Page 3651 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 28 October 2014
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should go back to the UFU and ask whether their concerns still stand, because I am told that they do.
The problem with this is that what will happen now is greater confusion, and the same sorts of concerns that the VBA have raised with me have been raised with me by the United Firefighters Union—that if you give the commissioner the power to go onto the fire ground, he will be on the fire ground. And let us face it: it is not a big jump from suggestion to direction, from question to direction. If there is order and counter-order, young officers were always taught in the Australian Army, “Order, counter-order, disorder.” Disorder on the fire ground or on emergency ground gets people killed. And that is why we have clear lines. We are taught in basic training as young volunteer firefighters in the ACT that protection of life is number one, and what you do not want is disorder on the fire ground, because disorder on the fire ground leads to catastrophe.
The amendment today does not make it any clearer. If you want to clarify the coordination section of the bill, that is great. If you want to clarify how it is incorporated into the act, that is a good thing. But a case for the removal of the existing 8A(3) has not been made. So let us leave it there. We will accept your amendment. We will accept the amendment to your amendment. But there is no reason to get rid of 8A(3), which says:
The commissioner may not direct the chief officer to undertake an operation in a particular way.
Really, the problem here—and it is quite clear from Mr Corbell’s inability to defend the commissioner regarding what happened on the fire ground at the Sydney Building fire—is that I am correct.
Mr Corbell raises the need for the government to be informed. Yes, the government should be informed, and there are processes in place to make that happen. It does not require the commissioner to be on the fire ground, at the emergency scene, collecting information so that he can come back and brief the officials. That is not the way it is done and it is not the way it should be done. The individual in control of the fire ground should be directing his or her attention to that incident, not looking over their shoulder.
What will happen now is that these amendments will go through, courtesy of Mr Rattenbury, and it will lead to less certainty on the fire ground. If his aim is to make it clearer in regard to coordination, the logical thing to do would have been to have a section on coordination and then have a different section on command and control. But it is interesting that the ability to direct, to overtake command and control the fire on the ground or the emergency on the ground is about to disappear from this act. And that is most unfortunate.
The minister is either disingenuous or unknowing in what he is attempting to do. If you want better coordination, fantastic. That does not explain the need to remove 8A(3), and on that ground we will be opposing this.
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