Page 4117 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 16 Sept 2009
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endorsed in the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council draft discussion paper A national systems approach to community warning dated May 2009 and that they incorporate the use of the common alerting protocol, as adopted for the Australian context.
I am advised that this new nationally consistent approach has been considered as a result of this recommendation and has been prepared by a national bushfire taskforce committee convened by the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council and endorsed by the Australian Emergency Management Committee. The national bushfire task force committee comprised fire services, land management agencies, fire behaviour experts for the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, the Bureau of Meteorology and emergency managers from across the country, including representatives from the ACT Fire Brigade and the ACT Rural Fire Service.
I am not quite sure what research or expert advice Mr Smyth received or sought in preparing his bill, but I know that the recently announced nationally consistent approach has been prepared with input from experts in their field from across the country. This new nationally endorsed and consistent approach to bushfire scaled advice and warnings to the community is particularly important in the ACT for several reasons.
The first reason is our close location to New South Wales, and Mr Corbell described the ACT as an island within New South Wales. For New South Wales and the ACT to be consistent in their approach is extremely important. It is critical, not only for the ACT but for the whole region. If the Assembly was to pass Mr Smyth’s bill here today, it would be setting into legislation a different warning and advice system in the ACT from that being used in neighbouring New South Wales. The result would be different advice and warnings issued across the region.
The second reason is that the ACT has many residents that move in and out of the territory from interstate. It is important for those residents to be familiar with the advice and warnings that are being used and issued. In the case of a nationally inconsistent and adopted framework, the advice would be the same from state to state and from state to territory.
As a member of the ACT community, I would feel far more comfortable with a nationally consistent approach to warnings and advice to the community being used and I would be more comfortable knowing that the adopted system has been prepared by experts in their field from across the country, as indeed the system that we are adopting here has been. I therefore call on members of the Assembly not to pass Mr Smyth’s bill today. I believe it would result in the ACT being inconsistent in its warnings and advice to the community. The members of this Assembly have been voted in by their community members and I feel that we owe it to those community members to ensure that the best researched and considered approach is adopted, and that is the one which has been recently announced by us. It is the one we endorse, not Mr Smyth’s approach.
Again, I remind members that, if the Assembly was to pass Mr Smyth’s bill here today, we would be setting into legislation a different advice and warning system
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