Page 3533 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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the bushfire brigade and the SES unit bank accounts. The volunteers are not happy that the minister has said that he is forming a committee to look at what can be done to solve a unit and brigade accounts management issue against the Financial Management Act.
It is a legitimate question for the government to ask if there is a contradiction in the way that unit and brigade bank accounts have been traditionally managed against government solicitors’ advice that the Financial Management Act presents a series of problems. That is fair enough; that is a legitimate question for the government to ask and that is a legitimate exercise for the department of JACS to have to examine on behalf of the minister. But what the volunteers are very unhappy about is that it has to require another committee to be formed for—in the minister’s own words—the matter to be attended to and resolved at the end of the bushfire season. At least, that is what the minister said some three to four weeks ago. If he is now hastening that time line and moving to do something in the next couple of weeks, that will be an improvement on what is currently a poorly managed issue.
However, the volunteers are not well served. They are not feeling well supported on this issue. The volunteers are saying that the communities give them their trust, raise and donate funds for various units and brigades to use, either to equip them, to be used for training purposes or to be used for other operational purposes, and the communities do not want to see the funding transferred into trust funds. The brigades and the units certainly do not.
That is one of the options that we know JACS are considering because they have said that they think the only way around this issue in terms of the Financial Management Act hurdle that has now been put up is for these funds to be collected in trust fund accounts. The minister has said here today that that is an option that he is looking at. He has certainly given the undertaking that brigade and unit bank accounts would be put under the umbrella of trust fund account management arrangements and he has said that the signatories to those trust fund accounts would be the same signatories that exist now within the brigade and unit committees.
That is half comforting; but it still does not allow the brigades and the units the independence and the flexibility to manage those accounts as they need to. For example, if on a Saturday morning rivers brigade find that one of their pumps has broken down, will they have access to trust fund accounts for the $100 or so to go to Bunnings and perhaps repair it on the day, or are they required to go through a number of bureaucratic hurdles and hoops to get signatures on a working day within working hours?
The question raised by the brigades and the units is this: if they have raised funds from their communities in good faith for expenditure for their own operational purposes, why can they be no longer be trusted to do that? Is this a grab by senior officers in emergency services to simply exercise, I suppose, some form of administrative power, perhaps well intentioned, to lock these funds away because they are frightened of being exposed? Do officers in the emergency services make these sorts of decisions as part of a backside-covering exercise because there just may be an outside chance that under the Financial Management Act problems may be found in the way that units are managing these accounts?
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