Page 3875 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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have been adequately attended to. For example, I have received numerous complaints from volunteers that, while the minister has looked the other way, senior leaders and bureaucrats have bullied the RFS headquarters continually since March 2007, blaming the RFS leadership for allegedly condoning the demonstration that occurred on 15 March 2007. The volunteer bushfire association are deeply concerned about the effect of this bullying on the ability of the RFS and its units. People should not forget that negative impacts do cascade down—the negative impacts that affect these units’ ability to do their job.
This would not surprise me. This is Labor’s way—vendettas; “get squares”; the squashing of whistleblowers; the tacky, seedy, secret surveillance of employees. This is Jon Stanhope’s workers paradise—bullying and witch-hunts, a mark of his government. There is despicable arrogance by Mr Stanhope and his ministers which permeates down to the senior bureaucratic leadership and therefore impacts on the effectiveness of government service, in this case on the effectiveness of our emergency services in protecting our community. If the ministers behave in that way, the bureaucrats think they can get away with it too. I believed the VBA when, this week, they advised me of these grimy circumstances. I demand that the minister take immediate action to sort out the relationship between leadership and the services.
This is the point I make to Dr Foskey, too, by the way. Dr Foskey, would you have the opposition neglect the concern of the VBA and a broad community of folk because you and the Greens are frightened that it might seem to be politicised? Get off the fence, Dr Foskey. Scrutinise properly; make a real contribution to the debate about essential services. See if you can get stuck into it.
Furthermore, the promises made by the government and the ESA leadership to meet with the volunteers by 1 October 2007 to establish the terms of reference for the long-promised review of the organisational restructure—a review promised to commence on 1 November—have not materialised. What is this: arrogance, incompetence or both?
Does the government and its officials not care for the men and women in the front line? Does it wish to continue to treat them with disdain? I suppose that, as long as the government allows the bullying of its agencies, the opinion of the RFS units who have to put themselves in harm’s way does not matter in its eyes when it comes to reviewing essential capability and the emergency services organisation. The first day of October has come and gone; there has been no meeting and there are no terms of reference. The first day of November has come and gone, and there is no review. We are now two months into the bushfire season, and these fundamentals have not even been looked at.
For a moment, I want to step down from the strategic level and turn to one matter of operational detail—to demonstrate how this effectiveness has been impacted upon. I refer to 3 October, a day of total fire ban. We have already talked in this place about the failure by this government to man the bushfire towers. Something else has now come to our observation. At 5.00 pm that day, the observers in those towers were stood down—for bureaucratic reasons of course. I happen to know that the VBA went up to those towers after 5.00 pm. They measured the wind gusts, and those wind gusts
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