Page 2965 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 September 2006
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management prior to the 2004-05 bushfire season”—to meet the immediate needs. It might have been sufficient as a stopgap in 2004-05, and we were happy enough to see that draft version as at least a first step, but this version of the SBMP falls well short of public expectations, falls well short of the community’s needs, and does not adequately prepare the ACT for a serious bushfire threat the likes of which we saw in 2003.
Why all the fuss about seeing a final, concrete SBMP? It is because McLeod found that, under the ESB and JACS structures in place in 2002-03, bushfire prevention, planning, and operational contingencies had been too loose, too haphazard, a make your own arrangements approach to preparing for and then responding to bushfire emergencies. Good work was done by individual fire agencies—there is no question that they were doing their best—but at the strategic level overarching our bushfire services the planning of JACS and the ESB was found wanting. Experienced firefighters, former bushfire council members, scientists like Phil Cheney and long-term landed families who have lived here for decades and decades had agreed with that perspective.
Mr Benton’s audit report in 2003 of the “dysfunctional” ESB touched on this raw nerve that planning had been haphazard. Many of the lessons listed by the emergency services in the wake of the December 2001 bushfire, the one that gutted our forest industry, pointed to haphazard planning. That was the fault of a number of successive governments, but no government before 2001 had faced the dramatically serious drought index that the Stanhope government did right through 2002 in the wake of the wake-up call fire of December 2001.
During 2003, everybody of experience knew that we badly needed proper strategic planning governing the implementation of concrete preventative programs. Much of the evidence submitted to the Doogan coronial inquiry has highlighted this fundamental deficiency. So it was at least encouraging to see the government introduce a draft version 1 of the SBMP. Yes, it lacked authority and clarity, but it was at least a pretty good and useful guide for preventative planning. The opposition notes that it was better than anything seen before, better than what was being provided before. The Emergencies Act 2004, which was the governing act, laid down useful guidelines as a foundation for preparing an SBMP, but the act too lacked concrete benchmarks. You will remember, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker Burke the opposition sought to toughen up the act, but to no avail.
Going back to the SBMP as we currently see it, the SBMP is intended to set out all of the requirements for bushfire prevention and management in the ACT and is a requirement under the Emergencies Act 2004. Currently, the SBMP remains in a seriously inadequate form, despite promises by the former emergency services minister, John Hargreaves, to have version 2 in place by July last year. I will now explain its deficiencies in more detail.
Version 1 falls well short of the mark in terms of what such a plan should detail. The SBMP should be an action plan with clear directions and tasking for emergency services staff, government and private land managers, and the general community with respect to bushfire prevention and emergency responses. It should also detail, suburb by suburb, how to deal with and mitigate another bushfire emergency. Unfortunately, these elements were lacking in version 1 of the plan.
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