Page 3619 - Week 11 - Thursday, 16 November 2006
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Mr Hargreaves: You gave him absolutely nothing except a bollicking.
MR SMYTH: There you go again, Mr Hargreaves. Go the slag. For the SES you need 350 volunteers, according to the report, and there are less than 200. Let’s go to the heart of this matter. You are asking fewer people to do more and more with less equipment, out-of-date equipment, broken equipment and inappropriate equipment, but we share the pride. Perhaps Jon Stanhope should come back in and we could all hold hands here and share the pride.
Pride is not going to help you in windy conditions at 2 o’clock in the morning when you do not have an elevated work platform and there is a broken gum hanging over a house and some poor volunteer has to climb up a ladder. They often do it in breach of the SOPs because they know that if they do not, more damage will be inflicted on people and property. They put themselves at risk and they should not have to. Revenue of $900 million above expectation has flowed into the government’s coffers but they cannot spend $30,000 or $40,000 on an elevated work platform, and that is all it would cost.
We do not have enough volunteers to start with, so the existing volunteers will be used even more should we need them. They will come; they always do. When the bell rings, the smoke rises and the phone call comes, the volunteers always respond, but when they get there they often cannot get a replacement helmet because we have got too much braid going on leather jackets in the upper echelons. They cannot get an elevated work platform because there is a bevy of four-wheel drive Prados at headquarters. Headquarters gets the gear, but not the volunteers. Yes, have the pride, Mr Hargreaves; share the pride. But what the volunteers resent is the lack of support from ministers like you who have allowed the ESA to run amok on projects that have not been delivered and on uniforms that have been purchased when volunteers cannot get helmets. (Time expired.)
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella) (4.22): I thank Mr Pratt for raising this matter of public importance today. During his speech Mr Pratt mentioned the function of training. However, I think he missed the point that the training that is currently being undertaken by emergency services is to national standards. It is not a decision, at the whim of the government or emergency services, to create a paper war over training.
All emergency services across Australia now focus on these training standards, and for good reason. There is strict adherence to occupational health and safety guidelines, Mr Pratt, because the safety of our personnel is always paramount. Training to national standards is useful in the context of the ever-increasing reliance on cross-border responses. We need to ensure that personnel in the ACT are trained to the same level as their interstate counterparts.
In the ACT Ambulance Service, the minimum educational standard for staff employed as intensive care paramedics is an advanced diploma of health science, which is a three-year course of theory and practical study. In addition to the minimum ICP qualifications, ACTAS also maintains certificate 4 qualifications for aeromedical retrieval and rescue and call-taker and dispatch staff working in specialist areas. Currently, eight student paramedics are undertaking the full three-year advanced
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