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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2380 ..

Clauses 130 to 147, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

Proposed new clauses 147A and 147B.

MR PRATT (9.25): Mr Speaker, I move amendment No 18 circulated in my name, which inserts new clauses 147A and 147B [see schedule 2 at page 2441].

I will first of all address proposed new clause 147A, which deals with disaster plans. I believe it is fundamentally important that the community as a whole risk analyse and plan for emergency preventative and emergency response operations for the most credible of all possible scenarios. The aim of the proposed new clause is to require the services to prepare such disaster plans; require each of the services to carry out operational planning for a full range of credible emergencies; impose important professional discipline on our services to think about all those possibilities, measure the needs and identify the shortfalls against those threats; and provide a basis for educating, informing and, where necessary, warning the community about potential emergency threats.

Proposed new clause 147B refers to the community communication information plan that I spoke about earlier. As I said, a fundamental weakness in the system arising out of the lessons learnt from January 2003 was that of warnings and communications to the community and services. Timely warnings to the community and then providing efficiently timely updates on changing situations are so fundamentally important that we believe this emergency function, too, needs to be enshrined in legislation.

It is hard to fathom that, after the community warning failures of January 2003, the legislation would not include something like that. I am glad to see that the minister has come up with an amendment, which we might want to haggle over or negotiate. That is great because I think that means we will be putting in place something along these lines. I might add that I have seen the minister’s amendment for the disaster plan and we might want to talk about that separately. However, I will finish dealing with my amendment first.

If we have a good community communication and information plan in place, surely the community will again have confidence in the way its leadership determines what those threats are and informs them as threats arise. That is the essential importance of having such a community plan—the community gets to know about it, the community is educated about it and the community can have a lot more confidence in the fact that the authorities can look after them in the future. More importantly, the men and women who work in our services will know, with some confidence, that they will be looked after as well.

MR WOOD (Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, and Minister for Arts and Heritage) (9.29): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to move amendments 1 and 2 to Mr Pratt’s amendment No 18 together.

Leave granted.

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