Page 48 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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It is worth reflecting on the notion of strict liability here, where someone is penalised for failing to do the right thing regardless of whether or not they intended to do harm or even whether they were reckless as to whether their actions would cause harm. Situations like the one we are debating today do not attract the application of strict liability.
I do believe the ACT government under Chief Minister Stanhope was unprepared for the fires and failed to communicate effectively and in a timely manner with the people of Canberra. I do not find, in the coroner’s report or elsewhere, the degree of negligence or recklessness that would lead me to support this motion.
Third, the government of the day did not set in place the conditions that led to the 2003 conflagration. It was the product of years of inaction from the period when the commonwealth—Labor and Liberal—controlled land management, as the reports I mentioned earlier attest. As Cheney and the other experts said, a fire like the January 2003 fire is the product of three things: fuel quantities and location, moisture levels and weather. Only the first of these can be affected by humans, and I believe that it took more than a year for them to reach the abundance that Cheney and others assert to be the cause of the fires.
Four, the community played its part—and here I do not want to lay blame, for whose fault was it that the community was not prepared as it ideally would have been? Governments again bear some responsibility for this, and perhaps the Stanhope government most of all, even though it had held that responsibility for little more than a year. There had been a fire in Curtin that threatened Deakin and Yarralumla only a year before. Mr McBeth, who said in 1994 that a fire like 2003 was inevitable, had some relevant comments to make about this. He noted that many Canberra people have lived only in cities, they lack the fire consciousness of rural dwellers and they believe that in cities they are safe from the natural forces of fire, flood and falling trees. As one woman said:
Above all I was shocked by the realisation that cities burn. I knew Australia had bushfires—in the bush, or at least in the rural fringes of cities where people like to live surrounded by trees. But not that whole suburbs would be destroyed. I also expected that governments would deal with a crisis quickly and efficiently. Although I know that no one can stop extreme weather conditions … I had always taken it for granted that in an emergency there would be someone there who knew what was happening and what I should do.
Like any disaster, this one cannot be undone, but something can be salvaged if we learn the lessons it can teach us. The government tells us it has gone much of the way, but here are some questions I would like answered before I will believe that adequate measures have been introduced.
First, does the return of the Emergency Services Authority to JACS mean that our emergency services will be subject to the same bureaucratic processes which, I believe, impeded swift and appropriate responses as when it was in the department in the summer of 2003?
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