Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2344 ..

Let me turn to a number of issues in the bill that I want to talk about—first, the community communications and information plan. I am somewhat disappointed and a little concerned that the bill does not properly tie down and clarify the responsibilities and the mechanism for the establishment of the government’s warning and community communication strategy. It is quite pleasing to see, though, the responsibilities and roles of both the minister and the authority with regard to providing warnings, launching the states of alert and emergency and providing updated reports to the community.

This is a vast improvement and yes, the legislation has addressed community communications but not to the extent that I think it should. The legislation does not lay down the framework of the community communications plan in detail—I am not talking about drilling down into the regulations—but the legislation is the place where we should see at least the outline of the concept locked in place. It should also describe the obligations of others in the community, particularly the media. It does not specify the essential tasks mandated for key government agencies and the sorts of tasks that we would like to request of the media and other authorities over which the government does not necessarily have control.

Why not enshrine those vital functions in our legislation so that we can show the community what we are on about? I cannot understand, given that warning the community in January 2003 was fundamentally a failure, why the legislation has not gone much further in comprehensively detailing the principles underlying the need for warning and community communications. To that end, we will move substantial amendments to rectify what we believe is a gap in the legislation.

I am going to eat some humble pie here. We have received significant feedback from members of the emergency community about the need to clarify the boundaries of responsibility between the areas of operation of both fire services. I did acknowledge at the time that there had been an extensive amount of work undertaken by the drafters to really sharpen this and they have done a good job. I had submitted a group of amendments that I had prepared in respect to this and now I have taken those out. I must, Minister, thank the government and its departments for a late meeting to get to grips with this issue.

I do congratulate the professionals and the drafters for going to great lengths to much more sharply define the division of responsibility between the two fire services, and to remove the dangerous ambiguities that have bedevilled some responses in the past, and may have caused unnecessary confusion during some of the emergency responses. There are questions around that and we are all going to have to monitor that. There are technical concerns that we will certainly monitor from this side of the house, but I think it is a pretty good plan. I must also thank the crossbenchers and their staff for joining in last night in coming to grips with these issues at such a late hour.

Bushfire risk analysis, clause 72: we think that, while some quite good principles have been laid down, this area needs to be sharpened as well—the responsibilities and roles of chief officers relevant to bushfire risk analysis. We think that risk analysis is so important that we need to pull those four or five jigsaw pieces out of the different parts of the legislation, regroup them and quickly describe what those functions involve and who is responsible for analysing risk here and who is responsible for it there.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .