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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2358 ..

Something like this is absolutely essential. There was a wake-up call in December 2001, in terms of the bushfires anyway. That really was not heeded and then we had the tragic events of January 2003, which have at least, I suppose, sadly been a catalyst to a restructure of the emergency services organisation. We are seeing now, through the coronial inquest, some of the very obvious problems that occurred in some part because the previous organisation was not all that good, all that it could be. Indeed, improvements very clearly needed to be made.

My committee, the legal affairs committee, had the benefit of the briefing—and I thank the minister for that—very recently when Major General Dunn and his assistants came along and took us though the features of this new bill. I think the features of this new bill are indeed logical, as I heard someone say when I was following this in the anteroom.

Mrs Cross: A military man, what do you expect?

MR STEFANIAK: Well, it does help, Mrs Cross; it certainly does help, especially an army man. If you want something done, you cannot really go past an experienced soldier for getting organisations right, especially in this sort of area. I’m sure Mr Pratt would agree with that.

Mr Pratt: Go, the regiment.

MR STEFANIAK: Well done, yes. Quite so, Mrs Cross. Certainly he was ably assisted by a large number of other persons in the organisation as well—a very capable team, as I said. We have had the benefit of that. I see my old friend David Prince smiling there. It was a very creative presentation too, Mr Prince, as some of my colleagues said when we were there only a week or so ago—it was not even a week ago—about the briefing you gave us.

I think in the past one of the problems in anything like this has been that people have not listened to experts, people who have actually got their feet on the ground, practical people who know what they’re doing. I speak of people like Val Jeffery. I know Val has probably had run-ins with all sorts of people in this place over many years, but let’s not forget the fact that, because of him, Tharwa basically did not burn. And there are other people around, the experts like that, the people who really know what they are doing who, I certainly hope—it might have been a point I made when we were having the briefing—need to be utilised in any structure. I see in this particular structure there is provision for people such as that to actually continue to give assistance and give advice.

It is all very well to have a structure but also you need to have flexibility, which is one of the great principles of military matters as well—flexibility actually to ensure that those on the ground, those in a hot spot, be it in a fire or be it in some other emergency, have the necessary discretionary ability and power to actually take immediate steps to save life and limb and respond as they see fit to a situation. And that has been one of the main criticisms, I think, made of some of the previous structures—the fact that it was difficult getting messages up and down the chain of command, apart from just technical issues such as bad communications, et cetera.

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