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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2798 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

To me, reports such as the McLeod report and government responses just look like a lot of words. The Bushfire Council has operated in pretty much the same way since 1936. All these words have been thrown at it but it still continues to see itself as having an important role in the management of bushfires in the ACT. I do not think that its concerns about the McLeod report can be ignored, and we cannot continue to just throw pieces of paper and words around in the hope that the situation will get better. Also, we cannot say our words are the best, that they are the only words and that our model will rule regardless of what anybody else thinks, which I believe is unfortunately the path that the government is following.

The McLeod report itself makes it quite clear that the 2003 January bushfires were not the once in a hundred years event that we initially thought they were; and that the ACT is under constant threat of bushfire similar to the ones that we saw in January. The Chief Minister stood up in question time yesterday and said that he was complacent, that he was not as aware of bushfires as he should have been, and that we need to change this attitude throughout the ACT.

But I know of very many people who live in the ACT and its surrounds who have been concerned about bushfires, who watched the bushfires rage through Black Mountain, I think, in 1994, who watched the bushfires in the late 1980s rage across what is now Gungahlin, and who have remained concerned for that entire time. What they have been saying and putting forward through many reports and many other consultations over the last 20 years has to a certain extent been ignored. This is why we cannot, as has been the focus of some of the debate today, point our finger at one person and say, "This was your fault."

Over the last 40 years there have been ongoing changes to the way that we deal with bushfire threats in the ACT, and they all have resulted in the situation we had in January of 2003. I think that means that our ability to deal with such incidences cannot be determined in one day or, in the case of the McLeod report, over the weekend. I am concerned that the government received the McLeod report on 1 August, and by 4 August it had decided that everything McLeod said was gospel. We still await the outcome of the coroner's inquiry into both the 2001 and 2003 bushfires. We await the outcome of any number of other inquiries into different aspects of what happened across Australia in January.

I believe that if we are taking the time to have all these different inquiries look at different aspects, we should wait, get that information and bring it all together. We should talk to the people who fight the bushfires and the people who live in the communities that are continually threatened by bushfires to find out the best way to move forward, as opposed to just picking up one report, the first report we see, and saying it is gospel.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I have often wondered what people will be saying 10 years from now when they look back at how we dealt with the January 2003 bushfires. I do not want them to say we rushed things, we didn't speak to the right people, we jumped the gun and we were afraid. I want them to say that we considered in a clear way what led to the disaster of January 2003 and that we dealt with it in as

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