Page 1984 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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It is important that that work be done. But as the UFU and some of the RFS people have said to me, we are going to pass legislation and then let somebody define it. What we need to know is how they are defining it before we go to the legislation. Indeed, there are a number of references in the explanatory statement where the legislation has been changed to support the commissioner’s guidelines. Surely the commissioner’s guidelines come as a result of the legislation.
I do not think I have ever seen a piece of legislation that we are amending that supports what the commissioner wants to do. What we legislate for in this place is to direct the public servants in what they do. But this is almost retrospective. The commissioner has decided this. I wonder how many people in this room have actually read the commissioner’s guidelines and understood what they actually mean. But what we will do is give effect to those guidelines even though we do not see them in this document. That is not right. That is now how legislation should work.
There are also concerns about the council. Years ago, long before self-government, the Bushfire Council actually ran the operations and there were very experienced people on that council. They came out of the ranks of the firefighters and that was a good thing. But they were people with experience and with knowledge. Those people proved themselves invaluable in 2003. Those people, and particularly Val Jeffery in Tharwa on that night of the 17th with his years of experience, proved why it is important to have people like Val and others around. He is credited with putting in a back-burn that saved Tharwa, which perhaps was not approved by headquarters.
That is the sort of experience that you want because you cannot get the experience of large wildfires without years and years in the field. What we are doing tonight is emasculating that experience and putting them down to simply not approving anything except being consulted on the commissioner’s guidelines for some very important placements. The review concludes that possibly there were people in control in 2003 without the relevant experience. That is why that referral power came about in the Emergencies Act 2004, not as put forward in this document.
It is very important to get the history right because if you do not understand your history you are simply doomed to repeat it. I think it is very important, members, that we do not repeat history by changing this tonight. Perhaps Mr Rattenbury will listen to what I am saying and when he gets up he might move to adjourn the debate. I would support him on that.
But we are going to dispense with that history. Worse than that, we are now going to time limit people on the council. People on the council have been turned over regularly and naturally. But now it is going to be limited to people doing only two terms of four years; so you can have eight years starting from today. If you are on the council you can remain for eight years. But the ministers have exercised their power to turn over the membership and to renew it. That is a good thing.
But if this legislation had been in place in 2003, for instance, the time of somebody on the council who assisted in the firefighting and observed the fires in 2003 would have run out in 2011. Then they would have gone off for four years and maybe they could
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