Page 3622 - Week 11 - Thursday, 16 November 2006
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volunteers of the SES have received immense personal and professional benefit from the introduction of competency-based training and assessment, and this is something that we all should continue to embrace and encourage. It reinforces the current high standard of emergency services training, and allows us to feel confident that they are trained to the same level as their interstate counterparts.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (4.31): Mr Corbell indicated there are another nine new officers joining the ambulance service. I want to touch on the ambulance service, because I think it is a terribly important service and there will be some real problems if it is not adequately resourced.
I understand that only three of those officers are ready and qualified, and they will not plug the urgent gaps in frontline staffing. I also understand that the claims that there are seven or eight ambulance crews online are incorrect, indeed that management is still too often sending out single response unit vehicles and counting them as fully crewed ambulance vehicles. This indicates effectively that there are no more than five or six full-time crews available.
The TWU has claimed that ambulance officers are working extensive overtime and that response times are suffering. That is something that we hear from both ambulance officers themselves and patients. It is not often that the union backing ambulance officers actually speaks out without just cause. This is a crucially important issue. Ambulance drivers, who are very hard working, are working excessive overtime. It leads to tragic circumstances, and this has happened in the past.
Had the ambulance officers who attended after my brother-in-law’s heart attack not been right at the end of a very long shift, perhaps they would not have gone to the wrong place; they would have got there on time and my brother-in-law would be here today. That was a case of people working quite excessive time. I think that was right at the end of a long shift. There were other issues, too, that I am not going to go into.
It does scare me when I hear of people working excessive overtime, especially when it is in life or death situations. It worries me in a medical context, too, when you hear about doctors almost dead on their feet and nurses doing double shifts dead on their feet. How can you concentrate in a job like that when you are awake for 12 or 13 hours? Those are very real issues and Mr Pratt’s motion is timely.
On the issue of bushfire preparedness, it scares me that an expert like Val Jeffrey, despite his decades of firefighting, says he does not quite know how to counter fires in the heath country. A few weeks ago I took my wife and youngest daughter out for a drive into the heath country, and it was very scary indeed. There are some very real issues there. We are in a drought and we are going to have a very long, hot, dry summer. It is essential that the government does focus on insurance. We must ensure that there is adequate equipment and training for our volunteer and fully paid firefighters. The season we are going to go into has the real potential for another disastrous fire, with the threat that that poses to life and property. So it is a timely motion by Mr Pratt, and I thank him for moving it.
MR SPEAKER: The discussion is concluded.
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