Page 3532 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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government.” This is not government money and he acknowledged that. He said it is money that has been given to the volunteers to run the brigades, to do volunteer activity, as a thankyou from the community.
So what we have got is a minister who acknowledges that the money is not government money and will never be government money. He says, “We will not have our fingers in the tin to balance the books,” but he said that the FMA is about moneys managed by the government. This is not government money. That is why it is more than reasonable to say that the FMA does not apply to money donated by the community to the volunteers. If you stand out there with two buckets—one for donations for volunteers, one for donations for the government—I know which one will be full. There will not be a cent in the donations to the government bucket. And Mr Corbell knows that because I assume he has been out with his brigade; he has done the bucket brigade stuff too. He would have seen the thanks and praise that the people of Canberra regularly heap on the volunteers, the emergency services and the rural fire service.
But we have got a minister captured by his department, a minister who will not listen to the volunteers, a minister who is hell-bent on having a committee and more discussion and taking an entire fire season, if necessary, to resolve an issue that is very simple; an issue that can be resolved simply by passing Mr Pratt’s bill today and an issue that can be resolved for all time so that it will not rear its ugly head again. That is the problem. The head of the VBA, in response to Ms Leon’s email, said, “How do we make sure that this subject does not come up every couple of years; that way, if someone, for instance pollies, want to change it, it would need to be debated again.”
That is the problem for the volunteers. The volunteers in all of this want certainty as well. What they are not getting from their minister is certainty and what they are not getting from the department is certainty. What they do get is enormous support from their community as a thankyou for the hours that they put in, the efforts they make and the risks that they take to serve their community. This minister ought to get off the back of the volunteers and allow them to do their job—by passing this bill today.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (3.22): It is disappointing that the minister has not come forward today to perhaps embrace the opposition’s legislation, mainly so that we could bring to a quick resolution a problem that has created a fair amount of angst amongst our volunteers.
Of course, our volunteers are working overtime now to prepare for what is, on anybody’s measure, a pretty dangerous fire season. Some of our volunteers are saying that the fire season for 2006-07 is every bit as dangerous as was that of 2002-03 and they are very, very concerned. We have talked in this place often about the drought index that the ACT currently is struggling with, and the bushfire conditions seem to be highly dangerous.
Instead of our volunteers being able to focus their planning and their thoughts on and prepare their equipment and their work for this season to protect our community, their eyes are taken off the ball by a number of issues. The paramount issue, which is quite negatively impacting on them and certainly affecting their morale, is this issue about
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