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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (20 August) . . Page.. 2944 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

I said in the debate yesterday when we were discussing the government's response to the McLeod inquiry that what Mr McLeod does is he talks about developing a culture of learning, of learning from what happened, and putting in place a response based on our assessment of what happened, what went wrong and what went right. But that is not what we hear from those opposite. What we hear from those opposite is, essentially, "We told you so"and now "It's all your fault."That, essentially, is what the motion is about: "We told you so"and "It's all your fault."

Mr Speaker, I do not know whether anyone else-certainly my colleagues on this side of the house-has looked at the debate of 13 November last year, the so-called debate when Mr Pratt was alleged to have told us so about additional bushfire education being needed. If you look carefully at that debate-in fact, you do not even have to look at it carefully; you just have to read it-you will see that it is very clear what Mr Pratt was on about. He was on about education in schools. Every single member who participated in that debate responded on that point.

They did not talk about broader community education. They did not talk about the need for warnings to the general community. That is not what that debate was about. To say anything else is simply untrue and rewriting history after the event to suit your own purposes, and crude purposes they are, too. It is very clear that it was not about community education; it was about education in schools.

We have all heard the quote about how Mr Pratt believed, as the opposition's spokesperson on emergency services, that the emergency services had done everything they could and he saluted them. Those were his words, Mr Speaker, and I think they make pretty clear what his position was at the time.

Even if Mr Pratt had provided information along the lines that he alleges he did in the debate last November, the Liberal Party has still failed to demonstrate how that would have made any significant difference because, as the Chief Minister has said, as a community we had overall, up until January, become quite isolated from the perception that we could be impacted upon by a major bushfire event. The reality was that there had been no dwelling lost in the ACT to bushfires since 1950. I think that lots of Canberrans thought that it was probably going to stay that way.

That is not blaming anyone. That is not saying, "It's your fault, not the government's fault,"because that is not what the government is saying. It is simply saying that they were the circumstances in which we as a community found ourselves. The events of January 18 have changed all that and the challenge from now on is to learn from those events and make sure that we are better prepared into the future.

Mr Smyth in his motion calls on the government to do certain things. In particular, he makes a request at paragraph (3) of his motion for the government to outline to the Assembly an assessment of the future needs of those affected by the bushfires in regard to counselling and other services.

Mr Speaker, I happen to think that the response of the government to the disaster of January 18 has been a very credible one and a very comprehensive one. The work of the people in the recovery centre, the Bushfire Recovery Taskforce and every single

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