Bills

Fire and Emergency Services (Governance) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 3 December 2020.)

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart—Minister for Energy and Mining) (12:19): It is a pleasure to rise to speak on this bill on behalf of the government. We have an excellent minister covering fire and emergency services in the member for Hartley. This is a very important bill and there has been very good work led by that minister.

Unfortunately, the bill came about because we had some dreadful bushfires at the start of 2020. As we all know—and I will not go into it all—2020 was a tough year in many different ways. We were in drought across most of the state at that stage, and we then had devastating bushfires on Kangaroo Island, in the Adelaide Hills, on Yorke Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula and some at Keilira down in the South-East as well as some other places.

Out of that the minister took the very responsible step of saying, 'Well, what else can we do? What else can we do here in South Australia, as a government and in partnership with a whole range of organisations, not the least of which, of course, are the CFS, SES, SA Ambulance and other organisations that have a huge number of volunteers in them?' What the minister has done is seek an independent review to look into exactly what was done and what could have been done better—a warts and all look at this issue.

The independent review found that the response from our emergency services sector was quite remarkable; however, there are certainly things that could be improved. The independent review recommended that the state government consider amending the Fire and Emergency Services Act 2005 to enable the Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services to appoint an independent chair to the SAFECOM board, and this is one of the key things proposed under the bill.

To be clear, I say again that the independent review found that the response to the bushfires at the beginning of 2020 was actually very good, but we do not back away from the fact that there is always room for improvement. Let me share with the house the improvements that have been made recently.

Building on our $48.5 million package released earlier this year, the Marshall Liberal government has delivered a further $49 million package to ensure that South Australia is as prepared as possible for bushfire emergencies. The conditions that gripped the state in the 2019-20 bushfire season were some of the worst on record, and this government has responded with a $97.5 million package in total—as I just mentioned—to keep South Australia safe.

We are investing nearly $110 million so that our emergency services staff and volunteers have the resources and support they need to protect lives and property. Importantly, we are boosting support for CFS volunteers by employing nine additional regional staff, who will reduce the administrative burden on volunteers. We know that emergency services staff and volunteers experience some of the most extreme and distressing circumstances, so we are increasing mental health support by employing an additional professionally qualified counsellor.

Key elements of our response, more broadly, include $5 million for AVL, which is essentially vehicle tracking technology that has already been used successfully in trials this summer, as well as $7.2 million for new CFS appliances, including 25 new trucks for the 2020-21 season. Let me say very clearly here, on the record, and on behalf of the Wilmington CFS brigade, of which I am a member—and I will briefly come back to that—that I would like to thank the minister very much for the brand-new truck.

It arrived 1½ weeks ago, I would say. I was not able to be there on the Monday night when it was brought around, but I did go to the shed to have a look and make myself familiar with it the following weekend. I know how pleased other CFS brigades around the state would be to receive one of the 25 new trucks that have been ordered.

There has also been $2.7 million to retrofit 49 CFS vehicles with burnover protection, which is incredibly important, and there has been a rollout of thermal imaging cameras to all 55 CFS groups. These cameras are extraordinary. If you have ever had the opportunity to use one, they are absolutely extraordinary with regard to what they can do in terms of identifying hotspots, being able to avoid risks and dangers, and identifying further work that needs to be done. They are very impressive pieces of equipment.

There was $11.5 million for the new MFS heavy appliances. While we typically think of bushfires being addressed by the CFS there are certainly times when the MFS will attend bushfires and everybody is very glad to have them there. They are most often used in regard to protecting houses and other structures, usually in townships that are under threat from fire.

I can tell you as a CFS volunteer that when you see the MFS roll into town for a fire, as has happened in my own home town of Wilmington, it does give you a great sense of comfort to know that you and your colleagues will be away, out and about fighting the fire and the MFS will be back in your town making sure that nothing untoward happens there.

