Page 2000 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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The Audit’s key suggestion to overcome the deficiencies in governance and management arrangements … is that the Emergency Services Bureau be replaced by a statutory authority.
Let me remind the Assembly that, around mid-2003, in this chamber, the Chief Minister dismissed the findings of the Auditor-General’s report, which had found the Emergency Service Bureau to be inadequate and dysfunctional, leading to a massive breakdown in command and control during the 2003 disaster. Perhaps that underlies the attitude of this government in respect of what the ESA has become and what the findings of the McLeod report were. Maybe the Chief Minister is hoping that Canberrans’ memories of that disaster and the inefficiencies of some of those organisations will have faded. Perhaps that is what he is hoping for.
Despite the comfort of chief officers in the emergency agencies and services, and the rank and file with operating independently from departmental bureaucracy—yes, they may have questioned the bureaucracy that was beginning to become the Emergency Services Authority—they wanted that agency to continue, effectively, as a stand-alone entity, unencumbered by JACS or any other department.
The men and women of those services and their chief officers understood the operational efficiency, the responsiveness and the advantages that the streamlining had brought them by cutting the old Emergency Services Bureau away from JACS and creating a new stand-alone agency with the operational authority to respond quickly, without having to look over their shoulders to see what the department was thinking. That is what the men and women of our services understand. If you do not know that, Chief Minister, go and ask them.
An independent emergency services authority is critical to the effective emergency management of the ACT. This was recognised by the opposition in 2003 and, finally, the Stanhope government got around to recognising that too. That is why they clearly spent good millions of dollars creating the ESA in the first place.
So, you see, it was deeply alarming to the Canberra community, to the ESA workers, to the workers and the operators in the emergency services agencies, to the commissioner and to the opposition to hear the announcement in the 2006-07 ACT budget that the government is now going to recreate the structure of the ESA we fought so hard to abolish in 2003.
For the sake of our community’s safety, in case of another emergency, the ACT cannot afford to allow bureaucracy to once again dominate the ESA’s operations. You cannot have too many heads reaching down and managing the way that our emergency services operate.
You cannot have too many administrative heads, too many people operating in the tail and a commissioner and chief officers trying to run the show, if you want them to be training efficiently and if you want them to be able to respond very quickly to emergencies. That is why McLeod, other experts in the field and the people who have served on ACT bushfire councils over the last decade and a half, all applauded the move to cut the ESA away from departmental bureaucracy.
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