Page 126 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 12 February 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
There was no mobile phone coverage. There was no internet. Where I was, there was no water supply because the power had gone off and the pumps did not work. At least you could still get it out of the tank. We had fuel issues. Through the loss of electricity, suddenly there was no EFTPOS. There were no ATMs. People were not carrying cash. A lot of people were on holiday and were not self-sustainable in the way they would normally be in their own homes. We saw massive queues at supermarkets. We saw issues that in a modern world we are not used to having to grapple with.
Whilst we did not experience that directly in the ACT, I think there are things for us to look at, to think about. Interestingly, we have seen some of that thinking in our emergency contingency planning in the ACT, but now we have a real-life case study to look at and probably learn some lessons from in thinking about scenario planning.
In the time I have left, I will speak briefly about rebuild. Again reflecting on 2003, when we start to think about rebuild and repair we have been fortunate in the ACT not to have the direct impact that some of our regional colleagues have had, whether it is as close as the Michelago and Bredbo areas or the South Coast and then further afield. Today we hear that they are starting to move in right across the country to clean up some of the sites where people have lost their homes.
But thinking about how long rebuild takes, we are still working on the lower Cotter catchment 17 years on from 2003. There are still teams out there doing work—the parks and conservation service, Landcare groups, Icon and the like—who are thinking about how we protect that catchment and make sure that our water quality remains extremely high all these years down the track. We should not lose sight of how long term some of these rebuild efforts can be. With significant parts of Namadgi being re-burnt just 17 years down the track, the ecological issues are certainly at the forefront of my mind.
I was very interested in the comments in today’s Canberra Times by Professor Lindenmayer, who is a world-recognised expert in this space, about some of the subtleties of what that looks like. What does the ecological recovery look like and how do we treat certain areas? Do we leave some alone? How much do we intervene? There is the necessity of getting stuck into the predators during this period when our native species are so vulnerable to the likes of cats, foxes, dogs and pigs and all these sorts of things.
Certainly in the ACT I think that that ecological rebuild is at the forefront of the areas where we need to respond, in the absence of having significant property loss in the ACT. So we are fortunate in one sense. We have not had that significant property loss but we have certainly had significant impact, and that is an area where I think we particularly need to put both our thinking and resourcing in the coming not just weeks and months but, undoubtedly, years.
I appreciate the opportunity to discuss a few of these issues today in perhaps a bit more depth than we had the chance to yesterday. I note Mr Gentleman’s amendment. I believe it has been discussed. We are certainly very happy to support it. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss these matters today.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video