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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2982 ..

I go back to the communications issue. The plan to expedite the introduction of new radio equipment and a new system is welcome, but it is three years late. A sizeable amount of money has been appropriated and funding is accumulating from previous budgets as well. If the new commissioner was able to fast-track the introduction to service of this outstanding need, why the hell did it take so many years to get to this point? Communication equipment—personal equipment, vehicle equipment and the radio network and the system behind it—is very important. It goes to the heart of efficiency and is also life saving, so I think the community will be very concerned that it has taken so long to crack this.

We have talked before about the McLeod report. In our view, the McLeod report has held up the expedition of the new capability. I will not go into that again now, but we have talked about the 17 months that it has taken. At least now the appropriation provides the means to get on with it, but it has been a long time coming. As I have said before, we sailed through another bushfire season with nothing but the old capability to keep us going.

I raise the issue about the training of the services. I notice that in the appropriation resources and in the emergency bill there is talk about moving along with a joint training academy—something that was put together with ESB—and the funding for the joint academy is welcomed. The academy will have an important role to play in training the basic skills needed across all of the services, for example, administrative tasks, first-aid training and some communication training. The joint academy will have a role to play in supporting the authority in joint service training—that is very important—and the services can come to a central training area to do some other common training as well.

We need to be very careful that this does not replace specialised service training. I would like the Treasurer to correct me on this, but I cannot see in the appropriation where funding is guaranteed for each of the chief officers for the services to ensure that the chief officers can carry out their special-to-service training, that is, the core business training needed within those services. The reason for breaking up the old ESB cluster and going back to dedicated services was to give them autonomy. Autonomy means that they should also have the ability to carry out their own training for those important skills. I am not sure that the appropriation has covered that requirement.

I am pleased to see the Calwell ambulance station has now been properly targeted with funding as well, especially because those living in the Lanyon area in the south are almost out of range of existing ambulance services. So, that is a very welcome move.

Funding for the extra community fire units is important. The government talks about 20 new teams. We maintain that this is far short of the essential needs of the ACT community. We argue, for example, that Kambah, which is a suburb of something like 4,000 people and is certainly vulnerable to the west and north-westerly fire approaches, would need a minimum of five community fire units, and that is a conservative estimate. So extrapolating that example, we believe that somewhere between 40 and 50 CFUs would be required.

We are not saying the government can fund that, but we would like to see a statement somewhere saying that 40 to 50—or in that realm—is the target to be achieved over

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