Page 592 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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capacity and the understanding to make decisions about how emergency services should operate and how they should be organised. That is why he is employed. That is his job, and I will stand by him when he makes decisions which he is responsible for about how the organisation should be administered. That is his job and that is my job.
Now let us turn to the issue of the restructure. The restructure is designed to remove layers of senior management and to focus resources at the sharp end. I have already dealt with the specious argument from those opposite about the commissioner not being able to communicate with me. I have already dealt with that because I have demonstrated that the facts show otherwise. The facts show very clearly that the commissioner meets with me regularly, advises me directly, and has done so since I have been minister. So any suggestion that the commissioner and the chief officers cannot talk to me is nonsense. It is garbage, and it is not backed up by the facts. I have dealt with that and I have provided all of that information in question times over the past couple of weeks.
What this restructure does is ensure that more money is available to be spent on those things that are important to protect out community. It means more money for training. At the moment we have an organisation with a budget of close to $80 million a year. It spends less than one per cent of that on training, which is absurd and should not be happening. It needs to spend much more money on training to make sure that its volunteers and its paid staff have the skills and the refreshing of the skills they need to do their job. That is something that this restructure achieves.
This restructure also directs money away from senior layers of management and into better risk management and risk analysis. As a community we need to know where the risks are and how to prepare for them. It is about predicting, anticipating, planning, being ready. And that is where the money gets spent. Is Mr Pratt saying he does not want that? It sounds like he is, because if he were to trash this restructure that would be the outcome. So I reject that claim as well.
Let us deal with some of the myths about how great the ESA was. Let us talk about some of the issues about how great the ESA was under the previous structure. Ask the urban firefighters, the ACT Fire Brigade, ask the rural fire service, whether they got the money they needed for equipment or for training. When I became minister I was amazed when I went around and spoke to the union that represented the ACT Fire Brigade. I spoke to the RFS, and they said to me, “Look, you’ve done all these changes but we still can’t get replacement PPE.” The fire brigade said, “You’ve done all these changes, but we still haven’t got the equipment we need to extract people out of motor vehicle accidents.” Mr Speaker, that was the situation under the authority model.
So what was going on? Where was the money being spent? I will tell you where the money was being spent? The money was being spent in layers and layers of back office administration to support a stand-alone authority. That is where the money was being spent, and that is why the government changed it, because we could not justify in all good conscience spending more and more money on the back office functions of it, a stand-alone authority, when that money should have been spent on the front line, should have been spent in equipping our firefighters, equipping our SES officers,
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