Page 3090 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.30): I will speak to just three issues inside the Emergency Services Authority. I think we have well canvassed the Emergency Services Agency and the movement of the headquarters to Fairbairn. It is financial ineptitude of the highest order that we have spent $6.34 million on empty buildings. That is what we spent: $6.34 million on empty buildings, and it is some years before it will be completed.
Secondly, to the Rural Fire Service: it is an absolute shame that in this budget there is no money for a new shed at Tidbinbilla. The minister gave that undertaking earlier in the year when we did the annual reports hearings and third appropriation bill. He said it would be dealt with in the context of the budget. Well, it has been dealt with, and we see the contempt with which the minister holds the Tidbinbilla Rural Fire Service brigade. The brigade headquarters are appalling. They are inadequate, and it is a disgrace that in a jurisdiction like ours they have to work in those conditions for some years still to come.
The third area that I want to speak to is the issue of the Ambulance Service. There was a Canberra Times article some months ago talking about disquiet inside the Ambulance Service. The minister and the head of the ESA simply made light of it and dismissed it, but the report from the Auditor-General clearly shows that people should have concerns about the way the Ambulance Service is being run.
It is interesting that these issues have appeared in the time since this government got rid of the independence of the Emergency Services Authority. The pulling back inside of JACS of the ESA was a mistake then, the ambulance report confirms that it is a mistake now and I think the government should have a good hard look at that decision. The notion was that somehow it was financial mismanagement, but you can still see that the ESA is running deficits. It was not financial mismanagement; it is not being funded to the tasks being asked of it by the government. Certainly, I have seen letters that indicate that there were arrangements that simply said: “Do this job. If you need more money, we will get it out of the Treasurer’s advance.” Yet that was then concocted into a confection that simply said, “You can’t run your own budget; therefore we will pull you back inside the department.” But the pulling back of it into the department has not helped, because we can see that we are not meeting standards and we are certainly not meeting budgets in that regard.
The ESA is very important. All the arms of the emergency services, whether it be the SES, the Fire Brigade, the Rural Fire Service or the Ambulance Service, need all the support that they deserve to be able to do their jobs properly. If we look at the ESA headquarters, the Tidbinbilla Rural Fire Service shed and the Ambulance Service report from the Auditor-General, they clearly show that the arrangements that the government has in place do not work.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (10.32): I will turn to two issues under the portfolio, police and then corrections, so that Mr Hargreaves has time to sit down. Turning to police, the first issue I want to cover is that of the election commitment the government had to spend $300,000 on suburban policing community consultative committee trials.
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