Page 3641 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 28 October 2014
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The second of the key amendments is clarifying that the act, the ESA and the commissioner are also responsible for operational and administrative issues, not just emergency management. The bill introduces a power for a chief officer to be able to close any premises. This was noticed in the Mitchell fire incident in 2012 as the ESA did not have the power to close schools and other businesses that were in the direction of the toxic plume.
The bill introduces a power to obtain information or documents that are reasonably needed. It introduces the power for an emergency controller to control or coordinate services. It increases the penalty for people who throw lit cigarettes out of their car windows.
Let me focus on coordination issues. In 2012, following lessons from the Victorian bushfires and floods, the ACT introduced powers into this legislation to clarify the powers and functions of the Emergency Services Commissioner to ensure that there was, in short, only one head. This was not to say that the commissioner needs to manage each and every emergency, but to clarify that if there were multiple agencies working on the same emergency the commissioner had the power to align their activities to ensure the best coordination.
The United Firefighters Union approached us with their concerns soon after this bill was tabled last month, as a seemingly key clause in section 8A is to be removed by this bill today—that is, that the commissioner may not direct the chief officer to undertake an operation in a particular way. The proposal to remove the clause was seen to be asserting the commissioner’s powers unnecessarily by removing the autonomy of other agencies and giving him the power to direct individual operations, which has not been the case to date.
I understand that the minister will be moving an amendment today in relation to the definition of “coordination” to be applied to section 8A. This may look like a small amendment, but as members may infer from the five pages of explanatory text to accompany the single-sentence definition of “coordination”, a lot rests on a definition and a context.
The explanatory statement to the amendment clarifies that there are no express provisions for the commissioner to give directions to chief officers during an emergency event. It also states that this section only applies to an emergency as defined in the act under certain situations where the scale and complexity may be likely to exceed the traditional scope of one or more emergency services.
The amendment outlines why section 8A was introduced in 2012, to ensure that the commissioner has sufficient power to play a direct role in coordinating an emergency response. It also outlines the key differences between coordination, command and control.
I understand that the proposed text for section 8A is uniform terminology used for incident management across Australia under the Australasian inter-service incident management system framework, as well as the Australian emergency management
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