Page 1135 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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further decrease in these already low support levels. As reported in the media this week, the AFPA believe that ACT Policing needs an additional 180 officers just to bring us to the national average. That is a big ask, given our budget constraints, but it is worth noting that that is the observation they have made.
Let us now quickly look at the ESA. One of the key departments that we have heard on the grapevine will be subject to budget cuts as a result of the external review is the ESA. This is despite promises by the Stanhope government to ensure this agency was extremely well resourced in key areas in order to prevent the same serious bureaucratic calamity as occurred during the 2003 bushfire disaster.
The Stanhope government is yet to make clear its intentions for any new community fire units, if I could pick one of the areas of concern. We know that Minister Hargreaves has previously said, “We will look at it,” for upcoming budgets, having only installed 22 community fire units against the requirement of at least 80. Will this be possible when the budget is in such bad shape? What does the functional review say about these essential community safety resources? Community fire units reflect the front-line fighting capability of community safety. If the functional review does not identify this as an area that needs to be addressed, it is not worth the paper it is written on.
So, in summary, given what we believe to be the topsy-turvy bureaucratic nature of the ESA and its numbers of tail staff, it seems that we have not learnt very much at all since the Auditor-General in 2003, and then, secondly, McLeod himself, who identified the dysfunctional nature that had been the case with the old Emergency Services Bureau. Will the functional review home in on the ESA bureaucracy and its wasteful expenditure? There is a lot to be cut, but there are areas that have been neglected that instead need to be resourced, as I have outlined.
I will just point quickly to the Fire Management Unit within the Department of Urban Services. The FMU was the sort of essential service, again recommended by the McLeod inquiry, that should have been left in place. Yet Minister Hargreaves helped to substantially weaken the FMU last year by virtually disbanding it. Many FMU officers were transferred out of Urban Services, a force that the McLeod inquiry recommended remain in place in order to ensure that public land managers had more control in the event of fire on urban public land. This disbanding may have come about as a result of the $10 million in departmental budget cuts that were announced last budget, despite it being an essential front-line service. I just hope that the functional review identifies that that was a mistake; that to have moved all of our bushfire fighting and planning, with perhaps the exception of one man, out of urban services into one basket has probably been a mistake.
Let us see what this review comes up with. There are many inefficiencies that need to be looked at, there are many savings to be made, but there are many areas that have been under-resourced. Let us hope that your mate comes good.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.08): Mr Speaker, what we have seen here today is the absolute low point of the Stanhope government’s pledges to accountability. Everything that this man when he was Leader of the Opposition stood for has been walked away from today. I recall the number of times I sat on advisers’ benches and listened to Jon Stanhope, Leader of the Opposition, say: “A Stanhope government will be an open
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