Fire Management Plans

The Hon. S.G. WADE (14:23): I seek leave to make an explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation.

Leave granted.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: Yesterday, in response to a question on the proportion of scheduled prescribed burns completed in the Mount Lofty Ranges, the minister said, 'All of this information is available on the interweb thing.' My question is: will the minister undertake to ensure that information on the schedule of prescribed burns that has been completed is published regularly on the department's website?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (14:24): Sorry, Stephen, I didn't listen to your question. Could you repeat it?

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: The honourable minister will leave it to the President. The problem is there is too much noise. I had trouble hearing it myself. Can you please ask the question again?

The Hon. S.G. WADE: I make the point, Mr President, that if the minister was speaking while I was asking the question how could he expect to hear it?

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Let's hear the question.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: Yesterday, in response to a question on the proportion of scheduled prescribed burns completed in the Mount Lofty Ranges, the minister said, 'All of this information is available on the interweb thing.' I have been unable to locate the information, so my question is: will the minister undertake to ensure that information on the schedule of prescribed burns that have been completed is published regularly on the department's website?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: I thank the honourable member for his second attempt at trying to get his information correct in terms of prescribed burning. I know it is a struggle for the Liberal Party because when they were last in government they had zero commitment, zero, zilch, nothing for prescribed burning—something they try to run away from, but they committed no government resources at all because they had no interest and no understanding about prescribed burning.

The Hon. G.E. Gago: We don’t hear much from them now, do we?

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER: Nothing at all. I don't think at the time they were very keen on putting information up on the internet web thing as well. They were too busy keeping their ears glued to the wireless to find out what was going on and didn't, of course, concentrate on developing good policy which it took an incoming Labor government to do.

As I said yesterday, we have more than quadrupled DEWNR's budget for conducting prescribed burning, more than doubled DEWNR's budget for training firefighters, and more than doubled the number of DEWNR brigade members compared to what the Liberals were doing, which was zero—a big fat zero.

I think I said enough yesterday, but I can go through my comments again because I only got halfway through my briefing yesterday before I was forced to stop and ran out of time. But in terms of openness and transparency in what we are doing, we always strive towards committing ourselves to the Premier's open data policy, and DEWNR has committed itself as an agency to putting its data up into the public realm. That is something we will always do as a point for furthering our connectivity across agencies, but also with the private sector and universities. We think that's just good policy and, as information comes to hand for DEWNR, they will go through the right processes to put it up on our websites as appropriate.