Page 2966 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 September 2006
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The excuse by the former minister that land management decisions in relation to ACT Forests were to blame for the delays is unacceptable. Why would you neglect the urban edge in terms of having an SBMP that details protection measures for that urban edge for the sake of a piece of forest for which land management details are still being refined? Given that this was last year’s excuse, surely these land management issues should have been resolved by now anyway.
The question of managing forests can be written into the SBMP at a later date in the form of an appendix, but, for goodness sake, let’s get version 2 of the plan in place, let’s make sure it is concrete and let’s make sure it carries authority so that the community can be assured of better protection against bushfire disasters or at least a mitigation of them, a minimising of the threat, and the authorities can have something comprehensive to work with.
The detailed plans that should be included in the final version of the SBMP have to be propagated in winter so that land managers can be given instructions to commence preparatory programs before the bushfire season and also know those programs that they need to continue through the bushfire season. Given the way that this government is going, we obviously have no hope of seeing the final version of an SBMP until the next fire season, if we are lucky.
It is outrageous that 3½ years after the fire disaster which exposed massive shortcomings in the ACT’s emergency management system we do not have a final version of the SBMP in place. The minister needs to come clean on why the Emergency Services Authority is dragging the chain again and again on producing a revised version, a final version, a concrete version and is leaving the ACT community at unnecessary risk in terms of bushfire management and prevention.
There are lots of good people doing lots of good work right now to try to prevent or minimise the bushfire risk, but when you have the sort of strategic planning that we have in place which is in draft form, too loose, lacks authority and has holes that you could drive a damn truck through, there are too many things that can fall through the cracks. You cannot afford to fiddle around with bushfire preventative planning, but that is the problem with the SBMP that we currently have. So, given the way this government is going, we obviously have no hope of seeing the final version of the SBMP until the next fire season, if we are lucky.
There are many other questions arising out of the whole SBMP debacle and also around this government’s management, or lack of, of bushfire operational plans, a major component of any overall bushfire management plan. In fact, BOPs should be annexes to the SBMP and should fall under its overarching strategy. That leads to a number of other concerns that I now wish to raise.
Firstly, what are the real powers of the commissioner or his delegates, the chief officers of the fire brigade and the RFS, to demand—I stress “demand”; I do not mean encourage—that land clearances and fire prevention activities are carried out under this government’s legislation? Secondly, what are the real obligations of land managers to undertake fire prevention under this government’s legislation? I put it to the Assembly
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