Page 880 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 2 May 2007
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and how accountable this government is in responding to quite legitimate and absolutely well-intentioned FOI requests from members of the public and the opposition.
But, firstly, I want to focus on the Stanhope government’s failure to accept responsibility or accountability—corner posts of Mr Stefaniak’s motion. Let us take this government’s failure to accept responsibility or accountability for their failures in the 2003 bushfires. If the Chief Minister and his government had taken early acceptance of responsibility in those very important three or four months immediately after the bushfire disaster, he would have had bipartisan support from the opposition. If this government had said, “Okay, there were systemic failures, there were deaths, there was destruction; perhaps we should have known better; there have probably been 10 years of neglect by governments of all colours; it is about time we pulled everything out,” the community and the opposition would have said: “Good on you, Chief Minister. Good on you. Okay, you are willing to accept that there were systemic failures in your governance in terms of community safety, but you are pulling it out rapidly, you are inquiring rapidly, you are being transparent.”
But he did not do that, did he? This Chief Minister decided he would drag things out. The McLeod inquiry finally came, but McLeod was inhibited in what he could report on. His terms of reference were narrow. So much for open and transparent government! The community would have been far more forgiving of the failures of this government, but now he has bought himself a packet of problems because it took so long to identify the lessons that needed to be learnt and then applied, many of which, two and three bushfire seasons later, have yet to be properly applied. Then, on top of that, by dumping on the coronial inquest, this Chief Minister and this government have attracted the ire and the mistrust of this community about how fair dinkum they are about keeping our community safe.
Mr Stanhope: See at the next election, Steve. You will, mate; you will.
MR PRATT: Well, Chief Minister, we shall see.
The ESA restructure is another classic example of Stanhope government transparency—the failure of this government to even go out to the stakeholders and to important community lobbyists and say, “We believe we need to restructure the emergency services. We believe we need to tear up a key McLeod inquiry recommendation that the ESA needed to be an autonomous agency. We need to do something because we have got problems.” That would have been a responsible exercising of transparency and taking the community into the government’s trust. But they did not do that.
Mr Stanhope’s senior officials turned up and told the volunteers and the senior professional officers: “This is what you are going to get whether you like it or not, and really, guys, the reasons we are doing this are budgetary; it is to save money. We’re not doing this to make the emergency services any more responsive or any more capable of making our community safer. We’re doing this because the bureaucrats and the bean counters have told us that we have to. And, gee, we’re going to go along with them because we don’t have any imagination in this government.”
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