Page 3162 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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He is not doing the job. Ministerial responsibility has been abandoned by this minister and I believe it puts the people of the ACT at risk.
Then there is concern over the centralisation of the ESA Commissioner’s powers. The emergency services act is quite clear. It was done in this way because it is impossible to employ a commissioner who has experience in all four services—in urban fire and rescue, the ambulance service, rural fire services and state emergency service activities. It is impossible, I suspect, to find an individual who has worthwhile experience in all four of those services and would be able to have an appropriate operational role in those services should a disaster occur. That is why we have a commissioner who runs the Emergency Services Agency and we have four service chiefs. The chiefs have the expertise. We currently have in the act a very clear delineation in what the commissioner can do. Something has been circulated from the commissioner, certainly to RFS and other areas, saying that this will be changed, and I believe that protection will be eroded.
That is why the incident over the Sydney Building needs to be resolved. We have already got a commissioner who is interfering. I have a great deal of respect for his expertise coming out of New South Wales RFS; that is his field of expertise. Go and be the RFS service chief. But we should leave the professionals to do their job. Yes, direct them to go and put out the fire. Do not tell them how to put out the fire. Yes, go and attend the medical emergency. If you are not a paramedic, do not tell me how to do my job. That is the problem here.
It has taken almost 12 minutes just to read the litany. That in itself is an indictment of these ministers. All of these incidents are true. All of these incidents are accurate and I suspect there will be more.
Indeed, recently there were changes made to the communications centre out there at Fairbairn. The problem there is that we had in one room both the ambulance officers and the fire officers. They could overhear each other’s conversations. I understand a wall or partition has been put up and some other space has been taken in the communications centre. But if, for instance, as occurred in November-December last year, we have fires in New South Wales, we send crews there, and we are running the operations or keeping an eye on them from here, running a dedicated incident team in one of those rooms, one of those rooms is now gone. So if we have a number of incidents occurring at the same time, we have now got less space to break them down into groups so that they can function.
This was the problem. Full credit to the Canberra national airport for the building that they built; they built it to the specifications the government gave them. But it was cut down because of budget savings, and we are now going to pay a price for it.
That is the litany. It goes way back. It goes for years. It will continue to go for years until we have a minister who accepts ministerial responsibility and concentrates on what he must do. He must prioritise his work. He has got to do the basics first and he has got to do the basics well.
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