Page 175 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 23 February 1994
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Bushfires
MR STEVENSON: My question is to Mr Connolly in his capacity as the Minister for putting out fires. It concerns the recent bushfires in the ACT and New South Wales. What review has been done for the ACT with regard to those incidents, and what actions have been taken as a result of that review?
MR CONNOLLY: Members will recall that during the recent bushfire emergency in New South Wales the ACT made a magnificent contribution. Within an hour-and-a-half of a request from New South Wales for assistance we had our first team on the road, and throughout the emergency we were sending integrated teams of rural firefighters, professional urban firefighters, ACT Emergency Service officers and ACT Ambulance Service officers to Sydney. They operated as a task force. The Sydney fires, obviously, were one of the most extreme fire situations Australia has faced for many years and there are enormous lessons to learn from them.
To answer Mr Stevenson's questions as to what we are learning and what we are reviewing, we are doing two things. Mr Bruce MacDonald did the independent review of the fire and emergency services, the report of which was released during the Christmas break, and I think I wrote to all members and enclosed copies of that report. As he had just completed that, I would acknowledge, theoretical review, I asked him to come back and do a quick audit of how we performed at the sharp end. We had, within a couple of weeks, a fire at Curtin which had the potential to be reasonably serious - fortunately, it was put out and it did not do any major damage to property or life - and we had the Sydney emergency. So Mr MacDonald has come in to audit our performance, based on the experience he gained in doing the major review. That document, when I receive it, I will pass on to members, either by tabling it or, if it is out of session, by writing.
Mr Lucas-Smith is the Chief Fire Control Officer for the ACT Rural Firefighting Service and during the emergency was in control of all New South Wales operations for periods. He was often taking the midnight to dawn shift at the State fire control headquarters at Rosehill. That is an enormous responsibility for an ACT officer. It was an enormous vote of confidence by Australia's largest fire service in the officer who controls rural firefighting in the ACT that they were prepared to put the State in the hands of Mr Lucas-Smith. He was standing in for Mr Koperberg during those evening periods. He has been going up to Sydney on a regular basis and sitting in on the debriefing sessions that Mr Koperberg has been running with his senior people and with senior people in the New South Wales police and New South Wales urban fire services. I expect that we will get a formal report from him, but certainly he is benefiting from their experience.
The other thing to say is that, all-up, nearly 300 people from the ACT fire and emergency services went to Sydney. Mr Berry hosted a function to formally thank them on behalf of the ACT community when the emergency ceased. Those 300 people have been in the toughest university of firefighting, in that they were exposed to this major emergency, and that is an enormous asset to the ACT. Our people went up and learnt from their experience. So we are learning from our experience, in that our 300 firefighters were exposed and they are passing that on through their informal contacts. We have a further review being done, a fairly quick review by Mr MacDonald, to assess how we perform practically, given that he had made a major theoretical review of the structural changes that
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