Page 496 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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has been taken by the government in restructuring the emergency services. I will talk in more detail about that as we go through the morning. I want to go back, though, as a basis for the case that the opposition is presenting here today, to some of the history which is so important to underpinning the debate that we must have in this place. I go back to the Emergency Services Bureau failures of January 2003.
Mr Speaker, I would remind this place that we have a shed full of information and evidence presented by a number of inquiries in the last three years and 11 months; in fact, going back even further to the 109 recommendations put forward on the back of the December 2001 bushfires following an inquiry internally undertaken by the Emergency Services Bureau and the department of justice as to the organisational failings of the Emergency Services Bureau.
I will list the concerns, commencing with the January 2003 fires. There was clearly a lack of will to tackle the fires quickly on 8 January, and that was down to organisation. That was down to a lack of clarity in command within the services. The left hand and the right hand clearly did not know what was going on. Consequently, there was not the professional will to get the job done quickly, and the three fires at Bendora, Stockyard and Gingera simply were not tackled quickly on 8 January.
We now know that the Emergency Services Bureau bureaucracy which was integrated within the department of justice at that time was cumbersome. There were certainly too many chiefs, to borrow a term used by the minister in recent times. There were certainly too many chiefs and people simply got in each other’s road. Where professional assessments and risk analysis were undertaken as to what was evolving during the January 2003 fires, people confused each other. Whilst we have been very critical of ministers in this place about what happened then, it could very well be, and it is our belief, that part of the contribution to that problem was that ministers were probably getting conflicting advice from too many chiefs.
We now know that there was great failure to assess the evolving disaster. We now know that the Emergency Services Bureau simply was not structured then to do a risk analysis of what was looming on the western, south-western and north-western horizons of the ACT. Mr Speaker, I refer you to Joe Benton’s May 2003 audit report, which was presented in this place and which, very sadly, the Chief Minister decried at that time. He absolutely talked down Joe Benton’s audit report. Of course, Joe Benton has now been well and truly vindicated in terms of what McLeod was to find and what Doogan has finally found about what was then a “dysfunctional Emergency Services Bureau”.
Mr Speaker, the last point I would make in looking back at history is that we now know that the Emergency Services Bureau, in all of its glory, was simply dysfunctional and unable to carry out preventative planning in 2002. We now know—in fact, this place knew it then, because we debated this matter in November 2002—that the macro weather condition of 2002 was very dangerous, coming on the back of 10 years of continual drought leading up to 2002.
We knew then that the drought index was severe. We knew then that the bushfire index was severe. As I recall, the bushfire index was something like 1.4, highly dangerous. But the Emergency Services Bureau was unable to pull those factors
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