There was $4.7 million for nine additional FTEs, including the first permanent CFS staffing presence on Kangaroo Island, $4 million to upgrade state incident management facilities and continue Project Renew, upgrading CFS stations so that CFS volunteers have modern and functional facilities, and $2.1 million for four extra FTEs to provide more support to the State Bushfire Coordination Committee. There is funding for the additional counsellor to support mental health and wellbeing of volunteers and $37 million for increased hazard reduction, including prescribed burns on public land.

That is an outstanding list and I thank the minister and I thank the agencies that report to the minister and all the people who work in those agencies for their effort in putting together this very large package of new expenditure, new tools, new equipment, new appliances, new or upgraded stations, more mental health support and on and on.

But we are not stopping there. Very importantly, what this bill is about is putting a new head of SAFECOM in place, which was a key recommendation from the independent review and that is exactly what we want to do. We certainly hope that all members in this chamber see fit to support this.

I mentioned that I am a member of the Wilmington CFS brigade and that is true. It is also very important that I put on the record that I used to be a very active member of the Wilmington CFS brigade and these days I am not an active member of the CFS brigade in Wilmington. As much as I would like to be, I am actually very rarely home. That has changed a few things in my life lately and I look forward immensely to a future, hopefully not too soon, when I can return to volunteering with the Wilmington CFS.

One of the reasons I support the bill so ardently is because I have seen that firsthand in our area the impact of bushfires. Our Southern Flinders-Upper Mid North area, which I suppose would be the two ways that people would refer to my home patch, is one of the most bushfire ravaged regions of the state. Thankfully, in the last few years we have been blessed in our area—while other areas have not been so fortunate—not to have been hit too hard in that regard at all.

In my time as a member of parliament, let alone as a CFS member before that, in our broader area we have seen two major fires in the Bundaleer Forest, we have seen two major fires in the Wirrabara Forest and we have seen the Woolundunga fire, which started on the western side of the Flinders Ranges, near Horrocks Pass, and decimated a massive amount of country.

We have seen the Bangor fire, which started near the Port Germein Gorge road, towards the bottom, again on the western side of the Southern Flinders Ranges. That was another incredibly devastating fire—in fact, the most devastating of all of them. We have also seen the Sampson Flat fire and the Pinery fire in the southern part of the electorate of Stuart, which I represent, a fair way away from Wilmington and the area I was talking about before. My electorate, including further north in the Flinders Ranges and other parts, has been incredibly hit by fires in the last several years.

Somebody could say that one fire was worse than another, or bigger, easier or better, but it is nearly impossible to try to come up with those types of descriptions. The Bangor fire was absolutely devastating with regard to the speed at which it damaged property and burned homes at times and also with regard to the length. The fire burned for six weeks because there were parts of that region that just could not be accessed. I think it was six houses that were lost.

If I think about the Pinery fire, it started near Pinery, of course, and headed nearly to the edge of the Kapunda township. It did not last nearly as long. It started, it took off and it was a massively fast-moving fire in unreaped crops, something we do not normally see.

Usually, our bushfires start after reaping. Stubble paddocks are typically considered to be good places to fight a fire because you can get out and about on them. You can drive on them and get all your appliances onto them. Stubble can certainly burn ferociously enough and it is a serious fire, but a stubble paddock is typically considered a place you can stop a fire.

The Pinery fire was in unreaped crops. It was a massive, extraordinary fuel load. I do not want anyone to misunderstand my words here. While that fire, by bushfire standards, started and finished in a relatively short space of time, that is completely irrelevant compared to the enormous numbers of houses and sheds that were lost and, most importantly, the two lives that were lost.

That is how you really measure natural disasters: in loss of life. Even understanding the damage the Bangor fire did and the stress it put on local communities for six weeks, everybody would go through that again rather than have a fire that did not last long but took two lives.

There are many other examples that I could go into more depth on, but the reason I give them is that every member of this house knows, and I know personally—it is nothing to do with me, but I know by experience, participation and observation—how incredibly fortunate we are in South Australia to have approximately 12,000 or 13,000 CFS volunteers, to have SES volunteers and to have ambulance volunteers and a wide range of other volunteers who support us as well, but I am focusing on bushfires at the moment, who just give of themselves extraordinarily.

