Page 512 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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This restructure has been rejected by the Bushfire Brigades Association. Professional officers in other services and volunteers have condemned it. As Mr Pratt’s motion states, we have lost seven senior officers. The opposition calls on the government to establish a statutory authority, as recommended by McLeod and reaffirmed by Doogan, that will streamline the chain of command. Efficiencies could be gained as a result. It would lead to a simpler way of addressing some of the very real problems this organisation faces—problems that potentially could be fatal to people in the territory. It is important for the government to get this right. I commend Mr Pratt’s motion to the Assembly.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (11.35): I would like to speak to the minister’s amendment before debate on the motion is concluded.
MR SPEAKER: Yes.
MR PRATT: The opposition rejects the minister’s amendment about which I wish to make some comments. Paragraph (a) of the minister’s amendment states:
(a) that the ACT Government has already fully or partially implemented 51 of the 73 recommendations from the Coroner’s report into the January 2003 bushfires …
Some of the recommendations in the coroner’s report also reflect recommendations that have been highlighted by McLeod in his report. So 3½ years later not all the McLeod recommendations have been implemented. To its credit, in early 2004-05 the government implemented a significant number of other recommendations, but in many cases it has walked away from them. It walked away from supporting the changes and the structures highlighted by the McLeod inquiry, or it simply has not followed them through. I refer, in particular, to the area of communications.
Ron McLeod had a hell of a lot to say about the urgent need to address communication failure. Three years and 11 months later there are still significant structural problems in the emergency services communication networks. Of course, FireLink is but one of them. We now know that FireLink was sourced as a single select tender. That single select tender was justified by the government because it needed to be mobilised and fielded, or put into the field, by the 2004-05 bushfire season. That just did not happen. We now know, two bushfire seasons later, that FireLink is still not operational. So the justification for a single select tender was absolutely phoney. More importantly, FireLink has now cost a huge amount of money—60 per cent more than its original budget. Subparagraph (b) of the minister’s amendment states:
(b) the Emergency Services Authority has operational autonomy which is enshrined in legislation and that this is unchanged …
I do not want to be a pedantic wordsmith but the Emergency Services Authority no longer exists; it is now called the Emergency Services Agency. So the minister got that wrong in his amendment. The minister was correct when he said that in theory operational autonomy was still enshrined in legislation and that legislation still underpins operational autonomy. However, we argue that in practice the
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