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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1802 ..

responsibilities to the Assembly and he most certainly did not fulfil his responsibilities to the Canberra community.

In addition to the core of this no-confidence motion I would also like to take the opportunity to put the Chief Minister’s actions of misleading the Assembly into context. We know that after the December 2001 bushfires the Auditor-General’s report made recommendations on the state of the Emergency Services Bureau. We were assured by Mr Quinlan, who was the minister for emergency services at the time, under the leadership of the Chief Minister, that the recommendations were being implemented and all was under control.

Yet the recommendations were not implemented and we faced the January 2003 bushfire disaster with the improvements needed within the Emergency Services Bureau and the warning system incomplete. Indeed, in answers to questions put by me about why the Chief Minister had not acted at all, let alone with urgency, to the recommendations of the Auditor-General’s highly critical report handed down in May 2003, which said that the ESB was dysfunctional, the Chief Minister ridiculed the report. He ridiculed the advice of an auditor, yet another expert, just like he and ministers had ignored and ridiculed Mr Cheney and belittled the expert and experienced opinions of rural land-owners and bushmen and bushfire fighters who had been warning of impending disaster. We had to wait until August 2003 for the McLeod report to be released for the Chief Minister to take action.

The people of Canberra went through the January 2003 bushfire disaster being assured by the Stanhope government that all was okay when, in reality, the Emergency Services Bureau was suffering from operational and systemic weaknesses that had been brought to the government’s attention with no action. The Chief Minister blindly accepted the 106 recommendations of the McLeod report before they were officially released to the public or the other members of the Assembly, and only then have things begun to slowly change for the better. However, when it mattered, when Canberra was under real threat of destruction, the Chief Minister’s management of the Emergency Services Bureau and key departmental executives was ineffective, weak and ignorant.

All of these examples of failure to act, failure to follow up and failure to inquire, in the face of substantial evidence during and after a critical event, starkly point to the personal and professional failures of the Chief Minister that have pressured him to mislead. There is little in the way of an operational and emergency cultural make-up in his professional make-up, and this flows to his government.

The Chief Minister’s failure to improve the governance of the Emergency Services Bureau after he was warned of its weaknesses by both the Auditor-General and the Liberal opposition is a failure to perform as the leader of the ACT government. In addition, his failure to set up reporting structures and his lack of emergency management as acting minister for emergency services has been highlighted many times over the past 16 months.

Let’s return to 18 January and the Chief Minister’s performance on that day. This is the acting minister for emergency services who did not think to call the head of the Department of Justice and Community Safety first thing in the morning of 18 January.

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