Page 1996 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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– acknowledge the upgraded emphasis on community education and information and media relations
– retain a degree of operational separation from the Ambulance Service, in recognition of the extremely limited opportunities it has for cross-over with other emergency service agencies.
• It would provide common planning, administrative and logistical support to all its component parts and would have a common communications facility, command and control centre, and headquarters.
The basic structure of the proposed Authority is shown in functional groupings in Figure 6.
And then we go to page 237, under the heading “A more unified and independent emergency services organisation”. The recommendations state:
The separate organisations that make up the emergency services group that is co-ordinated by the Emergency Services Bureau, and the associated arrangements, should be replaced by a statutory authority, the ACT Emergency Services Authority.
The proposed authority should be headed by a Chief Executive Officer.
The position of Chief Executive Officer should be advertised and filled on a contract basis before the enactment of the legislation. In this way the person appointed can contribute to formulating the legislation and the transition process can begin without delay.
Upon the abolition of the Emergency Services Bureau, a small policy formulation unit should be established in the department that supports the Minister responsible for emergency management.
There it is in black and white. We just do not seem to learn from history. These things have been tried before. They actually have not worked and we have had two very learned reports from the Auditor-General and from the McLeod inquiry in relation especially to the Emergency Services Authority. Despite the fact that the government has attempted to show that operationally it would still be independent, it still comes under a department. It still is subject to the constraints that that imposes. It is still subject to the problems in terms of administrative back-up inherent in relation to that, and so are those other agencies that I have mentioned.
History shows that the government is highly unlikely to achieve the efficiencies it hopes to achieve. History also shows that, when attempts were made to do this type of thing before, invariably they failed and we had to go back to the drawing board. These are very important agencies. The emergency services agencies and tourism agencies are crucially important in actually growing the territory in terms of getting people here, bringing money into the territory and creating jobs—all of those problems which this government’s budget has really stomped on in a very hard way. This adds insult to injury in bringing these agencies back into government.
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