Page 125 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 12 February 2020
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consensus building that goes on in actually coming up with that plan and people bringing their different perspectives to the table and having to work through some of those issues.
I think that the other key discussion when it comes to hazard reduction is that burning is not the sole answer. That has come out in today’s discussion. There are a range of techniques, whether it is grazing or physical removal, and modern burning techniques will be part of it. I think there is improving discussion about traditional burning techniques. I heard Wally Bell talk about it on radio recently. The Firesticks Alliance is doing interesting work. I think we will see a lot more of this. We have seen some interesting case studies down the South Coast where some traditional burning has been employed. We need to have a sensible, evidence-based, scientific discussion about burning and get away from some of the more reactionary comments that we have seen.
Another massive lesson for us out of recent months has been the issue of smoke. In all the times that I have sat at the cabinet table and in the various discussions I have been involved in, nobody ever contemplated a smoke incident in the way that we have seen. In all the scenario planning no-one said, “Actually, six or eight weeks of hazardous air pollution is something we need to think about.” This is what my motion tomorrow goes to—so I will not speak to it too much now—but we clearly need to say, “This is something we didn’t see coming. How do we react to it now?” I think there was some great work done in a fairly quick way to react to it. Now we have an opportunity to sit back and think about it more strategically.
I reflected on the fact that I have no recollection of the smoke sticking around after the 2003 fires. I think in the 24 hours or so there was smoke in the air but there were not weeks of hazardous smoke in the way we have just gone through or the blanketing of the city, despite the fact that the fire really hit the city in such a full-on way in 2003. There is definitely some learning and some research to be done in that space.
I have been very conscious of mental health issues throughout this period. I spoke a little about that yesterday as well. I think we made some good responses this time, but there will be some learnings to do in that space as well. How do we make sure that we give our community the support they need, particularly for these sustained periods of anxiety? What does that look like? It is probably not so much in the acute mental health space but it is more a whole-of-population issue. How do we give people the right advice and help them deal with what they are experiencing? As I say, I touched on that a little yesterday. We certainly made a deliberate effort during this recent period to make people like our Chief Psychiatrist available to the media to give some independent, expert-led advice to the community, and I think that is a space where we can improve our responses.
The other fascinating one for me is what I loosely call supply chain issues. It did not really affect us so much in the ACT this time. As somebody who was at the South Coast over the period of the fires—and Mr Hanson spoke about this yesterday—I fortunately was not in an area that was directly burnt, but the supply chain issues were extraordinary, with the closing of key access routes and then the loss of power. We saw a whole lot of things flow from that.
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