Page 590 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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responsibility, and we have seen it again today: “These are operational matters—none of my responsibility. Oh my God! If the volunteers are in uproar, well, that’s an operational matter. I’ll just stand back from it.”
This Chief Minister and his ministers exercise a culture of no ministerial oversight. And not only that; the decision to restructure has moved this minister for emergency services five to six steps away from ministerial oversight of his chief officers. He is five or six steps removed from ministerial oversight of his chief officers. And why? Because the government can exercise plausible deniability: “We did not know that the commissioner was going to make that restructure. That was an operational matter. What do we care?”
Well, you are paid, minister, to care. You are paid to protect your community. You are paid to exercise duty of care over your community. You are paid to look after your men and women in the emergency services. You are paid to scrutinise decisions taken by your bureaucrats. In this case you failed to do that and that is why we are moving a motion of no confidence, and that is why the men and women were out there today exercising their vote of no confidence, and that is why you are now the owner of an elephants graveyard.
Mr Speaker, what we have seen in the last little while is this minister also demonstrating his disdain for and lack of interest in the opinions of the experts in the field of bushfire fighting and emergency management. He has stood in this place and he has said on radio: “Well, you know, we don’t want to listen to the opinion of Mr Val Jeffery on this matter of organisational restructure. That’s not really his area of concern, so we don’t really want to listen to his opinion. We will just listen to our bureaucrats, some of whom have only been in Canberra five minutes. We won’t listen to Val Jeffery or Pat Barling. We won’t listen to Pat Barling, who was the president of the association and who represents the captains in discussions with the minister and with the commissioner. We won’t listen to the Michael Lonergans.” What are they? Perhaps they are landed gentry; I do not know. “We will not listen to these people who generationally have been here for a very long time and understand fire on the southern tablelands. We won’t listen to what they think we should do to better organise our emergency management system or to better organise our services to respond to protect the community.”
The minister has demonstrated his disdain and his disrespect for these people and he has demonstrated that he is simply tugging his forelock to bean counters. We now know that the rather workable and rather successful ESA that Bill Wood put on the table in this place, headed up by Peter Dunn, was beginning to work well. It was a light year ahead of the failed ESB of 2003, but we now know that the bean counters were jealous of Peter Dunn’s authority and Peter Dunn’s independence. We now know that the bean counters did not like the fact that Peter Dunn was a stand-alone independent authority who managed his own resources. And why did he have to manage his own resources? Why did he have to manage his own administration? So that he could ensure that the Emergency Services Authority and the four emergency services could respond when the balloon went up. That is what McLeod recommended; that is what Doogan has signed off on—the need for a stand-alone statutory authority, the need for four independent chief officers with their own independent headquarters, not unified command, not the unification.
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