It is not only about fighting the fire. It is not only about fronting up when there is a job to be done or, in many cases, an emergency to be dealt with. It is about the thousands and thousands of hours of training that are put in across the state every year. People turn up, whether they are just helping with fundraising or whether it is an older member of the community who, for all the right reasons, prefers not to go out on a truck anymore so transitions across to running the radio or being one of the people running the radio back at the station.

People contribute in an enormously wide range of ways, and we can never, ever thank those people enough. Those people work within a system, a broad structure, and SAFECOM is at the very top of that structure. SAFECOM is an organisation overseeing, supporting, directing (depending on the occasion and the activity at the time) all the emergency services across our state, and then, of course, each of the streams—from surf lifesaving, even, to provide another example not bushfire related—through to the CFS, which has the largest number of members by volunteer base.

They all work within this broader SAFECOM structure. There are times when it is important that they work independently and run their own race within their own service, and there are times where they must work collaboratively and cooperatively. I know that there are times where there is a bit of frustration perhaps between two services on the ground, if, for example, there is just not quite enough space—different situations can arise.

There are niggles from time to time just as there are in any family, but on the ground the services want to work together, they want to cooperate, they want to support each other when that is appropriate, lead each other when that is appropriate. There are certain circumstances, such as a bushfire, or perhaps a motor vehicle accident where the CFS would take a leadership role with regard to helping use the jaws of life to extract a person trapped in that vehicle.

People understand that there is a system that works very well, and that is all the way through—brigade captains to group officers, up into the professional ranks—but it culminates at the top with SAFECOM, and SAFECOM has done an outstanding job. I have known a few of the SAFECOM CEOs who chair the SAFECOM board as it has been for quite a long time and as it is at the moment, and so this bill is absolutely no disrespect to those people whatsoever who have really done an outstanding job, as this independent review highlights with regard to the bushfires at the beginning of last year.

However, it does make sense to have an independent chair. It does make sense to have somebody who is going to lead that board which overseas all of the services and whose directions support, works its way through and trickles down to the lowest and currently inactive volunteer (such as myself) on the ground. It does make sense to have an independent person leading that group.

Our government has put $60,000 per year—and very importantly indexed as well with inflation—into the 2021 state budget so that the appointment of this independent chair can be made. On any given day $60,000 a year would not be nearly enough to remunerate properly the leader of that organisation, but we do believe that is an appropriate amount of money to spend. This is not expected to be a volunteer role. This is expected to be a role filled by a person with very high levels of experience and capacity in many ways.

We are funding this position. Make no mistake, we are very serious about making this work. I also know that volunteer members on the ground—and I do not exclude professionals in ambulance or MFS in any way whatsoever, but they are working professionals with a job to do and it puts them in a very different category to volunteers—and volunteers in the various different emergency services are very proud of their services. They do not want to think for a minute that services as were proposed under the previous government are going to being amalgamated and just brought in together.

A former minister for emergency services in the previous government put an enormous amount of work into heading that way. I think it is fair to say that, to his credit, and perhaps also to the credit of his colleagues back then, he realised that it was not the right way to go and so backtracked on that.

Let me be really clear: by having an independent chair of the SAFECOM board we are not intending to go down the path that the previous government contemplated. We want all streams of the emergency services to be able to have their identity, their operational responsibility, their culture and, in many or most ways, their own independence, but we do want them all to be led responsibly and professionally and as best as can be done from the top.

Mr ODENWALDER (Elizabeth) (12:39): I rise to make a contribution to the Fire and Emergency Services (Governance) Amendment Bill, and I indicate that I am the lead speaker for the opposition and perhaps the only speaker on this side today. These are relatively minor changes to the Fire and Emergency Services Act, but they are important changes and I think it is worth noting that.

I have spoken many times, as many of us have, about the bushfires of last summer and about the response to the bushfires last summer. The member for Stuart quite eloquently talked about the way in which the services did work together, and both Keelty and the subsequent royal commission into natural disasters bore out that in most cases the services did work well together.

