Page 3486 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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Then there is the matter of the provision of $3.7 million in the 2012-13 budget to meet increases in employee supplies and service costs to maintain the quality and effectiveness of the ESA services. The question I have about these funds is this: why are they being provided only for this financial year? Also, what will happen to the people and services related to these funds after the end of the 2012-13 years? I think there are something like 22 jobs involved there.
Then there is the Mitchell chemical fire emergency. There is still, pardon the pun, fallout from this emergency almost a year after the event. There is still uncertainty about how the remote access devices should be managed, particularly outside business hours. So far, I am very unsatisfied with the answers that I have received on this matter. I believe there are very real personnel management issues to do with this matter as well as broader personnel management issues. We raised a number of them at the estimates, but they have not been answered or resolved by the government.
The second-last matter I wish to raise is the relocation project. The project has had a very chequered history to date. There were considerable delays in getting to an agreed point where the strategy for the new and relocated ESA premises was decided. I trust that progress from this point, such as with the new facility at Charnwood, is satisfactory, but I remind members of, particularly, this minister’s record in delivering capital works—and a very poor record it is.
I have already been told, particularly by firefighters, that the new training facilities are already inadequate in terms of size. If you drive up Lanyon Drive, you can see a couple of white marquees that have been erected to help during training time, the reason being that the facility is not big enough. When the firefighters have undertaken training and are particularly dirty, they have to discard their dirty equipment in an area so that they can go inside for training. The urban firefighters are telling me that it is something of a joke within the brigade, given that it is a brand-new facility. As Mr Corbell has had such a poor record on delivering capital works inside ESA as well as inside his other portfolios, it appears that nobody was surprised that yet again we have got a facility that is not big enough currently, let alone big enough for the future, to serve the members of Emergency Services.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (10.13): I would like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the very important initiatives outlined for the Justice and Community Safety portfolio in this year’s budget. The Justice and Community Safety portfolio has been provided with funding of $398 million of recurrent expenditure and $63 million of investment for capital projects to ensure that Canberrans are protected and have adequate access to justice.
I would like to highlight a few of the very important initiatives in the portfolio as we deal with the debate this evening. The first is funding for legal aid. Access to legal aid is a fundamental cornerstone of any equitable justice system. The government is proud to be providing an additional $200,000 worth of funding to assist with expensive cases that the commission will face in the coming year. This funding will ameliorate the impact of expensive criminal cases, freeing up funds to provide services to other legal aid clients.
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