Page 1999 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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agencies as independent authorities for the purposes of providing better services to the public and improving community safety. I also talk about public transport when I talk about this rebound to the dark ages.
While there may be problems within some of these agencies that need to be ironed out, such as financial management problems and project management problems in the Emergency Services Authority or inefficiencies in ACTION, instead of making the effort to sort these problems out, the lazy Stanhope government would rather suck them back into the public service arena and hope that, by them lying within the constraints of departmental bureaucracy, all those problems will be solved. Some of the administrative problems would definitely be solved, but I would put it to you that the operational efficiencies and the ability to respond quickly to the community’s needs would suffer.
Abolishing the administrative and financial independence of these authorities in the hope that bringing them back under the public service umbrella will solve issues of overspending is extremely naive and a cop-out. Rather than take the hard and tough decisions to fix these authorities up and get them running more efficiently as independent bodies, thus enabling them to better serve the community, the government is pretending that money will be saved through putting them back under the public service umbrella.
I will now turn to a couple of specific areas which the opposition and the community are deeply concerned about regarding the proposal to basically disembowel the Emergency Services Authority, to delete it as an authority. Let me pull a couple of issues out. The opposition is seriously questioning why the Stanhope government has decided to amalgamate the ESA under the Department of Justice and Community Safety. We think this takes the ESA back to the same old bureaucratic structure of the ESB, as a wing of JACS, that existed during the January 2003 bushfire disaster.
Mrs Dunne: And what a disaster that was.
MR PRATT: It was a disaster. Firstly, this impending amalgamation seems to be a vote of no confidence in Commissioner Peter Dunn by the Stanhope government. They have pulled the carpet out from under him in respect of what he has developed. Secondly, it is a betrayal of the McLeod inquiry and the Auditor-General’s findings of May 2003, which both recommended a stand-alone agency for emergency services. Those two august bodies made that clear recommendation, and that has now been chucked out the back window by the Chief Minister and his ministers.
Finally, this amalgamation is a betrayal of the men and women who serve the community through the Emergency Services Authority and the emergency services, whom I have assessed were happy with the concept of an autonomous emergency services authority or agency. They were happy with that.
In the aftermath of the January 2003 bushfire disaster, the McLeod report found that many of the problems experienced during the fires were exacerbated by the bureaucratic structure that hindered communications and front line emergency responses under the old Emergency Services Bureau. It was not only McLeod who raised these concerns. Let me remind you of what the Auditor-General said in report No 3 of 2003, where he identified similar concerns about the ACT’s operational readiness to manage disasters. It says:
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