Page 416 - Week 02 - Thursday, 8 March 2007
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to be an increasingly esoteric and unhelpful discussion which really does detract from the main game.
But I want to take some members to task around a number of issues. The first, and I think the most striking one for me, is the suggestion that the government is ignoring the recommendations of the coroner around the governance of the ESA. The opposition cannot have it both ways. The opposition cannot say, “You ignored the coroner because you did not agree to establish a statutory authority again”—which is true; we did not agree—“but we won’t talk about the fact that you also ignored or disagreed with the coroner’s recommendation to establish a single fire service.”
If you want to be serious about saying that it is about learning lessons from the past and learning from what the experts tell us, including the coroner, what did the coroner say? The coroner said it should be a statutory authority and it should be a single fire service. That is what the coroner said. That was her conclusion. You cannot escape that. You cannot get away from that.
The government do not agree with a single fire service, but we take the view that there is more than one way to skin a cat, in the same way that we take that view in relation to the authority versus agency debate. When it comes to the authority versus agency debate, we say you can ensure that operational independence is guaranteed without all of the apparatus of a stand-alone authority. You can ensure that operational independence is guaranteed because that is in the Emergencies Act.
But we also take the view that you can achieve greater levels of coordination and greater levels of effective resource utilisation without establishing a single fire service. The view we take is that that can be achieved through a better unification of command so that you have a single person who has regard to all of the factors around fire response in the territory and you make sure that those resources are being used most effectively to deal with fires in the territory.
I know there are different types of fires. I know there are different types of techniques that are needed to tackle different types of fires. But the issue is that you still have a large degree of commonality across the two services in terms of a range of functions and approaches and a range of training, and that should be able to be shared, combined and built upon in the interests of providing a more cost-effective service to the people of Canberra.
I think it is time we moved into a more complex debate about this, rather than the shouting debate we seem to be having from those opposite at the moment.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
The Assembly adjourned at 5.27 pm.
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