Page 2531 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007

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MR MULCAHY: By dismissing that sort of comment I think the Chief Minister is clearly showing that he does not understand pricing elasticity.

Debate interrupted.

Standing order 76—suspension

Motion (by Mr Corbell) agreed to, with the concurrence of an absolute majority:

That standing order 76 be suspended for the remainder of this sitting.

Administration and Procedure—Standing Committee

Membership

Motion by (Mr Corbell) agreed to:

That Ms MacDonald be discharged from the Standing Committee on Administration and Procedure for the period 20 September to 2 October 2007 and that Ms Porter be appointed in her place for that period.

Appropriation Bill 2007-2008

[Cognate paper:
Estimates 2007-2008—Select Committee report—government response]

Detail stage

Schedule 1—Appropriations.

Proposed expenditure—Part 1.15—Department of Justice and Community Safety—$163,266,000 (net cost of outputs), $117,308,000 (capital injection), and $120,700,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $401,274,000.

Debate resumed.

MR PRATT (Brindabella) (10.41): The points I want to concentrate on are a number of functional capability areas. In relation to the emergency services circumstances, I will cover these. I will background this against the January 2003 bushfire disaster and the McLeod inquiry and its conclusions and recommendations. While this budget has attempted to address a number of funding shortfalls of previous budgets of emergency services, the Stanhope government has yet again failed to resolve major problems that see the emergency services in such a state of dysfunction that morale of the volunteer brigades is now almost non-existent.

A number of factors have led us to this point. First is the restructure. Contrary to the minister’s recent outpouring of spin, emergency services in the territory have gone backwards as a result of last year’s retrograde restructure. The minister is now five steps removed from overseeing the performance of our emergency services. By mid-2006 emergency services had developed to an independent authority able to respond to emergencies quickly. Thanks to the government’s changes in last year’s