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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2802 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

McLeod report. It might be that it would be better to have had a recommendation that said, "Look, I can't go down this path. We need to convene another group, body or whatever to further explore this rather than leave it up in the air."As I said at the outset, Mr Speaker, we have to learn and not forget.

I was quite heartened by the extent to which Mr McLeod dealt with areas that I am particularly concerned about-the issues of fuel management and land management. In doing so, he highlighted a lot of shortcomings that we have to do something about. All of us here who had anything to do with land management are to some extent culpable. All of us did not heed the warnings that were given.

After the Christmas 2001 bushfires, as a new member and the new shadow minister responsible for emergency services, which was taken over a while later by Mr Pratt, people came to me and spoke of their concerns about bushfire fuel management and how, in the past, we had failed. That struck a chord with me because it is a message that has been coming back and back to me in all the time that I have worked in this building and in areas associated with land management.

The message that came to us, and the message that came fully and glaringly out of the McLeod inquiry, is that over the years we have collectively failed to effectively deal with the issue of bushfire fuel management. The previous government set in place the bushfire fuel management strategy. It is a great document and it is comprehensive in many ways, but I think we possibly failed because we did not go back and sufficiently audit it to see whether it was actually doing what it set out to do. I think that is a failing that we have to own up to.

A failing that I have to own up to is that when I was approached by people who had much more experience in their little finger of the bush and of firefighting than I could ever have and was told by them that there were problems, I pursued these issues but perhaps I did not pursue them rigorously enough; perhaps I was not hungry enough to get the right answers. I think as a result of that, we all did not learn from the messages of the 2001 bushfire. Somebody said to me after the 2001 bushfire that the 2001 bushfire could have been prevented, and "if we are not careful, it will happen again and it will happen here and here and here".

That person also said to me that, bearing in mind the current fuel load, if we ever get a fire on Black Mountain we can kiss goodbye to Aranda, Cook, O'Connor, Turner and a whole lot of other suburbs in the inner north. We came very close to that happening on 18 January. In circumstances of continuing drought and continuing dry weather, I think it behoves us all to take responsibility to ensure that we do everything we can to minimise the possibility of that happening in the next fire season or the fire season after.

Mr McLeod says a lot about fuel. He says, on page 83 of his report that fuel is the only element of fire that we can control and that fuel burning is the only effective measure we have for wide-scale fuel reduction. We can mow, we can pick up things, we can take out dead trees in small areas, but this is not the way to go with large areas of bush.

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