Page 54 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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the ACT government had contributed by failing to warn the community when it was well aware a potential disaster was on its doorstep. This is a damning indictment of the Chief Minister, his ministers and his emergency agencies.
Elsewhere in her report, the coroner damns the ESB for its role in not warning the community and also ties ministerial responsibility to that failure. This is hotly contested by Mr Stanhope. It is what he essentially spent $10 million of taxpayers’ money trying to fight, seeking to stop Doogan getting right to the heart of this crucial matter.
In her report, Doogan said:
The Emergency Services Bureau should have warned the people of the ACT of the potential for disaster by fire ... Instead of warning the community they served, they said nothing until it was too late to do anything in any real or practical sense. Furthermore, there is a strong argument that, in accordance with the Westminster tradition and the convention of ministerial responsibility, direct action should have been taken by the responsible Minister.
That was Mr Stanhope. A further damnation is the coroner’s findings, which surely confirm many of the reports I have received over the years from insiders. She says:
… two days before the firestorm hit the suburbs, the Cabinet generally, including Mr Stanhope, knew a potential disaster was on Canberra’s doorstep but did nothing to ensure that the Canberra community was warned promptly and effectively.
It is inconceivable that cabinet briefings and meetings, and other ministerial, ESB meetings or telephone briefings, did not discuss the potential for disaster on the urban edge, at least by Thursday, 16 January 2003. There has been information from volunteers, professional officers and others who are adamant that the general feeling around the services, the ESB and the government was that, in the minds of many who bothered to analyse logically and dispassionately what was unfolding, the situation was grim.
By 16 January, the fire intelligence, combined with a long-range weather forecast indicating a freshening north-westerly wind change, spelt potential disaster. Either the ESB has entirely lost its memory, or it genuinely froze under pressure and took the risky, but far too typically, departmental approach to withhold that information from the community in order not to alarm it.
Many people would have been very happy to be alarmed. They would have been very happy to be alarmed even if it was a false alarm. Either way Mr Stanhope stands condemned, for the reasons I outlined earlier. He should have instructed his ministers. He himself should have gone looking for trouble. A fundamental element of leadership is that one must have a constantly inquiring mind and keep subordinates on their feet. In this regard Mr Stanhope was comprehensively negligent. This negligence led to his failure to warn the community on time. Even if we take the charitable view that nothing could have stopped the fires—and that is a reasonable argument, Mr Speaker—Mr Stanhope had a duty of care to warn his community in time to allow residents to make the appropriate decisions for themselves and their families. It would
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