Yorke Peninsula Power Outage

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (14:53): My question is to the minister representing the Minister for Emergency Services. Is the government concerned about the impact the recent power outage on YP had on emergency services? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr ELLIS: During the blackout, all phone towers in my electorate went dark and ran out of battery. There was no way to contact CFS volunteers if a fire had started and no way to contact ambulance volunteers if an emergency occurred. Should phone towers have a better backup battery to last for longer?

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (14:54): I thank the member for Narungga for this very important question, and I take it as the minister representing the Minister for Emergency Services in this place. Obviously, those power outages raised a lot of complications for service delivery but also for first responders in areas like the ones that the member for Narungga represents.

I will happily take it on notice and seek a response from the minister, but there are a few things I can say in the interim, and that is around the system that our emergency services use now, including the CFS. Although we still have a Government Radio Network, as I understand it, and we still have a fleet of generators that will go out to sites to make sure that that system can be charged and still utilised in the case of an emergency where there is no power, fewer volunteers like to use that system and prefer to use the phone system now on their smartphones, which is understandable.

I think the situation that we saw with power outages can certainly create some complications in terms of how those communications are kept up, how members of the public are able to communicate with the CFS for instance and then how the CFS command are able to communicate to their volunteers to make sure they can respond. I am told that there was still provision of pagers there, so that could be done, but I will seek an answer from the Minister for Emergency Services around what is done more broadly in terms of keeping that communication up in situations where volunteers might not actually have access to a pager and might be relying on the information coming to them through their mobile phone.