Page 598 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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like bushfire councils for many years: people who may not be bureaucrats, thank god, but who are practical people out there on the ground who know their structures, who have run brigades, who have faced danger and who have saved places, as Val Jeffery saved Tharwa through quick thinking and quick, proactive action on his part. If he had listened to the bureaucrats, if he had listened to the people above him, nothing would have happened there.
You need to listen to people like that. It is because of people like that—because of people like these volunteers and the people who have 10, 20, 30 or 40 years of experience—that Canberra has been saved on a number of occasions. Houses have been saved because of their ability. I was emergency services minister once, albeit briefly. In the time I was minister, the comments that were made to me by Val Jeffery always made immense sense.
Is this Stanhope government a bit like the British general staff in World War I, with Jon Stanhope as Field Marshal Haig sitting in a chateau sipping champagne and having nothing to do with the troops at the front, having absolutely no idea what is happening, poring over maps, relying on bureaucrats to tell him what is happening and never having a look himself? Is Mr Corbell like General Rawlinson, who was so surprised when he went up to see the battle of Ypres and the couple of feet of mud the troops had to work in that he made the comment “My God, do we send our troops to fight in conditions like this?” He did not have the brains to get up there and have a look for himself; he was removed from the situation.
Are you going to be like that—with no consultation; sitting back looking at maps; sitting back perhaps taking advice from bureaucrats who, however well meaning, do not have the same expertise as people who are out there doing it and do not have the same expertise as the people you really should be listening to—who, in many instances have been doing it and running these organisations for many years?
Today we see people who have served this territory very well take the extreme step of bringing all these vehicles in, leaving them, putting the keys in the bucket, putting in their resignations and walking away. That is the most serious thing I have seen since this Assembly started. And since this Assembly started—interestingly, it was a Labor government too—probably the next most serious thing I saw was a truck blockade. The mob at the time had really annoyed the transport workers and they blockaded Civic. But at least they drove their trucks away. At least that was just a normal demonstration.
Of course we have had other demonstrations. We had the dragway demonstrations; we had the Christian lobby demonstration fairly recently. But all of those demonstrations pale into insignificance compared with the action taken today by these volunteers who are just fed up with this government, fed up with the fact that it does not listen to them, and fed up that the government shows so much contempt for them that it has gone into this restructure without listening to them.
It was all very well for Mr Corbell to say today, “I will have a chat. I will have a think about this. I will see what happens.” It is a bit late for that. In answer to some questions today, these volunteers said that they have no confidence in the reforms,
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