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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 2 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 324 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

There were no houses lost and no major injuries as a result of these bushfire events-in all, an outstanding effort when we consider the impacts that the New South Wales bushfires have inflicted on some communities during similar weather conditions.

Mr Speaker, the government is very concerned that these fires appear, on initial investigations, to have had no natural cause of ignition, which leads to a conclusion that they were deliberately lit or occurred through some careless act. The government has already announced the desire to look at arson offences and penalties, and the Attorney-General intends at a later time outlining to the Assembly some of the approaches we might take to reduce and combat the arson problem.

About 615 people from the ACT, New South Wales and Victoria were involved in fighting the bushfires. Of these, 397 were volunteers. They all gave up their Christmas with their families and went home at the end of each shift dirty and exhausted. Most worked in shifts of 12 hours on and 12 hours off over the critical period, which lasted for about five days. It is estimated that 24,000 person hours were committed by volunteers to these bushfires over the critical period.

I digress from my prepared speech to say that I visited the Emergency Services Bureau a number of times and got a sense of the work that was being done. Of course, there was that high-profile fighting of large walls of fire with some sort of romance or adventure attaching to it, but beyond that those workers came back for several days after fires were contained and did the mopping up. That is a dirty, filthy, monotonous, grinding job, but to their credit those volunteers did the whole job. They did not just appear on the first couple of days and start to fade away.

In all, 29 government and non-government agencies assisted to reduce the impact of the bushfires on the Canberra community.

Mr Speaker, I would like to table a document listing the individual agencies and organisations that were involved, so that members of the Assembly are aware of the total effort. I seek leave to incorporate it in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The document read as follows:

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