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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2353 ..

should be working on and dealing with, such as accident prevention. I hope that, with the passing of this bill, each of those four emergency services units actually focuses on this community education awareness program and we start making the community more aware of fires that can happen in the home and what happens in other emergency situations; not just what happens when there is the possibility of a large fire hitting the city.

I’m also particularly pleased to see that the objects of the bill include reference to protecting not only life and property but also the environment. There was a lot of nonsense spouted after the bushfires that biodiversity management had somehow interfered with bushfire prevention. This bill clearly demonstrates that those two objectives need not be in conflict and it is clearly not in the interests of forests or wildlife to be regularly razed by a bushfire.

Finally, Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to recognise the fact that emergency services in the ACT only function effectively with the special effort of volunteers. The bushfires taught us the importance of our emergency volunteers and their bravery in preventing even greater harm that could have befallen Canberra in both the 2003 fires and the 2001 fires.

I want to make it clear that this bill is not, as I understand it, designed to derogate any recognition or responsibility from these crucial volunteers. This bill gives important recognition to the dependence of our emergency services on the goodwill and selflessness of volunteers and we must continue to value their time and their dedication.

This is a bill worth supporting and I am glad, as I have said, to see that it is focused on retaining the things that are good about our current emergency services systems, just working to improve them, and that we will have better communication structures into the future, better community awareness structures into the future, but we will retain the dedication, the knowledge and the desire to protect this city that make our emergency services one of the best.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (6.04): Mr Deputy Speaker, the opportunity to speak to this bill is welcome because the bill has been a long time coming. That is not a criticism of Commissioner Dunn and the process that he conducted; it is a criticism of the government and the glacial approach that they take to most of their activities.

I was curious to hear Mr Hargreaves’s approach to this bill that “it gives effect to the McLeod recommendations”. Mr Hargreaves, no, it does not. You need to look at page 208 of McLeod to know that the McLeod report is now seen for what it was—something that, in its recommendations that we would have a single-service emergency services authority, was absolutely unworkable and unsuitable to ACT conditions. So, Mr Hargreaves, sorry, you’re wrong. You need to read page 208. You also need to read page 210 where McLeod actually suggests:

Both the Tasmanian Fire Service and the Country Fire Authority in Victoria are examples of the successful merger of bush and urban fire services; they would be good models to follow.

Mr Hargreaves, if you had actually bothered to take the time to read this bill and had gone to clause 3.2 and chapter 4, you would see that, instead of having a single officer in

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