Page 65 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2006
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these units established, with another expected 58 units having to wait indefinitely to be established.
Let us look further at the government’s failure to properly resource our SES volunteers. Late last year numbers of SES volunteers said the cleanup from that storm which they were deployed to was managed disgracefully and some SES units could not access vital safety equipment and other resources to clear fallen trees. We have raised those issues in this place; so I do not need to go over the detail of that again.
In some cases, though, just to remind you, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, volunteers were not supplied with the required drinks or meals—the basic support you would have thought to keep our men and women in the field. There should not be the need for complaints such as this, as the government should be resourcing our volunteers sufficiently. The government can boast all they want about the great increase in volunteer numbers, but this is a superficial achievement when our volunteers are not then being fully supported.
The government has also recently introduced legislation to discipline volunteers. That is an issue which we have some concern about. In one sense, you can understand why we need legislation to look at some of those issues, but there are many questions still facing the fairness of the treatment of volunteers in terms of the way that all elements of the emergency services are managed and supervised by government. The Stanhope government has a lot to answer for in placing what would appear to be a gag on our selfless volunteers who seek the right to professionally speak out about the operational standards that they have to work to.
Finally, in terms of the way we treat and support or should be treating and supporting our volunteers, I raise this issue: I believe the government has made it even more difficult for both our volunteers and full-time personnel by failing to undertake adequate bushfire fuel reduction along the urban edge. The government cannot ask our volunteers and our professional personnel—fire brigade, police and other emergency services personnel, as well as SES volunteers—to deploy to save property and lives if the government neglects to prepare adequate firebreaks to allow volunteers and other emergency services personnel to deploy safely into those areas when we ask these people to go out and save property and lives.
The preparation by other arms of government to reduce the bushfire fuel load along the urban edge so that we give our men and women volunteers and other professional emergency services personnel a head start when they get to that fire front is very, very important. I believe the government has failed to do this in this current bushfire season. We will have a lot more to say about this.
This matter of public importance is clearly an attempt by Ms Porter, on behalf of this government, to deflect attention from the areas in which it is clearly failing. It is failing to resource, support and train our volunteers properly. It is also, as I just pointed out, failing to put other preventative measures in place to give our men and women volunteers a head start when we ask them to put their lives on the line.
To sum up: despite the government’s pride in the Productivity Commission’s latest report showing that volunteer numbers have steadily increased, what the latest figures
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