Page 2913 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 August 2015
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ESA on a journey to improving the attraction, development and retention of women across our service. Except you cannot apply for the top job in your chosen field because she, the minister, does not think you should be allowed to. That is a real shame. We get the talk but we do not get the action. The shame for the ESA is that I suspect under this minister it will continue.
We hear a lot about integration in the strategic reform agenda. I have heard the minister say, “Oh, no, there’ll always be four services.” We have heard variations. “There’ll always be four service chiefs,” or “There’ll always be four services,” or “We’ll always provide the functions of the four services.” But I have to say that the great fear in a number of the services is that integration means one fire service, so we will have an ambulance service and we will have a fire and rescue service. Let us be quite blunt about it.
The minister can stand up and say that will never happen. It will be interesting to see if she will explicitly say there will always be an RFS with an RFS chief officer, there will always be an SES with an SES chief officer, there will always be an ambulance with an ambulance chief officer, and there will always be a fire and rescue service with a fire and rescue service chief officer, each operating independently in their chosen field but working together to make sure we have got a combined response to any emergency that occurs in the ACT.
A number of people have read the strategic reform agenda; a number of people have seen the documents the minister still refuses to make available, documents that make the suggestion that some fire stations should close at night and that we should perhaps have operational volunteers in the fire service and the ambulance service. The emergency services levy just goes up, up, up; it will triple in about six years. Rates are tripling; the emergency services levy is tripling. I do not think people see paying triple for their emergency services over a six-year period to be in line with the government considering operational volunteers in the ambulance service and the fire service. Perhaps the minister would like to explicitly rule that out as well.
It is sad that we are having these discussions. In 2003 there was a lot of goodwill from all involved about getting the process right. I believe at the heart of this is that the minister seems to think the ESA is part of the bureaucracy and it should be in the directorate, whereas I think just about everyone involved has come to the view that it should be a stat authority. The McLeod report, the Doogan inquiry and everything said to have a stat authority. It provides that the ESA is of the government but it is not tucked inside the government caught up in the bureaucracy. It is that sort of independence that will make it work better.
That is a strategic reform agenda, not cohesive operations, a collaborative management team and a united executive. That little slogan talks all about those in charge, not about the people they should be serving and assisting, those that serve the residents of the ACT.
The UFU have come out and said they would like to see a stat authority. Indeed, the UFU have explicitly said that they do not want the model being put forward. Why do they not want the model being put forward? They say:
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