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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (20 August) . . Page.. 2958 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

people feel abandoned, feel left out of the system. It is not for want of trying. Perhaps they are a bit more stoic than the rest of them, because bushies are like that, but they should not feel left out and they should not have to go begging for services. Until people do not continue to say to me, "We are begging for services and we are being ignored,"I want the second part of this motion supported.

We have talked about looking after volunteers and the Chief Minister said that he has signed lots of certificates and he thinks that in the Australia Day awards some people might obtain recognition. That would not be this government supplying recognition; the Australia Day awards are not this government's recognition. After the Christmas fires in 2001, as Mr Smyth said, there was a public parade at the instigation of myself, as the then emergency services spokesman, and other people, including Mr Smyth himself as a volunteer. There was a patch and a lapel badge to be worn. None of those things has happened this time. There are many volunteers out there who are still feeling as though they have been left behind.

The number of volunteers who have said to me in emails and to my face that they have still not received a debriefing is a disgrace. It is a disgrace and an indictment that seven months down the track there are emergency services personnel and volunteer firefighters who have not received a debriefing on the greatest natural disaster that has ever hit our town. I do not care how well everyone is doing generally speaking; that is a disgrace and it must be remedied.

The last part of this motion is about how prepared we were for the fires. There has been a whole lot of argy-bargy today about not being able to talk about that because we were actually talking about arson and school kids last year. It is about the wake-up call that was the January 2001 fires. The January 2001 fires said, "Look out, it's coming."From the January 2001 fires onwards the situation got worse.

The Chief Minister said in here the other day that he was complacent. What he talked about there was not complacency; it was lack of warning and lack of awareness. You are complacent if you know something is going to happen and you do not do anything about it. If you are inexperienced in fire and do not actually think it is going to come about because it never crosses your consciousness, that is being unaware. Being unaware is not a hanging offence, but complacency can be.

My contention and the contention of the members of the opposition is that there has been complacency. There was, as Mr McLeod says, an overoptimistic approach to the fires. I received briefings from emergency services and from Environment on bushfire fuel management. There was a view that everything was hunky-dory and everything was fine, but it was not. We failed to learn the lessons of 2001. That is what paragraph (6) of the motion is about; we failed to learn from the messages.

Messages came from volunteers, experienced people in the bush, people who knew about fire, and other people did not do enough in response. They thought that Fred or Jack always runs that line, that there are modern ways of doing these things and their views are outmoded. But these people were proved right. Val Jeffery was proved right about the fires. Val Jeffery has spoken about the disaster that is waiting for us on Black Mountain if something is not done. I do not want Val Jeffery to be proved right again. Let us learn from the messages. Let us learn the lessons that we did not learn

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