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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 4696 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

going with McLeod? The government is saying, "We can't do Mr Pratt's; we're going to do McLeod."They are in conflict with all their volunteers.

In question time, the Chief Minister said, "We're going to be honest, open and accountable. We'll be out there listening."They are listening with closed ears. The words of the volunteers are falling on deaf ears and the government has problems out in the brigades. In the last five or six months we have raised the issue of morale and preparedness for the coming season. A lot of good work has been done, but there are still a significant number of volunteers who feel they are not being listened to. The Volunteer Brigades Association voted for a modified Pratt model and I believe that this legislation would allow what was voted on to be established.

Mr Corbell said that the process has started. That is the point: the process has started and is going on and on and on. One of the failings of this government, one of the murmurs in the community about this government, is that they are willing to talk something to death, but they are not willing to act, they are not willing to make decisions, they are not willing to lead on issues. We need clear leadership and a clear position on this issue and I do not think that it is too much to expect that to have occurred by now.

Mr Pratt managed to get around and talk to most of the organisations involved and he managed to garner from them support for his proposal. We have seen that support in the form of letters and commentary in the Canberra Times and discussion in the media, but we are yet to see any evidence that the government actually has a workable model. The fire season has already started and the cycle is still pretty bad, although some rain on the weekend has helped. All it has done is delayed the start of the season somewhat and promoted the growth of grass.

If the rain goes away and the summer heat comes in January, February and March, as it normally does, we will have more fuel and we will not have an answer. We have gone into this season basically with the same structure as last year, a structure that Mr McLeod said did not work and a structure that the Auditor-General said was dysfunctional, but we have a government that is complacent enough to take this structure into the current fire season. You have to ask why.

The objection seems to be that there will be too many boards. These are different trades, as it were; these are different areas. Being an emergency services volunteer is different from being a full-time professional metropolitan firefighter. Being an ambulance driver or a paramedic is very different from being a volunteer bushfire fighter. They are different trades. They actually deserve, I suspect, I think, I believe, I know, different boards to look out for them. Mr Pratt has proposed the operational model, the model that delivers services on the ground when required in an emergency situation, not a bureaucratic model that says that bigger structures are better. You would have to say that we tried that model. That is what we did when we put the ESB in place in 1996. It did not deliver in January this year.

McLeod has said to scrap it. McLeod seems to suggest that a bigger model is better, and it is not. If the government's complaint is that Mr Pratt's model is too bureaucratic because it provides for a number of boards, it has not understood the model. Perhaps the government should have asked Mr Pratt or got a briefing about how the model would work, because the way the model works is that it actually releases the operational arm of

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