Page 4111 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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Mr Speaker, there are a number of areas where the plan must be tightened. We want to see citizens and land managers having very clear understandings of their responsibilities—you and I as occupants of properties on the urban edge and owners of five-acre blocks—and we want to ensure that the CEO of the Department of Territory and Municipality Services fully understands that he has a number of bushfire operational plans for the length and breadth of the urban edge, that his budget is $X million for hazard reduction through the winter and spring and that he must complete in time the tasks according to the management plan and the BOPs.
We want to see clarity there. We want to see responsibility achieved by all of our responsible officers. Further down the chain, we want to ensure that the emergency officers, the people I have listed before, know very clearly what their tasks are. We want to see more delegation to brigade and SES captains and fire brigade officers. We want them to be given the job of going out into their areas of responsibility and identifying the hazard reduction tasks that are going to need to be done. We want that power to be given to our officers to go and determine those things well in advance of a bushfire season.
Whilst the existing SBMP indicates that these things should happen, we are saying that we should lock these analysis tasks in place and delegate them further down the chain of command and give brigade captains that authority to do their job and report back to their COs. We also think that, coming from the bushfire operational plans, you would be able to prepare brochures for residents of suburbs, particularly vulnerable suburbs, with information specific to those suburbs about the bushfire hazards in their areas.
I come to the point now of saying that we want to see more bushfire operational plans prepared. I understand that a handful of bushfire operational plans are in service at the moment and they tend to revolve around the land managers that are now given responsibility under the ACT governance system. The opposition believes that there should be many more BOPs prepared and they should be prepared for smaller vulnerable areas. For example, a vulnerable suburb or a group of vulnerable suburbs would have their own BOPs designed and the purpose of those BOPs would be to lay down the preventive tasks that must be done before the bushfire season, to lock in place the way that emergency services will respond in time of a bushfire and to lay down issues of relevance. For example, the bushfire operational plan for the Duffy-Chapman area would lay down the evacuation routes, depending on the bushfire scenario; secondly, where the waterholes might be, if there are any; and, thirdly, where the routes are that emergency vehicles can use and which gates have to be unlocked. We believe that these things need to be detailed in a bushfire operational plan for a particular area so that when the brigade captain or incident control officer arrives on the scene and picks up the plan they have got a fair idea where they have to go.
Turning to the terms of the legislation that we have tabled today, proposed section 71A relates to hazard reduction tasks and lists the responsibility for the preparation of those tasks, proposed section 74 (2) lays down a benchmark for what we believe the bushfire breaks should look like and their width, and proposed section 74 (2) (a) lays down the maximum level of fire fuel to be allowed. We might
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