State Emergency Service Control Centre

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:12): A further supplementary: when will a decision and progress be made to deliver a new state control centre, or an upgraded state control centre, and will it be in time for this bushfire season?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety, Minister Assisting the Minister for Health, Minister Assisting the Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse) (15:12): Obviously, these are long-term infrastructure projects. Even if the day that the Burns report had come out we announced a plan to build a new site, it would probably take many years to do. To have a new site is going to be a significant long-term investment in building a new facility. Our agencies have been based at the Waymouth Street site, particularly the CFS as I understand, since the year 2000. Those facilities have been used through all the major bushfire campaigns that we have had since then.

There are redundancy plans in place for a range of scenarios that might occur, but I think that there is an acknowledgement that we need to be working on a longer term solution that looks at a more significant range of redundancy features such as, for instance, if we had a one in 500 year earthquake in Adelaide, considering a building that would be able to withstand that sort of scenario. That is what the government is doing at the moment.

No-one is going to be able to promise that a building infrastructure project happens at the click of a finger, but it is something that we need to consider carefully. We need to work with those agencies, as well as with our partner agencies across government, including DPTI, to come up with the right solution that is going to serve the people of South Australia and those agencies long into the future.

The SPEAKER: Supplementary.

Mr KNOLL: Not a supplementary, but a further question, Mr Speaker.