Page 2850 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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The only change is in relation to logistics and planning where two of those personnel go and work with everyone else in the directorate who do logistics and planning for all the other land management functions, like vertebrate pest management, weed management and asset management. These are functions that naturally sit together, but those staff and the people who deliver the program on the ground will be based in the same location, they will work in the same office and they will continue to have the high level of communication and cooperation that they have to date.
I think the Assembly should not seek to second-guess managers about how to best deploy their resources to meet the government’s objectives. That is why I would ask the Assembly to agree to the amendment that I am proposing today.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.04): The Canberra Liberals will not be supporting this amendment. I think that Mr Smyth and Mr Rattenbury are basically on to something here. It is quite clear from the tenuous nature of the answers to questions that Mr Corbell gave in question time yesterday that there is something not quite right here. Mr Corbell was terse, circumspect and very brief in his answers, which, as Mr Smyth says, is quite uncharacteristic. But it is also quite contradictory. He said:
I understand that one position has changed substantially, and that is the role of the manager of the fire management unit.
So if you change the role of the manager of the fire unit substantially—by the minister’s own admission—then there are substantial changes afoot. He goes on to say:
Apart from that, the functions of the fire management unit remain unchanged.
That, to me, is quite contradictory and begs more questions than it answers. I think that we on this side of the chamber have come to be wary of assurances given by Mr Corbell. He has form in respect of motions in this place that have required him to do particular things at times. He is a little less bolshie than he was. For instance, Mr Smyth will remember the Nettlefold Street trees incident, where the Assembly essentially directed the minister to do particular things and the minister refused, and the minister was censured for his failure to comply with the motion of the Assembly. It resulted, actually, some years later in the death of the very trees that Mr Corbell said would be perfectly fine. So he and Dr Cooper and others colluded and we ended up with dead trees, which was what the community was concerned about.
What we are seeing here today is concern by two of the groupings in the Assembly about Mr Corbell’s management of this and the department’s management of this. But what is also significant is the level of concern that we in the community are starting to see from respected members of the community. Just in the last few hours, since this motion has come onto the notice paper, it is quite clear that there is a level of concern about the arrangements in relation to rangers generally, and conservation management generally, in the ACT government. These were things which were touched upon by Mr Rattenbury in his comments on the TAMS Directorate last night, which I presume that he will be continuing when we get back to that today.
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