Page 2982 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 September 2006
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Mr Hargreaves. And that is standard for Mr Hargreaves. Again, he does not answer the motion. They have got a whole department to write this stuff for them. All they have got to do is get up and read it. But they cannot even do that.
We have concern about the lack of progress. What Mr Hargreaves moves as an amendment is not a commentary on the progress of finalising the strategic bushfire management plan. And that is the problem.
We also do not get from those opposite the things that they have started to wind back. McLeod said, “Let us have a strategic bushfire management plan, with the operational plans that come underneath it.” But we are already moving away from McLeod. McLeod said, “Set up the ESA.” Now there is no independent ESA. McLeod said, “Set up a fuel management unit inside urban services.” That has been gutted as well. We see this slow winding back.
We have inside the ESA an organisation that is waiting to get some strategic leadership because its budget and priorities have not been determined. They have not been told how many staff will be cut because of this government’s and its ministers’ financial ineptitude and mismanagement.
The problem at the heart of this is that the government has not driven this issue. It has not been driven genuinely since 2003. It was not driven by Mr Quinlan. It was not driven by Mr Wood. It was not driven by Mr Hargreaves. Now it is up to Mr Corbell who, unfortunately, is not here today.
The question is: when will we see a finalised version? The answer is that we cannot get an answer from the government. Depending on which answer you want to take from Mr Hargreaves, this thing is under development, is finished or will be in operation in 2010. That is the whole point. There is no clarity. There is no direction. You have got the shadow minister putting together maps showing the areas.
If we go back to the bushfire fuel management plan that I helped launch in 1998 because of the Labor Party ignoring the McBeth report, suppressing the McBeth report, hiding the McBeth report and certainly not acting on the McBeth report, we see a repeat of history. This is what is happening again now.
We heard in estimates that we do not have enough volunteers to run a category 1 fire for the required period of time. There just are not enough volunteers. “We are doing the work,” says Mr Gentleman. “We are combining research with this, that and the other.” But the reality is, according to what we were told in estimates—and you were there, Mr Gentleman; Mr Pratt was there—there are not enough volunteers in either the RFS or the SES to continue the work, should it be required.
The work will get done, Mr Speaker, and you know the work will get done, because the volunteers will keep coming back like they do every time. We had the wakeup call in December 2001, and it was absolutely ignored by the government.
There was a report with 109 recommendations. We had assurances from the then minister that they had all been implemented. The majority of them had not been implemented, not in a meaningful way, not in a way that improved operational
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