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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 2048 ..

leave it there. Despite the snide remarks of the government on page 10 of their response to the select committee’s inquiry, I will be supporting the third appropriation.

MR PRATT (10.01): This will be painless; okay, relax.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Pratt, direct your comments through the chair and get on with it.

MR PRATT: I rise to make just a couple of comments. Of course we do support the appropriation bill. Firstly, the observation that I would make in relation to the ESB of course is that the expenditures for the accommodation and generator outlined in approp 3 are quite appropriate. My observation on that would be: why did it need to wait until appropriation 3 to carry out an introduction to service of equipment which, perhaps, should have been identified and appropriated for within 90 days of the January 2003 fires? It is good to see it there, and I congratulate the government for taking firm action, but perhaps four or five months too late.

In relation to the EBA and the $10.784 million appropriated: well, we clearly have to support that; there is no choice, there is no alternative there. We do understand the challenge that the government faces in terms of this New South Wales parity issue. So we will not be churlish and criticise that amount of money: of course not. Whether or not the government can find any more money is, of course, the $64 question. They probably cannot; I think you have probably gone about as far as you can possibly go, haven’t you, minister, in terms of the EBA? But I would make the comment that we have decried the time it has taken for the negotiations. I guess we would wish the government had knuckled down in March 2003 to commence the negotiations and wonder whether those negotiations might have been expedited somewhat earlier.

On the fire fuel-management issue: the appropriation under DUS, Department of Urban Services, refers to funding of, I think, $0.3 million for the bushfire fuel reduction management plan. Of course we support that. I notice that $1.6 million had been appropriated in appropriation 2. That is a lot of money. We will not criticise that amount of money, but we would make the comment that the $1.6 million and the $0.3 million, concurrently in those two appropriations, I think, is probably a reflection of two years of catching up—two years of catching up to get to grips with the fuel management problem. There is a lot of fuel management to be undertaken.

If I could just move to one side on this issue and have a look at the comments in the select committee report on this particular issue, the bushfire fuel management plan: I notice that recommendation 7 in that committee report wanted to see all further expenditure and activity curtailed until there had been further inspections undertaken to see whether the authorities were clearing the right excess fuel. Well, I am highly critical of that. Surely, if we have learnt at least one thing since December 2001, and repeated after January 2003, it is that we must trust our emergency management authorities to get on with bushfire fuel management reduction.

We know that there are thousands of tonnes of excess fuel lying around the ACT and so we should support the government in appropriating the funding it has to get on with and expedite the operation of reducing that excess fuel. I am quite disappointed that a committee here has determined that that probably was not going to be a wise thing when, indeed, we are probably playing two years worth of catch-up and we need to

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