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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (12 December) . . Page.. 4779 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

I hope the Government will support this motion. I hope I will get support from the Opposition and the crossbenches. As I said, there is no set agenda, other than to give this Assembly the opportunity to hear from the Government and from any other interested parties on what they are proposing.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (10.38): Mr Speaker, I rise to urge the Assembly very strongly not to support the motion which Mr Osborne has moved today. In speaking against this motion, I want to argue that there are a number of reasons why the Assembly should not support this reference to the Legal Affairs Committee. Briefly, they are that, although Mr Osborne describes the process of change as being imposed suddenly on those who he claims are affected by the decision, in fact, the process of engineering change and addressing long term the quite endemic structural problems in the way in which the Emergency Services Bureau operated has been going on for quite some time. In fact, it began in the middle of last year, at least in a formal sense.

The process that Mr Osborne has involved himself in only quite recently has, in fact, been a process with a great many tos-and-fros and ups and downs in that period. I accept that Mr Osborne has not had much exposure to these issues before, but those within the emergency services community of this city have had considerable exposure to the issues that have been given rise to here. I would respectfully suggest to Mr Osborne that his statement that, when he was invited to be briefed on this subject some months ago, he did not have much interest in the subject demonstrates, I think, that this issue has come to his attention only because of concern expressed to him by some constituents. Although I am sure they are very real concerns, they do not represent the concerns, certainly, of most people involved in the management of emergency services issues in this Territory or even of most people who are emergency services volunteers in this city. I will come back to those points in a moment.

Mr Speaker, let me describe very briefly what these changes are all about. It has been clear for some time that there were some problems with the operation of the ACT Emergency Services Bureau. Obviously, many elements of the ACT's emergency services generally - and I include other services in that description - have been the subject of much review and much change in recent years. Members will be aware of changes that have occurred to the bush fire brigades, bringing them closer to the urban fire brigade; changes in the structure and management of other emergency services; the integration, at the North Curtin centre, of all of the ACT's emergency functions, except for the police. In some cases those changes have been quite traumatic. There have been some debates in this place on those changes.

The changes to the ACT's emergency service that have been announced more recently reflect a desire to engineer a better means of operation of that service than I think we have had until now. Essentially, it is about taking what are now three units of the emergency service and dispersing them to line up with or be co-located with the existing ACT bush fire brigades. A dozen or so brigades have operated for some time around the Territory on a dispersed basis. They are a unit of operation which, I would suggest, has worked well. They provide a larger number of locations from which to operate

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