Page 1481 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2007
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that this government is prepared to make in emergency services. When it comes to the incident on the ground, it is not going to be the administrative arrangements that will be foremost in the minds of our volunteers. What is going to be foremost in their minds is whether they have the resources to do the job. That is what this budget delivers on. It is not just about vehicle replacement. It is also about training. We need to make sure that our emergency services personnel have the training that they need to do the job and to keep their skills up to date.
What investment is the government making in that regard? First of all, we are training for a range of things, including driver training to make sure that we have more people qualified to drive the large, heavy vehicles that are needed at the scene of a bushfire. We are training more incident controllers. What can be more important than making sure that we have more senior members of our services trained in the very important skill of managing and controlling an incident and directing resources on the ground? More money is going into that. But there is more than that. There is also training for remote area firefighting teams.
A key recommendation of the coroner was the early attack of fires in remote areas, and that is what remote area firefighting teams deliver us. They deliver us the capacity to get into a remote area and deal with the fire early, before it gets large and more problematic. That is the level of funding that we have put into our emergency services in terms of improving the capability of emergency services. All these initiatives demonstrate that our structure works in terms of getting the message through to the minister and to the government about what is needed on the ground. That is what makes the difference, not some esoteric argument about administrative arrangements.
At the end of the day, we need to drill down and address the issues at a practical level about what we need to do to reassure our volunteer captains and deputy captains that the new structure delivers and that their concerns can be and are being addressed. That is exactly what we are doing. The commissioner has been meeting regularly with representatives of the volunteers and the volunteer captains and providing them with feedback and information to address their concerns. Yesterday, I indicated in a letter to all of the volunteers in charge of our volunteer brigades and units as well as to our CFU units that I would be very interested in convening a meeting with them as soon as possible, as the first of an ongoing and regular pattern of meetings with them, to discuss issues around the implementation of this major budget package and the implementation of other issues that come up. That is what we are doing in response to those issues. (Time expired.)
MR PRATT: I ask a supplementary question. Minister, do you expect that by throwing additional funding at emergency services you will resolve the fundamental problems inherent in your restructuring of emergency services? When will you get your 40 captains and deputy captains back?
MR CORBELL: The leaders of our volunteer brigades, RFS brigades, are still, in effect, performing all of the duties they performed as captains. Yes, they have resigned as a symbolic act of protest, but in effect they continue to do the work they did when they held those offices. They have confirmed that in communications to the ESA, that they will continue to organise and continue to perform their duties as volunteers, but they will not hold formally those offices.
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