Page 2611 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016

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I am pleased to stand to speak today to the motion in my name on the notice paper. Just about every Canberran has experienced the need for one of our four emergency services bodies at one time or another, and everybody I know is incredibly grateful for the work that these hardworking men and women put in 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure that our community is as safe as it can be—from Fire and Rescue, including the community fire units, to the ambulance officers and the Rural Fire Brigade and the SES. It is absolutely vital to the people of Canberra that they have complete confidence, when faced with an emergency and a need to ring 000, that they are guaranteed the very best response and the very best service we can possibly provide.

The minister’s intention is to change the operational comm centre from being manned by experienced firefighters to being manned purely by call centre workers without the same level of experience of our operations on the ground. Many of our firies have expressed serious concern over this change, and there is potential for this approach to result in delays of service or the misdirection of services reaching those in need in the most timely manner possible. This could result in a greater loss of property or, in a worst-case scenario, loss of life.

These questions have to be asked: what is the purpose of changing the comm centre from being manned partly by firefighters to one manned purely without them? What is the benefit of the change? What is the problem, exactly, that the government are trying to solve with the change? They have not been clear. Or is it an attempt to save money or to take more operational work away from the men and women in uniform in our fire and rescue service?

We have trained firefighters who innately understand the operational process when responding to a structure fire or a range of other types of rescue operations. In the call centre at present there is one senior and three lower ranked firefighters working as a unit together to dispatch the correct appliance when there is a fire. There are clearly concerns as to whether or not call operators will have the ability to determine that a rescue requires one truck or many trucks, aerial firefighter capacity, specialised breathing apparatus, hazmat, compressed air foam systems or all such operations.

Is it the intention that a call centre manned by public servants will merely triage calls and forward them to an available fire station? If so, does this not just create an additional delay which could result in greater loss of property, greater distress or, as I said, in a worst-case scenario a delayed result that could cause loss of life? I am concerned that these proposed changes are not necessarily focused on getting better outcomes for our community or having a better response time but rather are cost-cutting measures.

Last year when the budget showed an increase in the emergency services levy for each ratepayer of $66 per year, up from $130 to $196 per year—another massive increase to the government’s rates and charges, as we have come to expect from the Barr Labor government—with expected increases of $40 a year each year after that across the forward estimates, I note the Chief Minister said:

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