Page 4903 - Week 15 - Thursday, 15 December 2005
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That goes to the heart of the motion here today: we do not get definitive answers back. We get the smoke and mirrors stuff; that is all we get. The fact that neither I nor the community can get any proper answers from this minister is the reason we continually ask questions on notice and questions without notice and, where necessary, submit FOI requests.
If this minister practised open and accountable government, as his government said that they were going to do, I would not have to put so many questions on notice. Mr Hargreaves, even now, refuses to give any real reason as to why there should not be an investigation into the ESA and its financial practices. Mr Hargreaves’s response speech was just a broadside of the normal John Hargreaves language. It was not a response that defined answers to the charges that we are laying here today. Not once in his response was he able to dissemble any of the arguments that we have put up today justifying why there needs to be an inquiry in this place into the efficacy and the procedures, the management, the support and financial management of the Emergency Services Authority and its agencies. He just did not do that.
This is why the government has a problem with this minister, the community has a problem with this minister and, indeed, the men and women of the Emergency Services Authority and its agencies have problems with this minister: he just does not go out there and scrutinise and inquire as to how well his own bureaucracy is performing. By not so doing, we see Mr Hargreaves repeating the failures of the Chief Minister and this government in January 2003—the failure to maintain an inquiring mind; the failure to go and scrutinise how well the then Emergency Services Bureau was preparing for that bushfire disaster coming upon Canberra; the failure by ministers to inquire of their bureaucrats and their senior public servants how well the agencies were performing and what the fire intelligence actually meant. This is an example of the concerns raised then. The opposition does not want to allow those concerns to continue and that is why we have moved the motion today, to ensure that we get some accountability on what is going wrong.
The minister has not explained at all why there are no internal audits. He says that the Auditor-General can turn up whenever she likes to audit. That is not the point, minister. The point is that, when the Auditor-General turns up to audit an agency, she wants to see and know that those agencies have already conducted their own internal audits, their ongoing financial and operational audits, so that they can self-audit. She needs to know that. If she sees evidence of that, she will be perhaps reporting more favourably—and this is not the case for the Emergency Services Authority.
Picking up on a point the minister made earlier: I did say in 2004 that the then minister for emergency services had introduced new legislation that definitely looked as if it was going to streamline and improve the old Emergency Services Bureau bureaucracy. I did say that, and it looked pretty good to me. The new Emergencies Act 2004 and the instruments therein, and the designs for what the new organisation was going to look at, while I did not think they were particularly perfect, certainly went a long way. But there is a very significant difference between what a government might lay on this table in terms of the concept of what they are going to introduce and then how well they implement it. That is the concern that we have: did they implement that legislation? Did they effectively ensure that the recommendations and the lessons coming out of the
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