Page 5719 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 6 December 2011
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meeting of commonwealth, state and territory police and emergency services ministers in Auckland on 11 November.
As a result of my proposals and a motion put by me at that meeting, the standing council on police and emergency management agreed that the system operator of emergency alert was to examine and provide jurisdictions with further advice about congestion management, system enhancement and reporting issues for the emergency alert system to allow for better planning of campaigns and that the national Emergency Management Committee was to investigate options to improve the integrity of static data used by the emergency alert system.
I have also written to the commonwealth Attorney-General in relation to the recent use of emergency alert in the ACT. The territory’s representative on the national Emergency Management Committee has also raised the ACT’s experience at the most recent meeting of that committee in Brisbane. As a result, a number of system improvements have already been agreed to. These include that the default campaign time for emergency alert be extended from 30 minutes to 60 minutes, that the number of retries for telephone numbers be reduced from two to one, and that attempts be made to adjust business rules to exclude invalid numbers or multiple calls to the same street address.
MR SPEAKER: Supplementary, Ms Le Couteur.
MS LE COUTEUR: In the event that the emergency warning system needs to be used over the current bushfire season, what strategy is in place to avoid the issues that arose during the Mitchell explosion?
MR CORBELL: The ESA has always been very up-front in acknowledging that a number of the issues associated with the use of emergency alert were due to their practices and procedures. They have significantly revised their practices and procedures, and refreshed them, to ensure that they are up to date and that the lessons from the Mitchell incident are fully taken into account.
ACT Policing—Operation Unite
MS PORTER: ACT Policing participated in Operation Unite on the weekend. To what extent can it be said that this operation was successful?
MR CORBELL: I thank Ms Porter for the question. Operation Unite is a cross-jurisdiction policing initiative driven by all state and territory police services, and indeed by the police service in New Zealand. This is the fifth Operation Unite that ACT Policing has participated in. ACT Policing deployed 65 personnel to Operation Unite in monitoring alcohol misuse across the ACT, including the deployment of beat patrols, random breath testing, mobile traffic, alcohol crime targeting and youth engagement.
During Operation Unite, ACT Policing conducted 584 random breath tests, with four people detected for drink driving—a very pleasing figure overall. Thirteen people were arrested for alcohol-related offences, three were arrested for assault, three were
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