The bushfire season did, of course, spark renewed interest in ways that the emergency services could be better resourced and also better governed. Again, the member for Stuart makes the observation about the way the MFS interact with the CFS, particularly in those peri-urban areas, the urban fridge, and in those large regional centres. The CFS clearly do the bulk of the rural firefighting, while the MFS serve the purpose of coming in and protecting major assets.

Both Keelty and the royal commission made it perfectly clear that that will be more and more the case as fire seasons get longer and as urban sprawl takes place, not just here but interstate. We are going to need more investment in our Metropolitan Fire Service, particularly in the way that they interface with the Country Fire Service, and SAFECOM is going to play a very important role in that going forward.

This bill does two things. The first, and probably the most important, is that it establishes an independent chair for SAFECOM. I thought it might be worth reading into Hansard the reasons for this and the comments in the Keelty review just for future reference so that people are very clear about what Keelty's view was and why this is necessary. In the review, he said:

The Review also highlights some anomalies with the role and function of the South Australian Fire and Emergency Services Commission (SAFECOM) and the overall planning process—most of the recommendations from this Review are SAFECOM’s core business.

Adding to questions about governance, SAFECOM does not seem to have adopted its role of enabling the emergency service agencies to do their job. There were many complaints about SAFECOM attempting to assert itself beyond its legislative remit to a more operational role.

This does reflect what I heard on the ground. Despite my comments about the services working well together and SAFECOM performing a very important role, there has been a certain amount of dissatisfaction on the ground with the way SAFECOM has conducted itself. I think that is largely a result not of any individual, and I would not want to blame any individual, but partly of that governance structure which is very unusual. Keelty continues:

On examination of the legislation, there is a clear anomaly in having SAFECOM’s Chief Executive (CE) preside over the SAFECOM Board which is akin to marking your own homework. This arrangement is not in line with normal Board/CEO relationships in either the private or public sectors. It would operate better under the normal conventions of a Board with an Independent Chair appointed by the Minister and the agency responding to the Board’s direction in accordance with the Minister's intent.

Elsewhere, Keelty notes the role of the CE as chair of the board. I quote again:

This is a significant shift from the usual governance arrangements where a CE would normally report to the Board and the Board would be separately chaired.

Under the Corporations Act 2001 there are good reasons why this is normally the case—it is to avoid the organisation ‘checking its own homework’. Both in ASX-listed companies and the public service, it is not recommended that the Managing Director or the Chief Executive also chair the Board. This Review may not have needed to highlight many of its findings—the lack of action on previous reviews, the lack of integration and interoperability of ICT systems, fleet suitability and management as well as the use of critical safety technology such as AVL—had SAFECOM been effectively performing its legislated role.

Keelty concludes (and I quote again for the last time):

[It was not a] specific term of reference to examine SAFECOM but given the issues raised during the Review about matters falling within the remit of SAFECOM to deliver, it was inescapable not to examine SAFECOM's role to a limited degree…The review takes the approach that a simple amendment of the legislation that results in the Minister appointing an Independent Chair is likely to deliver a better, and more conventional governance outcome.

Clearly that is what we have before us today. We have a move to establish an independent chair of SAFECOM—another member of the board, who is not an officer or a member or an employee of an emergency services organisation, who is to preside over SAFECOM. The hope is (and I join with the government in a bipartisan way) that this will provide better governance and avoid some of the problems Keelty identified in his review.

I do know that this is something that many in the sector absolutely support and have been calling for. This has been exacerbated in recent times, but it has been boiling away for quite a while, and I know that many of the agencies are very pleased to see this happen. There are some questions, very few questions but there are some questions, I will ask in the committee stage about how this will work, the appointment of the chair, but I will get to that in committee.

What the member for Stuart did not talk about was the other thing this bill does that is also very important. At the moment, the annual report of the State Bushfire Coordination Committee is handed to the CFS, essentially to the chief officer, and then there is no legislative requirement for it to go anywhere else. I assume that the chief officer reads it, acts upon it and shares that information with SAFECOM and any other relevant parties, but nothing is legislated to ensure that happens.

