Page 4272 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 27 November 2013
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to the bushfire disaster. We know that in August that year—10 years ago—Mr Ron McLeod released his report, The Inquiry into the Operational Response to the January 2003 Bushfires in the ACT. It is interesting to note that Mr McLeod then went on to be the assistant commissioner in the Victorian bushfires royal commission.
A major recommendation made by Mr McLeod was that an emergency services authority be established because, in his expert opinion, services should be managed by a single larger operational body specifically set up outside the framework of the ACT public service. Mr McLeod spent an entire chapter of his report—chapter 6—setting out his analysis of the evolution of the management of emergency services in the ACT, and why this should happen. Mr McLeod’s arguments were very strong in 2003 and, given Mr Corbell’s administration of the emergency portfolio, they remain valid now in 2013. It is quite easy to see that, if the recent history of the management of the emergency services in the ACT is anything to go by, Mr McLeod was right.
Then, of course, following the McLeod inquiry we had the coronial inquiry, and the coroner supported the findings made by Mr McLeod. Coroner Maria Doogan presented her report in December 2006. She made a major recommendation that the Emergency Services Agency be transformed into an independent statutory authority reporting directly to the minister. So here we are where in the last decade two independent experts have found that emergency services in the ACT should be provided through a stat authority. McLeod made that recommendation; Doogan made that recommendation. Now, for reasons that we still do not know, because the Costello report that suggested it is still kept secret by the government, the Stanhope government acted to abolish the authority on the flimsiest of grounds. The Labor government refuses to engage the community in effective discussion of the analysis and findings contained in the Costello report.
In one of the 2006 budget papers the Stanhope-Gallagher government noted that the Costello report had commented critically that the authority’s budget had increased by 46 per cent since 2002-03, but in the next paragraph the government sets out all the additional spending that had been made on the emergency services. The arguments used by the Stanhope-Gallagher government to abolish the authority were very, very weak. In any event, the authority was abolished. The management of emergency services was treated in a sorry manner by the Stanhope-Gallagher government, and sadly that situation is no better today.
We only need to go back a month ago to see the litany of failings the minister treated so flippantly and so lightheartedly. Let me run through them. For ACT Fire and Rescue: first responder medical training and pay issue, which is still running today; the draft terms of reference for the capability review to be carried out by JACS, which we still have not seen; the effectiveness of cross-crewing; the requirement for the second Bronto, which fire crews tell me they need desperately simply because you can either fight a fire or you can rescue—you cannot do both from one Bronto; post-incident debriefs are still an issue; and the replacement of the out-of-date PODs.
For the ACT Ambulance Services: the culture within the service, and we now know there is a complaint about bullying being investigated by WorkSafe, and this is all happening under the leadership—in all reality the lack of leadership—of this minister;
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