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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1661 ..
Mr S (continuing):
The obligation has always been that the ACT government and the Emergency Services Bureau, but more specifically the Chief Minister's Department-the responsibility primarily lay not so much with the Emergency Services Bureau but with the Chief Minister's Department-are required to submit their firefighting plan to the federal authorities for where and how the funding was going to be spent, and exactly what amount of funding they thought would be required on this fee-for-service basis. That is a fundamental tenet of federal funding acquisition anyway-it does not matter what capability or department we are talking about. Clearly, this government either does not understand that or it simply could not have cared less.
Was the funding, which would have been somewhere in the region of $4 million to $6 million annually, insignificant? Didn't we need that in the ACT to add to our fire fighting capabilities?
The federal government have expressed their frustration with the ACT government and the childish and irresponsible approach of the Chief Minister's Department specifically on this matter. Not only has the Chief Minister's Department dragged the chain, but this dragging of the chain has been childish. It has also denied valuable funding over a two-year period that should have been taken up. So we have just gone through a two-year period where funding which could have been provided to our ACT firefighting assets was simply not taken up.
As I said earlier, Mr Speaker, the December 2001 fires were a jolting wake-up call. When you couple that wake-up call with all of the dire predictions of continuing drought through 2002-03, there is no excuse for this government not having come to a rapid agreement to secure that funding. In the face of a drought and forecast conditions for the Christmas 2002 period which could be best described as negative, they should have at least eaten humble pie and taken what they could have got. We would have applauded that decision. We would have applauded their decision to perhaps go ahead and try to make up what they perceived to be the shortfall, rather than denying all funding.
The federal government's frustration is best expressed in a Department of Finance and Administration letter dated 20 December 2002 to the chief executive of the Chief Minister's Department, Mr Tonkin. In that letter the finance department says:
I am writing in connection with the proposed new arrangements for the funding of fire services provided by the ACT Emergency Service Bureau (ESB) to Commonwealth-owned or occupied properties in the ACT.
The finance official goes on to say:
I have become concerned that, despite a number of meetings between officers of my Department and officers from the ESB, real progress is not being made to resolve this funding issue.
So the matter was dragging. The letter later goes on to explain why the ACT government's dogged demand for what it was seeking-$6.22 million for 2002-03-was in fact unrealistic. And again I quote from this finance officer's letter:
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