Page 4110 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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volume 2, and the opposition says that the bushfire management plan must be a finalised document, not a draft document in perpetuity. We do not think that that is useful. Of course, with these things you will have flexibility to update the plans as needed. We believe that a final document as a concrete action plan must be put in place and that plan should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis.
Mr Speaker, we do not think that the Emergencies Act 2004 gives full responsibility and full authority to senior emergency management leaders in the ACT, and by that I mean the commissioner down to the SES, RFS or fire brigade captain or incident control manager. We want to see their authorities strengthened and made a lot clearer. We are moving to do that with this legislation. In many places the commissioner and chief officers certainly have to do certain things under the SBMP and those issues are quite clear, concrete and firm, but in far too many places throughout the plan there are statements that the commissioner and his chief officers may act in certain areas. I am saying that the aim of this bill is to replace “may” with “will”.
We want to see a bushfire management plan that states that the commissioner, the chief officers, the brigade captains, the SES captains and the fire brigade incident control managers will carry out tasks. That is what they want to do. They want to have that authority. They want to know that they will have to do something. If the management plan and the bushfire operational plans state that the officers in our emergency services will do something or must do something, they would know that there is an expectation and they would know that the community realises that they have the authority, as opposed to saying that the commissioner may think about doing this or he may think about doing that.
A couple of examples in the Emergencies Act do concern me. For example, section 71 says that the commissioner may declare a bushfire abatement zone and that the commissioner may, after consulting with the conservator and the planning and land authority, declare an area to be a bushfire abatement zone. We pay the commissioner a hell of a lot of money to make a determination, after he has consulted with all of the stakeholders, with the minister’s backing and we want to strengthen the SBMP so that he can do that.
I will give a quick example of what has happened in recent weeks with the bushfires around the country when there was a breakdown in communication and action. I refer to the example in New South Wales of the Baradine-Pilliga fire about two weeks ago. In an incident which has been well chronicled the local RFS captain was desperate to put in a fire break in the middle of the Pilliga region after a lightning strike had started a fire. He knew that he had to move quickly to contain that fire. Unfortunately, he could not get approval in time from the New South Wales parks authority. He could not get approval to put the fire break in because the authority said that there were endangered species in that particular area and asked him to wait until the following day before putting in the breaks. By the time the following day appeared, the whole damn area had been burnt out. I understand that, according to the New South Wales opposition spokesman on forests, lots of endangered species were killed in that period. That fire got away, got way out of control and disappeared. Those sorts of examples still exist in New South Wales. We do not have those problems here, but we do want to make sure that we will never have those problems anyway. A strengthened strategic bushfire management plan would ensure that that would not happen.
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