Page 1835 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 August 2007
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I want to finish off in this final phase by saying this: in the Canberra Times of 14 July 2007, Mr Corbell entirely blamed senior management for the project management disaster that became FireLink. Yet in 2005 and early 2006 his predecessor as emergency services minister, Mr John Hargreaves, received ample warning from full-time or volunteer officers in the services that FireLink was not working—and, indeed, in the view of some veterans, was not even needed. I do not necessarily agree that it was not needed, but that is a view expressed, and I want to see what the government thinks about that.
Minister Hargreaves’s successor, Mr Corbell, received exactly the same advice. This advice culminated in the FireLink review exercise of 2 September 2006, a substantial exercise testing the most critical performance requirements. It was at this point at least that Mr Corbell should have either shut FireLink down or announced publicly that there were major problems with FireLink and that he intended to rebuild it. He needed to come back to this place to argue for more resources and more time to rebuild FireLink, to ensure that our front-line services had the mobile data system that they needed and that McLeod had said had to be put in place.
Instead, we have seen Minister Corbell merely perpetuating the three years of Stanhope Labor government neglect regarding FireLink and the mobile data system. Under scrutiny about FireLink, all Stanhope ministers have fervently misled the community since mid-2004 when the first alarm bells began to ring. In Hansard of 19 October 2006, Mr Corbell said:
We stand by our investment of money into new communications equipment, new vehicles, new protective equipment, new radio communications …
In Hansard of 12 December 2006, he said:
FireLink does work. It is operational currently in RFS and SES. It does work and it is an excellent piece of technology.
And let us not forget the mother of all misleads from Mr Hargreaves, who said on 16 November 2006 that FireLink was fully operational and being successfully used.
When we go back to the estimates hearings and annual report hearings of 2005-06, we see cagey answers in response to all questions about FireLink. What we want to know is this: what is the government going to do to replace FireLink? Will it have something in place by bushfire season 2007-08? That is the question. (Time expired.)
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services (11:59): I move:
Omit all words after “notes”, substitute:
“(a) the ACT Emergency Services Agency (ESA) took the responsible and informed decision to withdraw the FireLink system;
(b) that decision was based on two independent reviews of the ICT programs for the agency;
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