Page 3971 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 17 November 2015
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Recommendation 6 says:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government ensure Annual Progress Reports on the Strategic Bushfire Management Plan are made available to the public and the Bushfire Council every year.
You would question why these reports would not be going to the Bushfire Council. The council is made up of experts who are there to advise the government on how to manage the threat of bushfires; if they are not getting the annual progress reports, you have to question what the government is doing.
Recommendation 7 is that the ACT government should confirm by the last sitting day in March next year that all the regional fire management plans have been annually reviewed and updated in relation to fire management zones and that, if this has not occurred, the government should provide specific detail in relation to which plans have not been updated and why. Again you would have to ask the question: why are these plans not being updated and what is the government doing in that regard?
A number of recommendations, from 8 through to 16, look at policy issues and governance arrangements. It is very important that they are agreed to. With recommendation 17, one of the things that the auditor made great mention of was the fact that there is meant to be a memorandum of understanding between TAMS and the ESA in relation to bushfire preparedness but it was not in place when she did the report. And it is important that it is updated annually. The government have an obligation to ensure that it is there. If they cannot get their two agencies to agree, if we do not have that level of cooperation just on the MOU, what is going to happen on the day when things get a bit tense?
Recommendations 18 and 19 look at information on volunteers and how we might have a central pool. With recommendation 20, there have been concerns raised with me, and raised in the committee, that professional development through access to training and interstate visits, particularly of paid members of staff, has been somewhat limited, in some cases not existent at all. It is important that we know what is going on in other jurisdictions. If that means travelling to WA or Queensland, or indeed overseas, where tactics, techniques, equipment and responses are evolving constantly, we need to be part of that equation. I commend the government that, for instance, we have just had a crew of firefighters in Canada. That experience is invaluable; it allows us to gain knowledge of their situation and teach them things that we might know.
Recommendation 21 asks the government to look at how training is delivered to volunteers, with possibly a more involved role. When I joined my brigade 20-odd years ago, all the brigade training was done in house. You turned up; the brigade took care of it. We now have a greater degree of professionalism. Some of that is done by the ESA, and that is reasonably appropriate. But should there be a balance and is there a possibility that there is more training to be done in the brigades? Many members are keen to do that sort of thing.
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