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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (20 August) . . Page.. 2956 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Every time the bushfires are mentioned, the one big lie that comes from the government is that this opposition is struggling for relevance. This opposition is not struggling for relevance. This opposition has a part to play in the ongoing community debate about this bushfire, this tragedy, this disaster that struck this town. All of us in this community talk to one another about what has happened.

Yes, there are many people who just want to forget that it happened, who at the moment just want to cover up and get on with their lives, or so they think. But there are many people, countless people, that I speak to on a regular basis who just want answers, who just want to get to the bottom of what happened, why it happened, and whether we can learn something from it. What we are not getting so far is the answers that the people of the ACT community are crying out for.

I would contend that even those people who are saying that they want to get on with their life will at some stage want to seek out those answers. There are many phases of dealing with a disaster like the one that we have had. Some people are angry, some people are confused, some people are in denial and some people are in torpor. All of us in this community, to a lesser or greater extent, will go through all of those phases once or more often than that in the process of getting over this fire.

I touched yesterday on the experience of own family experience with fire. It was not a disastrous fire. We were just an isolated family who were not completely left bereft. My children say to me from time to time, "Mum, we weren't like that. People didn't talk about it all the time."In fact, people did; people talked about it to us for months and months afterwards, perhaps when we did not want to do so, especially when the kids did not want to. Multiply that by the thousands of homes and households that were affected and the sense of urgency, fear, terror and all that was in the community at that time and you will see what effect that has had on the community.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to get over a fire. You think it is all right, but suddenly you realise that there is something you want that is no longer there, something about your life which has been taken away and you cannot get it back. They might seem to be material things, but from time to time they are things that you really do regret their passing. That is why we need to take a concerted approach to keeping asking the questions, because the community requires us to ask questions to keep the momentum going so that we do not actually run out of puff and fail to learn the lessons that we need to learn.

How many times have fires hit Australian communities and we have had inquiries, royal commissions and all sorts of things looking into them and somewhere along the line everyone loses impetus? Ms Tucker and Ms Dundas spoke today about the inquiries into fires and such things that have happened over the past 20 years and we have not done enough. I remember reading an article in, I think, the Sydney Morning Herald straight after the fire in which a journalist said that after the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983 people said we should learn the lessons from it so that we would never have to go through that again, but we did not learn the lessons of the Ash Wednesday fire.

The role of the elected members of this place is to ensure the vigilance of the community so that we limit the opportunity for making the mistakes from history that

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