Page 1994 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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procedures for determining who is in control on the fire ground. I am very much aware of what was said further on, in fact, two paragraphs down from the paragraph I quoted from. What I said was that I do not see the required clarity in the bill, and the minister just ignored that. That is important, Mr Corbell, through you, Madam Speaker. I do not see the clarity, and this is the problem with this bill.
We are about to abolish something called the bushfire abatement zone as an operational tool, but we are not going to replace it with anything yet because that does not exist, and that is the problem. If the minister had managed or bothered to read the email from the UFU he would know they say in a number of their dot points that the sequence of amending the legislation first then making any boundary changes later would leave the ACT in a position where there was no BAZ in place for operational response nor any time frame for changes to the boundary to be made to take account of the removal of the BAZ for operational purposes. What you do is leave us exposed.
We have this assurance from the minister that it will all be done expeditiously. But if it is that important, why was it not done so we could view it today, so we knew what we were voting on? What we are voting for is to remove something that is very important in an operational sense unless there is a replacement, and there is no replacement. That is the problem, members. The UFU goes on to say in their email that they consider that before they can agree that the changes to the BAZ are acceptable they need to understand what changes would be made to the boundaries to ensure that the intent of the McLeod inquiry was preserved. As things stand there is only a commitment to talk.
If we are going to talk about the BAZ because it came out of McLeod and we have to keep McLeod, the McLeod inquiry also said that the ESA should be a statutory authority. But the government did not accept that. It watered down many of the recommendations of the McLeod inquiry as it suited them. I think perhaps the most important was, in many ways, the establishment of the ESA as a statutory authority in its own right. But the government did not like that. And why not? Because they wanted to cut its budget. That is all it was; it was just budgetary constraint.
What we are doing now is potentially adding confusion for a period of time until the maps are agreed to. That may be, as Mr Corbell and I had a conversation outside, a little bit contentious because there are different groups with an interest in this. I do not see why we have to race this through when we leave a void that cannot be answered until the commissioner has determined what the new maps will look like.
The logical thing to do would be to do those maps so that the replacement was ready to roll instead of there being a void. The best way to get everybody on side is to have agreement on the maps before you make these changes. That is my principal objection to what is going on here today.
In regard to Mr Corbell’s comments on the council, he quite rightly quotes clause 44 in the bill. Clause 44 says there:
… must be appointed under subsection (1)—
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