Page 3618 - Week 11 - Thursday, 16 November 2006
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volunteers want? Yes, you are a proud of them, but you do not trust them and you want to control their money, have your fingers in the pot.
Let’s go to equipment. Yes, you have bought another flood boat; that is fantastic. Asking how often the flood boats have actually been used for flooding in the ACT would be a very interesting question on notice, Mr Speaker. Yes, they are important when used for crowd control in events around the edge of the lake and providing support there, but the volunteers did not want a boat. They did not ask for an extra boat. They asked for an elevated work platform.
They will also get a light tower. The light tower will be here in a couple of weeks. Fantastic, a light tower! Did they want a light tower? No, they wanted an elevated work platform. It is like Christmas: “You will get what I give you, not want you want.” That is how it is being run. Let’s listen to the volunteers. Everyone will remember the incidents over December and January of last year, particularly during the Chief Minister’s cricket match last year, when an enormous number of trees were brought down. Unfortunately, volunteers were put at risk because they did not have an elevated work platform.
There are a number of types. You have seen them on construction sites. There are little ones on four wheels or ones on three wheels that you can drag behind a truck. They are smaller than the Bronto, which is being replaced, as is appropriate, because it is at the end of its useful life, and that is a good thing. But for many of the things that the state emergency services workers do the Bronto is not appropriate. They need something on a smaller scale. Yes, they can put up the light platform and see whether a tree is hanging over a house, but they have no safe way to get there.
The safest way, Mr Hargreaves—through you, Mr Speaker—is to listen to your volunteers. Ask them what they want and what they need to do their job properly so that they are not putting themselves or others at risk—not wear the chaps that they do not have or put on the old chaps that are frayed, damaged and broken—while they try to use a chainsaw on a tree hanging over a house or on a roof. But they will not be doing it on an elevated work platform. They will be doing it at the top of a ladder, and that is not safe. Listen to your volunteers, because they give you their service for free and all they want is the tools of the trade to do it properly.
Let’s go to the volunteers. Before you get to the training of volunteers, you actually have to have volunteers. We have had something like a 10 per cent reduction in the number of SES volunteers and we heard at estimates hearings this year that the RFS has approximately 450 volunteers, not all of them active. The Australian Institute of Management’s best practice report said that to staff a category one fire, with two shifts a day going out over seven days, you need 700 volunteers. We do not have them. We do not have them because we cannot keep them.
Mr Hargreaves was very pleased to see the joy on Val Jeffrey’s face when he was given a slip-on. I am sure the joy was there. It was probably the first thing he had been given by the government for a long time. They will not give him a pump or a bridge and they will not let him keep his school, but he did get a slip-on. You cannot drive to Tharwa and you cannot get an education in Tharwa, but it has a slip-on in case the village is threatened again.
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