Page 498 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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was the minister going much too far in this regard. To subsume the independent Emergency Services Authority in the JACS department was overkill, ensuring that the bean counters in the department got their way. Unfortunately, we had the minister being snowed in 2006 by the bureaucracy, by the bean counters, who were pretty jealous, by the way, of Peter Dunn’s independent powers.
We have been critical in this place of Peter Dunn’s financial and project management of the ESA, but we acknowledge that Peter Dunn went a long way in pulling the Emergency Services Authority and the emergency services agencies into what were operationally quite responsive outfits. We think that Peter Dunn went a long way, at least on the operational side, in improving matters. That rested on the independence of the emergency services to stand aside from the JACS department, to stand aside from the bureaucracy, and be able to operate.
There is no doubt that Peter Dunn did achieve those objectives which were laid down by McLeod and which have been endorsed by Doogan in recent times as to the importance of the Emergency Services Authority standing away from the department of justice, away from an arrangement which we know failed in January 2003 in terms of the failure of the Emergency Services Bureau to serve this community and to protect this community.
But what has happened, Mr Speaker? Last week, the government took a retrograde step further on the back of its decision last year to pull in bureaucratic controls by subsuming the ESA in JACS, back into the same failed arrangements. I do not buy the minister’s argument that it does not matter because the Emergencies Act still gives powers and authority to the officers in the organisation. I do not buy that, Mr Speaker. If the commissioner for the Emergency Services Agency and the chief officers of the services do not have primary control over their resources and their administration, they do not have the freedom to move and they do not have the authority to lay down quickly what must be done to protect this community in terms of preventative planning, which is mostly what they have to do.
It is too late when the balloon goes up because they do not have control of their resources. They have some damn bean counters telling them whether they can go to the Q store and pick up three chainsaws, rather than being able to make fundamental operational decisions and get resources to the front line. That is what McLeod had recognised and that is what Doogan recognised, but that is what this government does not recognise. That is why our volunteers are absolutely beside themselves at what has happened. They recognise that this restructure has been a disaster.
Mr Speaker, we have heard the minister say in this place that it does not matter what Val Jeffery thinks about the restructure because, I think the minister has said, he does not have the experience in terms of corporate planning or restructuring. That is just bunkum and that is just a whack in the face for the volunteers of the ACT. Val Jeffery has been the president of the bushfire council for 12 years. For decades, he has been a bushfire fireman. For many years he has been a captain and from time to time he still represents some of the captains in the meetings that they have with ministers.
These people know bushfires in the ACT region, they know what the organisation needs to look like to meet the structures, and they know what the emergency services
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