Page 2001 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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The opposition has been calling for the Stanhope government to take action regarding the ESA’s administrative, financial and project management, particularly tendering practices, for some time now. We have recognised that the ESA, in the operational sense, has been a success for all the reasons I have just outlined—that it was a much more responsive organisation. But, of course, the opposition has been deeply concerned about the way the bureaucracy of the ESA has grown out of control.
We have been somewhat concerned about the way the ESA has spent money on some of its projects, and we have been very concerned with some of their expenditure priorities. But that does not mean other than that, operationally, the model is excellent and quite successful. So we think the government has got its priorities entirely wrong here.
Those problems need to be addressed by the government but within the existing structure, not solved by hiding the ESA back under a departmental structure. The answer to those problems is not to amalgamate the agency. The government simply needs to make the authority more accountable and efficient, but must leave it as a stand-alone agency to ensure prompt emergency responses, as I have just outlined, that cannot be hindered by departmental bureaucracy.
If you put emergency services headquarters back inside the department of justice and community services, yes, the advantage is that there will be some savings in administrative arrangements. There will be closer focus, I suppose, on some of the administrative weaknesses we have identified. I am sure the government has identified them. That must be one of the driving reasons for this. Isn’t that true, Mr Barr? It must be one of the driving reasons why the government wants to do this. But we think you will throw the baby out with the bathwater, and you are going to lose the operational responsiveness.
I think this will be a blow, too, to the morale of the emergency services. While there were concerns about how some of these issues were being managed, there was a certain pride amongst our women and men in the fire services, the SES, the ambulance and the fire brigade about the way this entire organisation was running. The McLeod inquiry concluded that community safety would be maximised through the creation of a new statutory authority. We have already talked about this. Some of the areas he covered are quite instructive. McLeod said this, for example:
It would be separate from and independent of any department of state and would be outside the public service; it would be responsible for the overall strategic direction, management and operational control of the ACT Bushfire Service, the ACT Fire Brigade, the ACT Ambulance Service and ACT Emergency Services; it would report directly to the Minister responsible for emergency services … It would be structured in such a way as to maximise the opportunities to improve the operational effectiveness and flexibility of all of the emergency services organisations … 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.
That is what McLeod said, and a lot of experts around the place really quite agreed with that. I would disagree with Mr Corbell’s comments that moving ESA under JACS is justified to make things more and more efficient. I would disagree with that observation
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