - would question which you should do first. If you have to move in and destroy evidence to extract an injured person, that is what you do. There is, however, a particular level of expertise in relation to forensic material. The headlight of a motor vehicle which is a wreck may be able to show, through forensic testing, whether the headlights were on or not, or even whether the indicator was on, which could lead to valuable evidence later on.
Mr Humphries: Yes, they might, if you have the police there to do it.
MR CONNOLLY: The knowledge of that is a particular level of expertise. I have discussed this in the presence of both Mr Dance, the Fire Commissioner, and Mr Dawson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police. There will be additional training, consequent upon the eventual takeover on 1 July of road rescue by the Fire Service, to ensure that all fire officers are well aware not of the expertise involved in doing the forensic, because that is done by the scientific squad anyway, but of the potential importance of material evidence at a road accident scene and the need to acknowledge that, if a police officer says, "Don't touch that" or "Leave that part of the wreck alone", the fire officers will understand that that is for forensic or crime reasons and do what the police officer says.
In the atmosphere we have had in the last two years, there have been a number of cases where both fire and police officers have probably not acquitted themselves as well as we as legislators would wish them to do, because of this constant ongoing squabble we have been unable to resolve, no matter how hard we tried. Last time, when we were talking about that constant ongoing squabble, you called upon the Government to act decisively, to pick a single service and give them the responsibility for road rescue. We did that in relation to the Fire Service, a service which, unlike your claim, is not overfunded. In fact, on the document that has been tabled, we spend slightly less than we should, according to the Grants Commission, on the Fire Service. Your grievous error in relation to your claim that we spend twice as much was based on your failure to read the small print in the Grants Commission report, something that a more experienced person in relation to financial management, such as the leader you recently dumped, would never have done because he reads the small print in the Grants Commission reports. Your claim is therefore based on a false premise.
We have two services. They duplicate a role. We can either give it all to the police service and have more firemen sitting around doing nothing - - -
Mr Humphries: And reduce the number of firemen.
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