Page 2604 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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(Second speaking period taken.)
If it is included, that would be a delightful change. When the Auditor-General made a recommendation on bushfire preparedness that the explicit detail be included, I asked the minister to give me the explicit detail. His explicit answer was:
I have got a Fire and Rescue Service. I have got a Rural Fire Service. I have got a couple of helicopters and a couple of bulldozers.
That is clearly not what is meant by the act, that is clearly not what is required by the Auditor-General and that is clearly not what is required, I believe, by the community.
There are some issues inside the Rural Fire Service at the moment. It has been raised with me that a number of the paid staff, the full-time staff, at the RFS have gone. There are questions over the use of officers—officers have been seconded to do some reports—and whether or not they have been replaced. In the approach to a fire season, as we know with a potential El Nino effect, are we as genuinely prepared as we could be?
I would bring to the attention of members that there were two grassfires in the ACT yesterday, one on Canberra Avenue and one, I believe, in Lyons. Here we are in August and the fires have started already. Given what happened particularly in the Blue Mountains last year, Canberra got off quite lightly. We had a number of fires but not a great deal and not anything significant. There is fuel out there. On average we have a major bushfire event in the ACT every eight years. It is now some 11 years since 2003, and there is a lot of fuel out there. The question there is: are we ready?
As members would know, I am a member of the Guises Creek volunteer bushfire brigade. We had our annual general meeting last week. The commissioner came. I understand he has gone to every AGM, and that is a good effort on behalf of the commissioner. But you could see the hairs rise on the back of the neck of the firefighters in my brigade—and I understand there was similar consternation in other brigades—when the commissioner starting speaking about integration.
We volunteer because we want to be members of the ACT Rural Fire Service. We do not want to be members of a larger, one-size-fits-all organisation and when the commissioner starts using the word “integration” people get very nervous. I call on the minister in this debate to totally and categorically rule out the integration of Fire & Rescue and the RFS or, indeed, all four services into one ACT emergency service. There has been talk about this behind the scenes for a long time now, and I would like the minister to rule out any integration of the services.
The services need to work together and we need to make sure that we use all resources wisely and economically. But the volunteers that I have spoken to—and I have had many discussions with members of a number of different brigades and with the VBA—are very concerned about the integration word. They see it is a threat to what we do as volunteers. We see ourselves as doing something totally different to what the Fire & Rescue service does as their main job, although they certainly do
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