Page 3150 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 August 2005
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Mr Pratt interjecting—
MR STANHOPE: You need to understand. When you have your briefing with emergency services, they will explain to you the detail, the importance and the implications of the development of individual or effective incident action plans—
Mr Pratt interjecting—
MR STANHOPE: for each particular incident and the role that they play in our evacuation strategy. Those incident action plans will be tailored to the precise and unique situations—
Mr Pratt: You’re going to write them up now, are you, Chief Minister?
MR STANHOPE: It does maximise the advantage, as we see it. We are preparing an evacuation strategy that details the unique situation and circumstances of the ACT, namely, a community of 325,000, not particularly densely populated, with wide roads generally and with plenty of open space. It provides us with an opportunity and an operational response that is not available, for instance, to the Sydney CBD or other densely populated cities.
Mr Pratt: But you still need plans.
MR STANHOPE: It recognises, of course, the importance of an all-hazards approach to emergency management that addresses both natural and non-natural threats and the extent to which they widen the evacuation requirement to include the consequences of terrorist attacks. So the ACT evacuation strategy is based on an all-hazards requirement. The work has been undertaken by ESA in collaboration with ACT Policing and reporting to the emergency management committee. The basis of the evacuation strategy is, as I indicated earlier, the Emergencies Act 2004.
To go to some of the specifics of the question that Mr Pratt asked in a broader request for an exposition on how the evacuation strategy developed and where it is at, one of the central aspects of the strategy is the capacity or the requirement to develop and implement an incident action plan in respect of the incident. What that does is require—
Mr Pratt: They’re busy writing the plans now, are they, Jon?
MR STANHOPE: standard evacuation plans to have the capacity to incorporate, as I said before, the specific arrangements into each particular site and respond to the specifics of that particular incident. As to the role of the SES, as the commissioner, Mr Peter Dunn, explained at a press conference today in some detail—
Mr Pratt: So where’s the plan?
MR STANHOPE: and as I think every member of this place that takes an interest in emergency management would know, the SES has been completely restructured and reorganised in the last 15 or 16 months. The SES of today is not the SES of 18 months
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