Page 3128 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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looking at it closely, but we have not seen it, but I received it.” It is up to members to make their own decisions about this minister and what he says. In the dissenting report, we have asked that the Minister for Emergency Services clarify, for the record, when he first received and saw the emergency services in the ACT relocation feasibility study report.
The thing that he then has to explain is why virtually nothing has happened for almost two years—it is a very important report—because, at the same time we get report No 4 of 2009: Delivery of ambulance services to the ACT community, which looks at the same question, the delivery of services, and whether we have the appropriate service levels that we deserve from the Ambulance Service.
I think all in this place would say to our intensive care paramedics: “Thank you very much for the excellent job that you do. To go out every day to the scene of accidents and illness and death must be very, very hard. We thank you for the work that you do.” Unfortunately, they are not being given the tools to do their job effectively, efficiently and without putting pressure on themselves. This is the whole purpose of the station relocation report—to make certain that we do get the best response times. When just a handful of Canberra’s suburbs meet the guideline or get the service delivered within the guideline stipulated by the government, there is something wrong. What the report says is, “If you move the locations, we can do better response times and we can do it better.”
Now the interesting thing for members is—and you probably would have missed it when you were laughing at the “infrastucture” report—there is a section on emergency services infrastructure. It is quite interesting, because emergency services infrastructure simply says:
Construction projects underway include a fit-for-purpose headquarters for Emergency Services and a new ESA training centre. The Station Relocation Feasibility Study will inform other future decision-making
So apparently this report is already informing future decision making. Yet again we have a contradiction from the minister. So this is a report that he has not seen or did see or looked at closely, and it has now been included in the Chief Minister’s infrastructure report and it says:
The Station Relocation Feasibility Study will inform other future decision-making.
So he has either got the report and he is using the report, or he has not got the report and they made that up in the infrastructure report. But there it is in black and white—everyone can read it.
Well done to the new commissioner: apparently he has taken the running on this, because the minister abandoned the report. Apparently some further work is being done. But the question—and some of the excuses that the minister used—seemed to be that the fire brigade objected to the methodology. Well, that is not quite true either. What the fire brigade objected to was the new facilities being built without the resources to make them work. There is no point in having a big shiny new building if you have not got the resources, because it just becomes a big shiny white elephant.
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