Page 1834 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 August 2007
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some very experienced RFS people—but not all of them—very clearly supported that view. These experienced ESB officers were saying that the 2004 updated CAD system then in service with the fire brigade and the ambulance service should have been adapted for service in the RFS and the SES.
These officers told me then, and continue to say, that, for the sake of $700,000 to outfit 125 vehicles at $5,500 per Mobitex box, as they call it, and an additional $250,000 to place the same types of boxes on nine existing trunked radio network towers, for an-all up cost of $1 million, with vehicles adapted and boxes placed on towers, you could have developed an effective mobile data and vehicle locating system in the space of a number of months for $1 million—not $4.5 million, as we have seen with FireLink, a system that would have used four major existing telco communications channels.
The other school of thought vehemently rejected—and still to this day rejects—the CAD Mobitex option, saying that it simply would not work. This school of thought, represented by Peter Dunn and his senior officers—now ex-ESA people—says that the government should have persevered with FireLink, that FireLink was not too sophisticated and that the government failed to implement the sorts of software upgrades needed to address the speed of transmission problem affecting accuracy of vehicle location.
There are a number of questions, but the government must firstly answer this: what action is it going to take to replace FireLink; if it is not, why not? The government needs to indicate what it believes to be the true picture as to CAD versus FireLink and whether there was a mistake made in 2004—that perhaps CAD and Mobitex should have been taken up instead of the then project managers persevering with FireLink.
We have talked in this place before about the single select tender decision that was undertaken in 2004 with FireLink. We now know that the project managers of the ESA decided to snap up FireLink and run with it as a single select tender decision. They argue that this was because FireLink was the only product in the ACT that would provide a mobile data system to meet the needs. They also say that the urgency from needing to have a mobile data system in service by bushfire season 2004-05 was the driving factor in that decision. It was a single select tender; they did not go out to broadly tender other options. It was the government’s decision then to single select tender instead. Now we see an argument between the minister and the ex-commissioner about who said what and what decisions were taken in terms of project management in those days. Frankly, we see the government walking away and washing its hands of the problem.
I move to FireLink itself. Some time in mid to late 2004, that process went on, but what we see now is this. The minister has indicated that the government was unaware of what decisions ESA were taking at that time. But that is just plain fanciful. I put it to you, Mr Speaker, that, while this minister would not have known much about the issue at the time, his predecessors must have known what the hell was going on with the decisions around the selection of FireLink. If they did not, they must have been off the planet. This clearly goes to the heart of the incompetence of this government in project management.
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