This bill makes the very important change to the reporting requirements of the State Bushfire Coordination Committee directly to the minister, who then in turn must report directly to parliament on an annual basis. This is a good move, a good move towards more transparent ways that we approach bushfire management in this state, and one that the opposition supports. With those few words, I look forward to the rest of the debate and to the committee stage.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (12:46): I rise to support the Fire and Emergency Services (Governance) Amendment Bill. I say this as an active member of the Country Fire Service, and I applaud not only everything the Country Fire Service and all our emergency services do, particularly in this difficult time of COVID-19, but also all those people who choose to deploy in farm fire units. I want to discuss, as part of my contribution on this bill, some of the recent fires or mopping-up operations I have been involved in. One was on 19 November, the Yumali-Netherton fire, which did not get a lot of media because there was something else in the news, a pause with COVID.

It was interesting because we were not supposed to be seeing anyone. Thankfully, we had gone home from estimates in this place and I rang my boys, because they were here for school and university, and said, 'Get home,' because they had harvest jobs. With COVID, we are never too sure what is going on: you only have to look at what goes on at the Victorian border between our state and Victoria to know that things can change day by day or part way through the day.

We were home on the 19^th and, as I have indicated in the house before, a powerline dropped into a crop a bit towards the south-east of us, not many kilometres down the road, so we attended that with our private unit. What I did not realise until well after the event was that a young lad, young Harrison Rowntree who was also out fighting the fire, took some excellent drone footage. If you go on Facebook, you can see the aftermath of that fire. He took a photo of me and Mack, my eldest son, and the Neumanns, Alistair and David, his father, when we were saving a house on the Leinert property, which used to be my friends Gary and Karen Sommerville's house.

I know that we are not supposed to have displays, but I have a picture showing graphic portrayal of fire coming down through the scrub, and the house is just over my shoulder up a bit above me. We are pumping water from one unit to the other to do our best as a private unit to save that house.

I have fought a few fires. I have had a few burn-offs go astray as well and have fought them to save the situation, but this was probably the toughest time, where I nearly made a decision to pull out from fighting the fire. With me, I had my 19-year-old lad, Mack, driving in his first big event, and I had young Angus, aged 16, on the back. They did a very commendable job, a fantastic job, in chasing that fire. When it got too rough to chase it out on the fire ground, we got out of there because of the radiant heat.

There were several burns injuries. Thankfully, Damian Heym is home, but he spent quite a lot of time in the Royal Adelaide burns unit. I cannot speak highly enough of the burns unit in the Royal Adelaide that was transferred from the old Royal Adelaide Hospital. Damian is home in a full-length bodysuit because he got burnt when he was caught outside a vehicle. He wears gloves as well, and I think he has to have them on for up to two years, but thankfully he is still alive.

I have mentioned in a grieve here before about two women who were caught in a utility. They could not get away to the east from the fire, and as the fire came at them from the west they kept the windows shut and the fire went over the top. They got out of the ute and were unscathed, which was almost a miracle. It was the best decision they made in the end: they got out of that utility and got onto burnt ground, and the ute burnt to the ground.

A lot of stock was lost—we shot a lot of stock the next day, hundreds of stock—and a lot of fences. The closest we got to losing a house in the 30-kilometre blaze that raged for four hours was that the fire blew the windows out of a house as it passed and then torched a shed, which had a New Holland harvester in it. From memory, I think it was a TR87—a pretty burnt New Holland that was never going to reap another crop, sadly, when I saw it later on at the Johnson property.

There was a time when we were between the fire, and it was only about 10 metres or so between a quite high scrub line of trees and the house. If we had not had rollout lines, hose reels, I would have pulled out, but we had the hose reels and we managed to tone the fire down—it was vicious. My brother got burnt and another lady and another lad were burnt. The other day, I saw my brother's hand that was burnt and it looks like it will to come to a full recovery. He will have to wear a glove for probably most of this year, but he is certainly not too badly affected.

