Page 2029 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
tied after 4½ years of mismanagement in emergency services. It took you 17 months after the McLeod inquiry recommended the creation of an independent statutory authority. It took you 17 months to come into this place and finally table legislation to create the Emergency Services Authority. I remind you of that.
In that 17-month period we sailed through another bushfire season. In 2003-04 we sailed through another bushfire season because of your failure to act and your failure to table in this place any reasonable legislation. That says it in spades. This government has been a very poor manager of emergency management, and here we see it again: this attempt to strip away the title, Emergency Services Authority, so that we can have it subsumed within the department of justice and community services.
It is something that this government will rue. The men and women of the emergency services will not thank you. They will not thank you at all. At the 11th hour, I call upon this government to see some commonsense and to ensure that this authority remains a statutory authority. If you think that by putting it under the department of justice and community services it is not going to affect its operational capability you are wrong, because when you subsume it within a department and then have that department reach down and interfere with the running of its administration, that takes away from its commissioner the power to make that organisation responsive. You cannot even see that, can you? This is a sad day for emergency management in the ACT.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for Planning) (10.34): I just want to take the opportunity tonight to put some things very clearly on the record and, in essence, to reiterate a range of comments I have made in the media and publicly since the budget was brought down on Tuesday.
The government is proposing not a single change to the operational powers of the four emergency services, their chief officers or the commissioner. These are the fundamental elements that guarantee the operational independence and capacity of our emergency services. If the government were seeking to remove or to undermine in any way those statutory powers of the chief officers and the commissioner as they relate to their operational responsibilities, the criticism from the Liberal Party would be accurate. But the criticism from the Liberal Party is not accurate because that is not what we are doing.
What we are doing is changing the financial reporting and administrative responsibility that are essentially the back end of what the emergency services do. The emergency services have an operational element which is the bulk of its operation, and those are the four emergency services: the ACT Ambulance Service, the ACT Rural Fire Service, the ACT Fire Brigade and the State Emergency Service. Those four arms perform vital work for our community. They are composed of committed volunteers and paid officers. They do very important work for us all. This government, unlike those opposite, has made the investment in those services.
When we came to office we inherited a legacy of massive underfunding and neglect, and that legacy was revealed all too painfully during the fires of 2003: no emergency control capacity; outdated, indeed antiquated, radio communications; inadequate resourcing and training of staff; and inadequate provision of vehicles and equipment. All those things
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .