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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1812 ..

McBeth made a number of findings that were highly critical of all land management agencies, particularly reflecting on their lack of expertise and resources dedicated to fire hazard reduction and so on, and found that there was no coherent government vision to deal with these matters.

McBeth referred to a document prepared by Mr Chaney from the CSIRO for the ACT Bushfire Council in its submission to the Hannon Group review in 1991. Chaney made similar points—in particular, that without active involvement of the community in fire preparation and defence, a conflagration fire would overwhelm the firefighting resources of the ACT, leading to severe suburban damage. In other words, people on the urban fringes needed to be prepared for some involvement in defending the properties against fire.

In March 1995, in response to the McBeth report, the then Minister for Emergency Services, Gary Humphries, established a task force to look specifically at fuel management practices in the ACT. The task force included the chief fire officer, firefighters, ecologists and conservationists. It reported in August 1995.

Two of the subsequent recommendations focused on community awareness and education programs and four centred on urban edge guidelines and relevant building standards that took into account bushfire hazards. It does not appear that those recommendations were put into effect. I am very interested in how the history of these bushfire concerns informs our final analysis of where we have failed in our preparation for these fires and in our handling of them.

The point about the 1994 and 1995 recommendations is that work on the public awareness and participation parts of the process does not seem to have taken place. If these activities had been more energetically pursued, arguably we would all have appreciated the danger more clearly. The communication and mobilisation protocols would at the very least have been considered ahead of the fire striking us.

I raise that because I think it is important. I notice that Mr Smyth speculated so much in his speech—“What if? What if? What if?” While that obviously suits the Liberals’ agenda at this point, it is not in the interests of the ACT just to do that. We have to look at all the “what ifs” and take into account all this work, good work, that has gone on over the years and has not been taken up. Really, what is coming out of that work is that anyone and everyone concerned with managing the emergency would have been better prepared to consider the worst and act on that possibility and we might not be looking at a phone call as the signifier of our inadequate response.

The first investigative process in the ACT since the January fires was the McLeod inquiry, which had a very limited brief. I heard Mr Smyth say as part of his case that the Chief Minister was misleading about the McLeod inquiry. I do not quite know what he said—I would have to look at Hansard—but Mr Smyth seemed to be implying that the Chief Minister had made statements about the nature of the McLeod report which were also misleading. My memory of the McLeod report was that it was not going to duplicate the coronial process. It was put in place as an administrative review to see what could be done by the next fire season. It was not claiming to be what Mr Smyth apparently said. I do not want to misrepresent Mr Smyth, but I was concerned about what he said.

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