It was a great cooperative approach between the CFS units and the farm firefighter units. It is acknowledged that a lot of the farmers in my area, or several of them at least, now own ex-CFS units. They are still very capable fire trucks because they do not have a lot of kilometres on them when they come out of their time with the CFS, after maybe 20 years or so, and still can carry a lot of water.

This bill is a bit about the management of fires and the bureaucracy around it, but when it gets down to making sure the action hits the ground you have to put the wet stuff on the hot stuff. For everyone who is out there on the fire front, I commend them. I must again commend all those units that came in the strike teams, whether it was from the South-East, Port Augusta or from the Hills. I think the Salisbury brigade was down there, and I saw one fire truck from the south of Adelaide, but there were many I would not have seen because they would have been in different sectors of that 30-kilometre run of fire.

I also managed to assist with the mopping-up of Kangaroo Island last year. That was a horrendous fire. I would hate to think what it was like with the Kangaroo Island fire coming at you. It was totally devastating, burning hundreds of thousands of acres of land—500,000 acres, I think it was. It was devastation across the board.

I must commend how it was managed and the mopping-up, with the controller at our base, which was quite a few kilometres outside Kingscote. At times there was a little bit of levity, which you need sometimes in these situations. We rescued a koala one day, and then other trucks realised we were going to the Parndana animal welfare centre, so next thing we had bags of possums on board, and for the rest of my time on Kangaroo Island, our truck, Swan Reach 14, was known as 'Swan Reach international rescue'. So there you go. It was interesting to get that banter from the controllers and just to have a little bit of lightheartedness in a delicate situation.

I must commend everyone, not only those on the island who were there fighting for their livelihoods and their land and houses and properties—and there were so many properties lost and lives lost, the Lang family with two lives gone; it is very sad—but all the people from the mainland who went over: the MFS, the CFS and there would have been private units. We had the plane boys in the area, Aerotech and others.

I have mentioned in this place before the help from the Defence Force. There were a lot of men and women from way up north. I cannot remember whether they were from Townsville or Darwin. They might have been from Darwin, I think. They always have bags ready to go to help out with tsunamis or cyclones, but they said, 'We've never been deployed for fire before.' Their work was absolutely commendable as we all got together to make sure we could help with the mopping-up.

We would go up separate roads at times, put out hotspots and come back the next day because this fire was sometimes burning up to 18 inches (45 centimetres) into the ground because there was so much litter, leaf litter and that sort of thing. You know there is a big event happening when the anchor chains come out, the old anchor chains that have not been used since about 1980 for scrub clearing, and the dozers knock down a whole strip next to the Vivonne Bay road as an emergency firebreak. You know it is happening. That is when, as they say—I was going to use another word, but it is unparliamentary—it is happening.

I ran into a local contractor on one side of the road and the Army D6 (a bulldozer) on the other knocking down some big gum trees for the emergency firebreak for Kingscote. That is how sensitive that matter was. We have certainly had fires through the Hills around that time as well, the Cudlee Creek fire. I have spoken here before about how everyone, private owners but the CFS mainly, saved Harrogate.

I still shake my head in disbelief that Harrogate was saved. Yes, there were considerable losses around the town, but have a look where the burn mark comes, right up to the edge of the town, right around the town, 360⁰. I am forever amazed at the challenges. I know some of the first trucks that went in were going down roads and they were just told, 'Get ahead of it. Yes, there will be losses behind you as you go past, but you have to get ahead of it and try to save what you can.'

That is the thing, that people can never think that the CFS will always be there to save you, because it is just impossible in these big events. Yes, I think a lot of the CFS personnel—in fact, virtually all of them—are superhuman people, but there is only so much you can do, as we found at the recent Yumali-Netherton fire, when it just gets too ridiculous out in the paddock trying to save crops, stubbles and fencing, so you just try to save sheds and houses.

We had the Cherry Gardens fire recently. It looks like that was, from all reports, lit by an arsonist, and I have all sorts of things to say about the way that person should be dealt with, but I will not mention them here. I must commend everyone who got involved in that fire, whether it is the people on the ground or in the planes. They were very commendable efforts. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 12:59 to 14:00.