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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2343 ..

operating structure of the Emergency Services Bureau was dysfunctional. That was a pretty important statement made in May 2003.

The inactive and the ineffective Labor government also ignored that comment, just as it ignored all of those recommendations coming out of the emergency of December 2001. It by and large dismissed the Attorney-General’s report and therefore, I would maintain, missed another early vital opportunity to enact urgent and vital reforms, and to perhaps design and table this legislation much earlier than this.

What about the McLeod inquiry? We now know from the very useful work done by the new emergency services authority, and the very useful work done by the men and women of the emergency services, including the volunteers of those services, that significant elements of the McLeod inquiry, including significant recommendations, have been quite rightly shunted to one side. Mr McLeod’s report, by and large, while of some use to the community in identifying some of what went wrong and some of what needed to be done to rectify the weaknesses in the system arising from the emergency management system in January 2003, was a frightful waste of time and money. It was valuable time lost, and time that was needed to urgently come to grips with fixing the emergency management system. Perhaps it was time that might have been better spent developing and tabling this legislation earlier.

The coroner’s inquest, on a weekly basis, starkly demonstrates the significant inadequacies of McLeod and the opportunities that were lost because the government did not act in a more urgent and inquiring way in 2003 to identify what needed to be rectified.

We are here today, 17 months later, and before us we do have now a useful piece of legislation. However, we had to sail through another highly dangerous bushfire season—and I am talking about the season just gone—smack in the middle of the worst period of drought the ACT has seen in decades, before finally we got this useful instrument on the table. That is not a reflection on the people who have drafted it. That is not a reflection on the men and women of the services who have gone around to consult, made suggestions and changed models. That is a reflection on the inactive government we have seen in all of this, the lack of leadership by government to urgently come to grips with this legislation here and now, and get it moving.

Now we are three and a half to four months out from the next bushfire season, in 2004-05, and now the government is going to be asking the new authority to mobilise in short order as a consequence of the passing of this legislation. It does not only have to organise, retrain and put in place new training regimes, but it must also enact new regulations relevant to bushfire hazard management in the next three and a half months. In that time, the government and its authority is going to have to have time to inform and educate the community before the upcoming bushfire season starts.

The government has been a bit tardy and a bit unfair, and the people are going to have to jump through hoops and kick backsides to get these things moving. I would remind this place that we, the opposition, introduced legislation in November 2003 that I wish the government had stolen. I wish they had taken it on board and rebadged it then—adapted it, adopted it and then rebadged it—so we could have got this process moving much earlier.

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