Page 2216 - Week 07 - Thursday, 27 August 2020
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fires in eastern Australia over the summer tested us like never before. Our emergency services and first responder agencies were again challenged and required a new level of cooperation and collaboration.
As we know from the time, and from the report that led to this bill’s introduction, the efforts to protect our city and natural environment required the deployment of the Defence Force for the first time in this context, and became the shared responsibility of Parks and Conservation, rural bushfire brigades, metropolitan firefighters, the Emergency Services Agency more broadly, and required the consideration and combined efforts of nearly every government directorate.
To borrow a phrase, we came through these times not by luck or chance. The ACT emergency services worked tirelessly over an extended period of time and protected us well through dedication, professionalism and commitment. I add my thanks to all of those who helped. It is and has been for some time normal practice to review critical events such as these, and it would be very unusual indeed for any such review to not offer up learnings and opportunities for improvement.
Learning under such circumstances should never be considered an implicit or explicit criticism. Without doubt, people more qualified and experienced than most of us in this place will argue the merits of certain decisions or arrangements that occurred over the summer, but for myself today I am content to see such practical and straightforward governance changes brought forward as would support the ESA if we were to face another such emergency in the near future.
I do, however, unfortunately believe that we will see the ACT challenged in this way again, if not this coming year then in the years ahead. The sobering realities of multi-complex crises are not contingency planning or far-fetched drills anymore. We are living through it now. The fire season we just saw highlighted issues of cross-border and national interactions, of supply chains and logistics—in fact, matters even of constitutional significance.
As the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action found in their recent Australian bushfire and climate plan, more must be done at every level of government and across state and political borders to protect Australian communities from increasingly frequent and damaging extreme weather events.
Australia’s black summer fires over 2019 and 2020 were absolutely unprecedented in scale and levels of destruction. Fuelled by climate change, the hottest and driest year ever recorded resulted in fires in the ACT that destroyed 80 per cent of Namadgi National Park, triggered a state of emergency and, it is estimated, caused 31 additional deaths due to excessive smoke pollution as air quality in Canberra reached more than 23 times the hazardous level.
Looking forward, the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action recommend that we should work in partnership with the federal government to increase the resourcing of emergency services so that they can provide the early detection and extinguishing of fires, including through an automated network of sensors, and the immediate deployment of aerial and ground firefighting crews on days of very high fire danger.
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