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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (20 August) . . Page.. 2896 ..
MR SMYTH (continuing):
But, Mr Speaker, have we as a community done all we can possibly do in terms of both pulling our own weight and backing up our fire services and emergency services in general? The community generally could do a lot more, given the grave conditions that we face.
He then said that he had spoken to different field personnel, directors and senior officers and they told him:
... the key to combating the threat is prevention and educating ACT residents as to their roles and responsibilities in protecting our community and territorial forests and grasslands. These personnel advise that it is imperative that we hammer home the lesson to the community as a whole and to our youth in particular just how fragile and vulnerable our environment is in the warmer months and therefore make our residents aware of their responsibilities when working, travelling through or playing in this fragile summer environment.
He went on to say:
Mr Speaker, this brings me to the point where we need to examine how effective our fire preventions are for our children ...
And what was the government's response on the day? Mr Corbell, the then education minister, said:
Mr Pratt's motion is unwarranted, it is uninformed and it is unnecessary. The government has the issue in hand ...
Mr Quinlan's response was just as interesting, Mr Speaker, because he said:
Mr Corbell has pointed out that ample education systems have been put in place and, to some extent, I think it demeans the emergency services and the fire service to be asking that we have more, because it is just so easy to ask for that.
Well, Mr Speaker, is Mr McLeod's response demeaning to the emergency services and the fire services when he says, "We need to have more education"? The answer is clearly not. There was a clear need and the opposition raised it with the government. The government demeaned what we said, because it was clear that we were the opposition and we wouldn't know.
But, Mr Speaker, the curious thing is that when you finally get hold of a copy of the recommendations into the 2001 fires, it is interesting to find that the government's own advisers were saying in recommendation 95 that we should develop a program of public education that looks at issues from these debriefs. It goes on to ask, "How should it be addressed? How can the public be better educated in emergency management matters and their responsibilities?"
So at the time when the government was telling the Assembly that there was no need for further education, that they, to quote Mr Corbell, "had it in hand", the emergency services people in their response to the Christmas 2001 fires were saying that we actually had to better educate the public in emergency management matters and their responsibilities.
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