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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (30 January) . . Page.. 46 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

We must ask appropriate questions about what happened. We should not apportion blame, but we must take heed of the answers that we get. As Alan Ramsey so poignantly reminded us in the Sydney Morning Herald last Saturday, we cannot afford to find ourselves in the situation that we did after the fires of 1983 whereby many of the opportunities were talked about and suggestions were made on how we might rebuild our lives and how we might do something to fireproof our communities across the country, but very little was done. Let us hope that a proper inquiry will tell us what we need to do know in this town and how we might best minimise the dangers from fires in the future.

Everyone in this place and across the community has his or her own pet theory about how we can fireproof for the future, but today is not a day for pet theories and glib one-liners. It is a day for drawing stock, of paying testament to the sense of community that has been shown in this place, the selflessness that we have all talked about, the fact that volunteers had to be turned away. People in my office said that when they turned up with cartons of water and trays of sandwiches, the response was, "Thank you very much, but we have more than we can cope with. Please take them home and use them yourselves."There was the supreme irony of community groups getting together to have recovery barbecues and raise money for the community. I do not think that it struck them that it was ironic to have a barbecue in the shadow of smouldering suburbs, but what it showed was real soul-soul in the so-called city without a soul.

Perhaps we need to do more as a community to help ourselves. It has been distressing to hear of so many people not being insured and, in addition, of the growing number of people who were underinsured. It is, of course, a decision that householders make to insure or not to insure and we need to stand by those families who have been left with nothing, but it is an issue of important public policy to address why people are not insured.

I was very pleased to see the initiatives taken by Ms Dundas in this area, because it is an important area, not just for renters, but for the people who, for whatever reason, let those things lapse because they do not think that they are important. The $10,000 grant that they will receive will not go anywhere near meeting the cost of repairs and restoring their lives. We have to be aware that next time this happens, and it will happen in some form or other, that $10,000 may not be there.

If there is to be some good emerging out of this sorry story, it must be in the changes that it brings to the way that we think about ourselves and the way that others think about us. Last Monday, Dennis Shanahan wrote in the Australian that Canberrans have paid the price for the constitutional decree that we be in the bush. He said that Sydney-Melbourne rivalry was the genesis of the bush capital, which was built from scratch in a dry valley and designed to hide as much of its commercial and residential life from sight with trees.

Other people, such as Paddy McGuinness, said similar things but in a much less kindly way and with much less thought about the impact that their words would have on the people hearing them in this town who were suffering so much. No matter how it was said, though, the question that we must ask ourselves frankly is whether the way we live is truly sustainable. Most of us have come to think of sustainability in terms of resources we need and use, but I think it is time for us to extend that concept a little further and consider how we coexist with our immediate natural environment.

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