Page 4279 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
At this point, I am not convinced by the argument that any of the difficulties and challenges that the ESA is facing will be assisted by returning the ESA to the administrative structure of a statutory authority. It will be a change, certainly, and it allows Mr Smyth and his colleagues to say that the current system and current minister are a failure. But I am not sure that that is necessarily the way to improve the ESA at this point. It delivers a political outcome for Mr Smyth, but the key question for me is: will it make an operational difference on the ground, and will it improve response to emergencies in the ACT?
The key questions really are: is the emergency response in the ACT adequate? Is the ESA doing its job? And are we responding in a timely and satisfactory way to emergencies? These are really the questions that matter. I think from that flows, then, a discussion about structural situations.
As I said in my earlier remarks, I think this has been the subject of many inquiries over the last decade, and the 2003 bushfires were certainly an incredible wake-up. The McLeod and Doogan reports have given the ACT government and emergency services a tremendous wealth of recommendations to work with, trial and implement.
The Auditor-General has also undertaken a number of relevant inquiries. The most recent one, on bushfire preparedness, looked at many aspects of our bushfire management and even looked into governance issues. The Auditor-General made many recommendations but the report did not recommend restructuring the ESA and creating an independent, stand-alone authority. Of all the recommendations that were in there—and some of them applied to TAMS as well—none said there was a fundamental structural problem, certainly not as I understood the report.
What may be of interest—and perhaps this is something that Mr Smyth does have some suggestions on—is the creation of new strategic and accountability indicators to ensure that government is on track annually to achieve the best emergency response possible. That would be something that I would certainly be prepared to look at.
I certainly had an exchange with Mr Smyth recently in annual reports hearings in my capacity as the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services around fire trail preparedness. I do not know whether Mr Smyth has received it yet, but I have just sent him a reply—it should be with him in the next day; I have signed it—which clarifies what was, unfortunately in annual reports hearings, not as crisp an answer as it should have been. But I think it is quite crisp now that it has been worked through. That is perhaps not the best indicator. I think that there was some uncertainty there, and the fact that the agency was not able to explain it clearly in the annual reports hearings does beg the question of whether we need a better indicator. They may be things that we need to look at.
Are there measures there that are not being delivered and that need to be delivered? Are there indicators that perhaps would be a clearer measure of preparedness for some of these emergencies? That is a discussion that I am certainly willing to have, and that might be a place we could look to go in the future.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video