Page 52 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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The Chief Minister has never taken responsibility for his own and his government’s negligence in the events leading to the 2003 disaster. Chief Minister Stanhope is as good as guilty of reckless negligence, resulting in the deaths of four people; the maiming and injury of up to 400 people; the destruction of 487 houses, commercial properties, valuable and irreplaceable scientific infrastructure, public infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and bushland, much of it scorched beyond the soil surface—that terrain is deeply damaged to this day, by the way—and the wiping out of significant pockets of wildlife. That is due to Chief Minister Stanhope’s poor emergency management in 2002 and to his professional choking—to the point of leadership paralysis—in the critical period, 15 to 18 January 2003.
I now intend to lay out before this place the litany of failures and downright cover-ups that have plagued this Chief Minister’s tenure in office in relation to the events of January 2003. I intend to make out the case for why this Chief Minister must resign. I will call on every MLA in this place to show cause as to why, when they address the facts of the case against Mr Stanhope, they should not vote for his resignation.
I now want to address the negligence of this government in 2002. It was on Mr Stanhope’s watch that the drought and bushfire conditions affecting the territory and the severely neglected New South Wales forest areas immediately adjacent to the ACT, and dangerous to the ACT, deteriorated more dramatically than they had in 2001—or, for that matter, ever before. The bushfire index in the second half of 2002 and early 2003 was 104, the highest recorded. When this factor is combined with both the extreme drought index and the fuel hazard loadings, believed to be about 10 metric tonnes per hectare, or six to 10 times the size of acceptable loads in better conditions, the ACT was ripe for an explosion sometime in 2002-03.
In November 2002, the opposition asked what education and information programs about this threat had been launched. I recall that there was little in place in the way of substantial programs. I note too that, in her inquiry report, Coroner Doogan found that in 2002 the ESB failed to maintain fire trails, bridges and other infrastructure needed to allow rapid response. This, we now know, hindered firefighters during the disaster. During the Christmas Eve 2001 fire, I recall ABC radio struggling, but doing their best, to put out warnings and ongoing information about where the fire was located. If ever there was a wake-up call about our warning and information systems, that was it, but we saw the same mistakes repeated 12½ months later.
Let us now look at Mr Stanhope’s negligence in the period of the actual January 2003 fires, 8 to 18 January 2003. Here we had lightning strikes starting first three fires and then another fire—in, as I described earlier, the most extreme bushfire threat season seen for many decades. Yet this government moved at snail-like pace to tackle these fires and contain them. I refer to the coroner’s damning findings. The first key finding is that there existed a “failure by the ACT Emergency Services Bureau to attack the Bendora, Stockyard Spur and Mount Gingera fires in the first few days.”
What we knew very quickly in February 2003 was that Mr Stanhope and his government simply did not have the political will or sense of urgency to tackle the threats head on. During the week after 9 January, it became well known that there was widespread dismay amongst firefighters and expert observers about the lack of
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