Page 497 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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together and perhaps properly advise the government of this territory. Let’s be fair: perhaps at the time Minister Wood and Chief Minister Stanhope simply were not getting the best advice that they should have been getting because the Emergency Services Bureau simply was not organised and structured or did not have the professional will to get to the nub of what were problems.
Going on, the McLeod inquiry later in 2003 highlighted all of the issues that I have just gone through. What was the McLeod inquiry’s major recommendation? Its major recommendation was that an emergency services authority needed to be created out of the ashes of the failed Emergency Services Bureau. One of the major recommendations of the McLeod inquiry was that there was a screaming need for an independent statutory authority. That is what McLeod said at the time. He said that there was need for a more responsive and uncluttered chain of command within the emergency services organisations.
He pointed out that there needed to be clearer lines of ministerial oversight between the minister and the heads of the services. So he was not concerned simply that there be closer ministerial oversight of the heads of the emergency services organisations and the then department of justice in terms of its role in emergency management. McLeod really indicated that there needed to be a shorter chain of command, a much closer ministerial oversight of the heads of the emergency services, the heads of the rural fire service, the fire brigade, the ambulance service and what were then called the emergency services, which we now know to be the ACT SES. It came out of the McLeod inquiry that there was an urgent need for these reforms to be undertaken.
In October 2003, the opposition called for those recommendations to be implemented. In fact, we put forward in this place draft legislation seeking to have the emergency services streamlined. I must say that in May 2004 we did finally see Minister Wood implement what was a pretty good and workable act, the Emergencies Act 2004, and Minister Wood did introduce the Emergency Services Authority as an independent authority which was going to be able to meet the needs of the ACT community in providing better protection for all forms of emergency risk.
We supported that, Mr Speaker. The opposition wholeheartedly supported the government’s Emergencies Bill in 2004. We certainly supported the structure that Bill Wood came out and put on the table here. We now know that, unfortunately, through 2004, 2005 and 2006 the Emergency Services Authority was suffering severe financial and administrative management concerns. We know that there was a waste of funds on the part of the ESA. So, even though we had this stand-alone, independent authority, we now know that they were mismanaging their finances and we now know that they were mismanaging their projects. We now know that implementation of the communications programs was very slow and we now know that the relocation of the ESA headquarters was bungled. We now know that there was a waste of funding in the relocation exercise. We now know that the agencies are split. The ESA’s headquarters, in effective terms, is also split.
Minister Hargreaves, the minister at the time, and Minister Corbell, the minister after him, were right to be concerned about this mismanagement and they were right in undertaking reforms to try to tighten those procedures and make the Emergency Services Authority more accountable but, unfortunately, what we saw after June 2006
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