Page 37 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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have saved those 500 homes or those four lives? I struggle to comprehend the coroner’s criticism of my actions in this regard. I could not have acted or spoken in any other way. I would do the same again under the same circumstances.
Mr Speaker, it was appropriate and inevitable that the issue of the adequacy of warnings be looked at by the inquest into the 2003 firestorm. There is no doubt that the absence of warnings has been the issue that has most disturbed many members of the public. They wonder what they might personally have done to better secure their property if only they had had a few days or a few hours to prepare. They cannot accept that this was a disaster so profound in its scale and so beyond the comprehension of even the most seasoned and experienced professionals that normal procedures, normal protocols, collapsed in upon themselves.
I sometimes ponder what it must have been like for those men and women of our emergency services who were the decision makers and the advice givers during the 2003 fires. Few of us, thankfully, will ever have such calls made upon our professional capacity. Few of us will ever be expected to apply our everyday understanding of how the world works to a world that suddenly conforms to none of our expectations—a world gone mad.
I and my ministers relied on the operational experience and expertise of the emergency services during the 2003 firestorm. I do not say this in order to deflect attention or apportion blame. Indeed, while no-one disputes that the process and systems in place in 2003 proved quite unequal to a disaster of the magnitude of the firestorm, the men and women who fought the fires before and after they reached our city did so according to assumptions and rules that no-one—not the government, not the members opposite me in the chamber, not the courts—had ever suggested were manifestly inadequate.
I raise the matter of the government’s reliance on expert agency advice simply because that is how government works. Neither I nor my cabinet colleagues had the kind of operational experience or expertise—or indeed the responsibility—to make judgments about whether warnings should be issued or the content and timing of such warnings. Had I or any of my ministers tried to interfere in operational matters or override operational decisions made by professionals, we would rightly have been exposed to criticism. Indeed, as I am sure the Leader of the Opposition knows, this was precisely the criticism levelled against his own Liberal government by a coroner in relation to the implosion. But our having relied on expert advice, which is what we did, seems to expose us to criticism as well.
It is curious that the coroner saw fit to give us the benefit of her opinions on the Westminster model of ministerial responsibility—a concept that is entirely a political construct and which is utterly unknown to the law. Putting to one side the coroner’s competence to comment on matters so unrelated to her judicial powers, it is, of course, quite appropriate that such concepts be teased out here in this forum.
Back in 1980, Sir Billy Snedden, in the course of a speech on ministerial responsibility, said:
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