Page 19 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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the fires. As the coroner said, the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing and mostly both were doing nothing.
The coroner found that there was misinformation and even denial about what was happening. Indeed, as the opposition will show, denial remains the response of this government to the 2003 fires. And while it has cost the ACT dearly, the failure to acknowledge fault means that lessons have not been learned. The result is that the ACT and Canberra are likely at some future date to burn again. Other members of the opposition will elaborate on these deficiencies and will highlight the continued lack of effective action by this government to address and implement the lessons we must learn from the January 2003 bushfires.
The two main points that concern Canberra residents are: why weren’t we warned and why weren’t the fires put out when they first started? Experienced firefighters I have spoken to are still pulling their hair out at the lack of action by the authorities to aggressively attack the three fires in the ACT. Indeed, the same can be said for the New South Wales authorities in relation to the McIntyres Hut fires when they started on 8 January 2003. The lack of a proper response in the early days, in the coroner’s view, significantly contributed to the disaster on 18 January 2003. She found in relation to the Bendora fire:
If the crews had not been withdrawn on the night of 8 January the fire would most probably have been contained, and if it had been fought during the following days by properly resourced teams it would most probably have been extinguished.
She made similar findings in relation to the fire at Stockyard Spur and Mount Gingerra. From her report it is clear that from around 13 January onwards government officials were at least aware of the potential for the fires to burn into the urban areas of the ACT.
But, Mr Speaker, of even more importance to the Canberra community is the question: why weren’t we warned? There were many opportunities to do so. Coroner Doogan found that no effective warnings had been given until it was too late. She found that, until the first standard emergency warning signal was sounded at 2.40 pm on Saturday, 18 January, there was no official warning given to the people of Canberra. That message “was too little, and it was delivered far too late”—the words of the coroner, a finder of fact, not mine.
This inquest is a first, members, because it lays direct blame on the Chief Minister. I do not think that in my time in this place I have seen an inquest that has done that. Despite what the Chief Minister and his colleagues may say to the contrary, he has failed in his duty to the citizens of the ACT in not ensuring that adequate warnings were given to the population, and there is no escaping from that fact. The coroner said that as well as not warning the population:
Mr Stanhope either misunderstood or deliberately downplayed the seriousness of the situation in his comments on ABC 666 and 2CC radio station at about 3.00 pm—
on 18 January—
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