Page 3867 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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these issues. I certainly welcome the opportunity to have this discussion today. I would welcome, more importantly, the minister stepping up to the plate, taking responsibility and ensuring that these areas that I have identified and that my colleague will identify are, in fact, addressed proactively and that the minister does not simply hide his demonstrated reluctance to tackle these issues.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (3.39): I am interested that, so searing was Mr Mulcahy’s critique, he fell three minutes short. I think the last couple of minutes of his contribution involved a summary of points he had made earlier. So the opposition is struggling to make an effective critique of this issue. It is quite clear that Mr Mulcahy was the one who, unfortunately, had his name pulled out of the hat but he did not really have his heart in it.
Let me start by addressing the key issue that Mr Mulcahy raised in this discussion. He said that this government has failed to put in place the appropriate structures to provide for effective emergency management in the ACT. Let us reflect on the legacy left to us by the Liberal Party. Let us reflect on that, for a start, because we need to judge people by their actions and not by their words. The previous Liberal government left us with an emergency services bureau where the most senior bushfire control officer—
Mr Smyth: That had never lost a house, never lost a life.
Mr Pratt: Like people dying in waiting rooms—they also had people dying in their homes.
MR CORBELL: I know they do not like it, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, but I heard their critique in silence and I would ask them to give me the same courtesy. The most senior bushfire control officer under their regime was an ASO6. The person charged with managing major bushfires in the ACT was an ASO6. How do you think that demonstrates their seriousness about protecting the Canberra community from a major event such as a bushfire? Let us also reflect on the deeply unpopular decisions they took to incorporate the SES—
Mr Mulcahy: Why don’t we talk about a few of yours? That is what is contemporary. That is what is of interest.
MR CORBELL: I have got 15 minutes; I am going to use all of my time, Mr Mulcahy. The SES and the RFS were pushed together in a deeply unpopular merger. In fact, I think that was one of Mr Smyth’s, or it might have been one of Mr Humphries’s, legacies. But it was, indeed, a deeply unpopular merger, the ramifications of which continue to this day. So that is their record.
Mr Smyth: And we didn’t lose a single house, we didn’t lose a single life, we never injured a volunteer.
MADAM TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mrs Dunne): Order! Mr Smyth.
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