Page 3864 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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responding to major incidents. An ability to respond to everyday emergencies—house fires, car accidents and so on—is crucial but should not be the sole task of emergency services.
Our emergency services need to be geared towards being able to respond to major incidents. I have been informed by experts in the field of emergency response planning and management that this is the focus of almost every other emergency services organisation both in Australia and indeed throughout the developed world. It is interesting that the national security website, which deals with the threat of terrorism, states that it is the responsibility of state and territory governments to “maintain policies, legislation and plans within their jurisdiction” and to “determine prevention strategies and operational responses to threats, including seeking assistance from other jurisdictions”.
Although these responsibilities deal with just one specific area of emergency response—namely, terrorism—they indicate the breadth and seriousness of incidents that emergency services organisations need to be able to deal with. I am not confident that under the current minister’s watch this configuration in the ACT is seriously being contemplated, let alone achieved.
It is not good enough for emergency services to be configured for the routine. We need to have the ability to respond to major incidents. I will use this opportunity to touch on a couple of examples of areas of significant concern that demonstrate that the current configuration of our emergency services has drifted from major, serious events to a satisfaction with being able to respond to daily, isolated emergency incidents.
The first example and one that has been discussed at length in this place, of course, is the FireLink system. We have seen under this minister the FireLink system cast aside. The cost of this now abandoned project to the ACT taxpayer is a separate issue, but I will take this opportunity to note that the circumstances around any project that costs $4.5 million and is scrapped on the whim of a new minister and new management needs to be thoroughly examined. It is a frightful waste of taxpayers’ money and a waste that should never have been allowed to occur.
I must say at this point that I have been quite dismayed at the willingness of those opposite, and the minister in particular, to attack the reputations of the previous management of the ESA and of the company that produces FireLink. The government is the first to jump up and cry foul when it suspects that the opposition or anyone else is criticising a public servant. Yet Minister Corbell has, in this place and publicly, sought consistently to tarnish the reputations of former employees of the ESA and the company that produces the FireLink system. It speaks volumes about a minister and a government that hides behind public servants and seeks to lay the blame for its own decisions at the door of others.
During this Assembly we have already seen the Chief Minister squirm away from his ministerial responsibility in relation to emergency management. Mr Corbell’s behaviour suggests that a repeat would, if the situation arose, be forthcoming. I have no hesitation in placing on record in this place my belief that both the company that
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