Page 2753 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 August 2015
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That is all that you really need to read. This is not working, and this minister allows it to continue in this way. Indeed we have recently made some changes. The letter goes on to say:
Changes to the Emergency Act 2004, implemented against the wishes of all chief officers of each agency last year; inappropriate and dangerous attempts to influence operational decisions at the Sydney Building fire in 2004; the continual and systematic degradation of fire brigade operational staff numbers and the non-filling of senior operational positions; senior officers in acting positions for years; and the proposal to realign reporting lines from within services to across the ESA are significant cause for concern for the safety of emergency responders in all four agencies and the ACT community.
The union closes by saying:
The United Firefighters Union implores the ACT Police and Emergency Services Minister Joy Burch to provide leadership and halt the return to the dangerous structures and practices currently being hotly pursued by the Justice and Community Safety Directorate and the Emergency Services Agency.
That is a pretty damning letter from a union. It is pretty damning because what they are saying is that the reforms have not worked; the amendments to the act, as I pointed out at the time, were not supported by the service, and they believe they are dangerous because they allow the commissioner to interfere. They now expose that during the Sydney Building fire—Mr Corbell denied this many times—there were inappropriate and dangerous attempts to influence operational decisions, and that could have been disastrous for all involved. And it is time we had a proper structure.
After the 2003 fires there was a meeting at the old Curtin headquarters where a lot of the volunteers came together and said, “What’s the best structure for what we do?” The one that everyone agreed with in the end—there were about four options put up—was a very flat structure which said, “Somebody in charge, four service chiefs.” What the UFU is saying, and what I have been saying for a long time, is that we need this inside a stat authority so that they are independent, so that they are not ruled by the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, which I believe has not been a good place for them to be.
What is proposed in this motion is that we re-establish the ESA as a stat authority independent of the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, and to be headed by a chief executive officer. It is impossible for any commissioner—and I acknowledge the presence of the commissioner in the chamber today, and I acknowledge his deep and abiding knowledge of Rural Fire Service matters—to be fully competent across Fire & Rescue, Ambulance Service, RFS and SES operations. It is just impossible. It is unreasonable to put that on an individual.
If we look at the set-up that the government has implemented for the courts, we now have a court administrator, and the court administrator is there to run the operation while the delivery of justice is left to the judges. We should have the same model in ESA. We should have an administrator at the top of the organisation who has
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