Government dodges opposition questions on bushfire staffing
The Liberals have failed to answer questions over whether the fire service lacked sufficient staff during recent bushfires. UPDATED.
Tasmania
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THE Tasmanian Fire Service is short of key staff and the recommendations of bushfire reports have gone unimplemented, state parliament has heard.
Labor yesterday claimed the Tasmania Fire Service did not have enough staff to run incident management teams during recent bushfires at Lachlan and Scamander and had to bring in staff from other agencies.
In response, Police, Fire and Emergency Management Mr Shelton read from a prepared statement about the Government’s efforts to increase firefighting efforts and made criticisms of Labor and the Greens when they were in power six years ago.
Amid calls from the Opposition for Mr Shelton to answer the question — and two requests from Speaker Sue Hickey for him to come to the point — he was eventually asked to sit down.
“You’ve had five minutes. Thank you, Minister,” Ms Hickey said.
Labor asked the same question of Premier Will Hodgman, who defended the government’s performance without answering directly..
“What we’re doing as a government is giving our full support to Tasmania’s fire fighting ability — the hard-working professionals in our fire service; the extraordinarily generous volunteers who contribute to the firefighting effort; our agencies; multi agencies, across government, which are supporting the effort,” he said.
“We give them our full support, we will not undermine confidence in their capabilities. We will stand up for them.”
Mr Hodgman said Labor was undermining community confidence in the fire service and decisions on staffing were matters for the chief fire officer.
TFS Acting Deputy Chief Shane Batt later said Labor’s claims were incorrect.
“Incident Management Teams are established for large complex fires which are usually across multiple tenures,” he said. “They are staffed not only from TFS, but also from PWS [Parks and Wildlife Service] and STT [Sustainable Timber Tasmania], due to their cross-tenure nature.
“An Incident Management Team was established at Cambridge for the recent fires. This had control of numerous fires burning in the Central Highlands and Derwent Valley.
“These included fires at Glenfern Road, Lachlan, Bluff Road, Dennistoun Road and Tod’s Corner Road near Miena. The IMT was fully staffed at all times.”
He said no IMT was established for the Scamander fire, because it didn’t warrant one.
Mr Shelton later issued a a media release saying Labor was wrong and should stop lying.
Mr White said there were concerns the state wasn’t well prepared for the bushfire season.
“There is a concern across the Tasmanian Fire Service, about how prepared this government is for the upcoming season, the fact that they haven’t implemented a number of recommendations from reviews.
“We’ve got an inexperienced minister who simply does not seem to be across the details of what’s going on in his own agency — [it] does mean we are looking to the Premier to provide leadership here and unfortunately he just resorted to political attacks today”.
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His comments came as Tasmania Fire Service Chief Arnol urged Tasmanians to prepare for the coming season.
“While weather like we’re seeing this week is no bushfire threat, very quickly we’ll see the
temperatures rise, bush dry out and winds increase which is the perfect recipe for bushfire,” he said.
“Tasmania experiences around 1800 bushfires each bushfire season and this year we’ll be doing all we can to protect lives and property, but we also need the community to do their bit.
“The most important thing is for people to plan now — while there is no bushfire threat — for what they’ll do if there is a bushfire.”
He urged people who live in bushland to:
— CLEAR 30m of vegetation and flammable material (such as wood piles) around houses and
buildings;
— CLEAR out gutters of dried and dead leaves;
— KNOW evacuation routes;
— WRITE a bushfire plan so they know what to do when a fire occurs.
david.killick@news.com.au
Originally published as Government dodges opposition questions on bushfire staffing