Page 3328 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 October 2006
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We have also implemented a standard early warning system for the territory and we have put in place a whole range of other measures to improve training for our firefighting personnel; in particular, revised AIMS training, Australian instant management system training, for ACTRFS senior officers, including the incident controller, operations officer and planning officer, to meet national competency standards. We have created full-time community relations and media liaison positions.
Most significantly—I think this is where the opposition fails absolutely to understand the responsiveness and the comprehensiveness of our response to the events of 2003—we have in place new incident control and coordination arrangements; in particular, an emergency coordination centre for incident response, coordination and planning, based at the ESA headquarters in Curtin, plus a new incident control facility at both the RFS headquarters in Fairbairn and the land management headquarters at Stromlo. That provides us with incident control rooms on the eastern and western sides of the city and potentially gives us the capacity to manage incidents on both sides of the city simultaneously through separate incident control centres.
Mr Speaker, these are all very significant improvements to our preparedness and response to a fire. How dare those opposite seek to suggest that we are nowhere better prepared? How dare they? It just shows the pathetic political posturing they seek to achieve through the sort of motion that we have today.
Mr Speaker, this censure motion seeks to deal with a couple of other issues and I will now go to those in some detail. First of all, I go to the issue of the community fire units required. Mr Pratt, the challenge for you is to say what is the number. Did the government every say X number of units? I challenge Mr Pratt to find in any government document, any budget document or any statement by a minister the number of units the government has agreed to fund and is aiming for, because there is not one.
The McLeod report did not recommend a specific number of community fire units. The McLeod report did not recommend that. So this particular element of the censure motion is just plain wrong. We have staffed 28 community fire units. Over 550 volunteers have been trained and there are 750 in the program. That is a very significant number of people involved in protection along the urban interface. But, at the end of the day, community fire units are not about putting out fires. Community fire units are about protecting people’s property. That is very important and the capacity that we have there is very valuable, but they are not about fighting fires. That is the job of the fire brigade and that is the job of the rural fire service. That is where the government in this particular budget has chosen to focus its resources.
Mr Pratt’s other critique is about failure of the trunk radio network and FireLink. Mr Pratt clearly was not listening during question time today because, if he had, he would know that the TRN works extremely effectively in the built-up area, in the bushfire abatement zone and in many other elements of the ACT, but there are a couple of areas within the Namadgi national park where it does not work well. We have never hidden that. We have never walked away from that. We have never denied it. The reality is that VHF does not work well in those locations, either.
Mrs Dunne: It works better.
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