Page 53 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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urgency on the part of the ESB and other government departments in tackling these outbreaks.
The orders given to the parks and environment firefighters to disengage from the fire front on the night of 8 January at Bendora and report back to town—leaving a fire of approximately 50 square metres, and one that was rather tame in nature, to continue burning—was an example of extreme negligence. Further, within 24 hours, with the Stockyard Spur fire, we again saw a fire still capable of being contained if it had been vigorously attacked. We saw environmental authorities impede the incident controller there from inserting a bulldozed fire break—for ecological reasons.
Both of these examples illustrate that the parks and environment firefighting authorities—usually the first respondents at fires because they are paid firefighters—were extremely reluctant to attack the fires; were reluctant to environmentally damage the bush in their dealings with the fires; and were poorly resourced to the point where bureaucratic decisions around overtime payments and poorly judged, so-called safety imperatives dramatically reduced their firefighting capabilities and, clearly, their will. This culture is sheeted home to Mr Stanhope’s government, which you can bet was swayed by environmental management needs, the irresponsible Greens lobby and bureaucratic imperatives before it bothered to listen to or take note of the bushfire professionals who even then were anticipating very serious problems.
The Doogan inquiry report has been highly critical of the poor state of the ESB and the poor professional attitudes of the senior officers of the ESB. The coroner said:
My overall impression is that senior personnel at the Emergency Services Bureau lacked competence and professionalism and that the bureau was disorganised and was functioning in a chaotic, unco-ordinated fashion, particularly during the most critical period of the fires.
Yet, in this period when the ESB was running around headless, we saw Mr Stanhope allowing ministers, including his emergency services minister, to travel out of the territory or take time off at home. We saw a headless ESB apparently struck by paralysis, unable to urgently push the Chief Minister into declaring a state of emergency, unable to warn the community and unable to quickly provide Mr Stanhope, as Chief Minister, and his ministers with the potentially worst-case scenarios that they should have received. We saw his ministers incapable of monitoring what the hell was going on, where the threat was and just how well the ESB was functioning.
This Chief Minister and his ministers simply did not bother to go looking for trouble. The Chief Minister could not exercise leadership or check the most vitally important challenge facing his government and the community. His government, his ESB and the Department of JACS at this time were absolute showers. This directly reflects on a Chief Minister who was negligent in not getting to the heart of what was in essence going on at a time of critical importance for this territory.
Now we get to the greatest negligence of all, leading to the failure to act in time to save lives and property. I refer to Mr Stanhope’s failure to adequately warn the community of the impending fire impact on the urban edge. Coroner Doogan said that
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