Page 2977 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 September 2006
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investigating construction standards for bushfire protection in the ACT, and I think stage 2 should shift us further down that path. We have concerns that the government has been slow in developing and communicating building design and setting out requirements at the urban edge. Perhaps the urban edge is a place where there does need to be specific fire prevention in house design. There is the issue of specific bushfire operational plans and I am not sure that they are in place everywhere they should be.
The government’s amendment—I expect that this is the only chance I will have to address it—contains an interesting and informative list of the government’s activities. However, it does not address the lack of progress in finalising the SBMP, version 2, so we will not be supporting it. The problem from our perspective of only having the first stage of the plan is that it is too broad. There are still significant shortcomings within it and it is too open to interpretation. There is a lot of good scientific, ecologically based work around that understands fire as part of ecology but it is only when that plan moves to a more detailed stage—stage 2, which we are waiting for—that people responsible for delivering the plan will be able to access the science. So, for example, areas where there is said to be a high fuel load really need to be understood in terms of the nature of the plants, the environment in which they are found, the fire behaviour that would result if there were a lightning strike and so on. It is, indeed, impossible to accurately estimate the resource needs for fire protection in different areas if that science work is not incorporated into the detailed stage for the plan.
The capacity of government agencies is reflected in the amendment that I will seek to move later in the debate. The issue of collaboration between leaseholders and government is another matter. I do not know how Val Jeffrey at Tharwa or the rural leaseholders struggling for a reasonable payout from their Molonglo Valley leases feel about working cooperatively with the territory’s land managers. I hope some of that distrust is being mended. I believe that resourcing local area voluntary firefighters would help.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.40): The motion moved today by Mr Pratt is an important and timely one, given that we are fast approaching another bushfire season. As one gets older it seems that they come around with increasing rapidity. We already know that unless the weather patterns change significantly we will face the possibility of a very difficult bushfire season. We have already seen fires in the Kosciusko National Park and surrounding areas as a result of normal and usual rural burn-offs at this time of the year. These fires are already causing problems. When standard burn-offs are causing problems in the first month of spring we know that we will have a difficult time ahead of us in the upcoming bushfire season.
Mr Pratt needs to be congratulated on his vigilance in this matter and on his preparedness to speak forcefully and authoritatively on the problems facing the management of bushfires in the ACT. The ACT does not have a great history in relation to the area that I would like to concentrate on, which is bushfire fuel management. Bushfire fuel management is only one part of the strategic bushfire management plan but it is one area where we have been lax for over more than a decade.
The issues related to bushfire fuel management came to my attention back in 1994 when, under the administration of the then minister for the environment, Mr Wood, the McBeth report came to light. The report was essentially leaked because the authorities in the ACT
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