Bushfire recovery chief says government lines left victims treated differently
The national bushfire recovery chief says bushfire victims have been treated differently, depending on which side of ‘artificial lines’ set by state and local governments they live on.
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The nation’s bushfire chief has admitted that people harmed by the Black Summer fires have been treated differently depending on where they lived.
The Commonwealth’s National Bushfire Recovery Agency was set up in the middle of the crisis to help the nation handle the emergency and the multi-billion dollar funding pool being amassed by governments and charities.
The agency’s boss Andrew Colvin told the bushfire royal commission on Thursday that “unfortunately” there had been inconsistent responses for people because of a lack of uniform data collection by the states.
“Everyone is aligned in their intention to make this as smooth as possible but the reality is that there are differences across jurisdictional boundaries,” he said.
“The experience of an Australian recovering from this event can vary depending on which side of an artificial line you sit.”
Mr Colvin said an ideal scenario would be that a bushfire victim would only have to talk to one person before accessing all available funding, and should not have to compound their trauma by repeating their story of loss.
But bushfire-stricken communities up and down NSW did not have that experience.
The Daily Telegraph last month reported that some people had to chase charities for weeks to access donated millions and had fallen through the cracks.
Others had to not just retell their story, over and over, but repeatedly prove that their home had burnt down.
Services Australia deputy chief Michelle Lees told the commission earlier on Thursday there was no “timeliness standard” on how quickly her department was supposed to assess and pay out recovery claims.
Some grants took six days to finalise on average, she said, others took 35 days on average if a loss of business income had to be proven.
The commission continues.
JUNE 3: Emergency chief warns of ‘dire’ future without support
The man in charge of Australia’s emergency management has predicted a “dire” scenario in Australia where massive crises stretch emergency resources beyond their capacity leaving some communities protected and the others undefended.
Director General of Emergency Management Australia Robert Cameron OAM has spoken about the way state and federal governments interact during emergencies. His posting comes under the federal department of Home Affairs.
“We’re interested in sources of threat and risk to Australia, Australians and things Australians value,” he explained on Wednesday.
Mr Cameron was called before the commission to explain how emergency services chiefs and critical government agencies met and communicated throughout the Black Summer crisis and their lessons learned.
But perhaps his most troubling piece of evidence was that he sees a time when those emergency leaders will need to choose who to protect and who they can’t because the scale of a crisis is just too massive.
“If you take the impact of the changing climate into account we’re going to have, again regrettably, more disaster impacts which will stretch our capacity,” he told the commission on Wednesday.
“If you take that to its ultimate end we could be faced, at some future point, with a decision that needs to be made collectively where resource element A can be applied to incident B or incident C but not both.”
“The impacts on the community to which the capability is not deployed could be dire and indeed is likely to be so.”
The Royal Commission into the bushfire season today examined the role of the Australian Defence Force in assisting communities during the crisis.
The government claimed the ADF was on the ground from early September after receiving criticism for the time it took to call in extra support.
The commission, on Wednesday, heard the first troops were on the ground on September 6 in south east Queensland and far north NSW where some fires were burning.
Their role was to “support the firefight” which included sending helicopter crews to spot fires, flying fireys between states and transport.
By the end of the year the ADF focus was shifting to ongoing community support and rebuilding, the commission heard.
The federal government’s National Bushfire Recover Coordinator, Mark Colvin APM OAM, will face the commission on Thursday.
JUNE 2: Incompatible radios ‘frustrated’ fireys
The bushfire Royal Commission has heard efforts of crucial water bombing aircraft were “frustrated” by incompatible radio systems that stopped them easily flying across state lines to fight blazes.
Currently the states and territories command firefighting aircraft within their own borders and each aircraft must be fitted with tactical radios that allow them to communicate with that state’s networks.
But that means an aircraft, called into battle in a neighbouring state, would need to be fitted with new radios or find “workarounds”, Richard Alder from the National Aerial Firefighting Centre told the commission.
Those workarounds could include sending up a local aircraft to accompany the outsider firefighting craft and relay messages back to the local network.
“ (NAFC) are certainly aware that can frustrate, for lack of a better word, moving aircraft across borders and sharing aircraft across borders,” he said on Tuesday.
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NAFC, an aircraft broker for the states, is trying to standardise the national aerial bushfire systems but has no ability to standardise the radio networks.
“Speaking frankly, we can’t standardise that,” Mr Alder said.
“Currently each state and territory adopts a different system that’s largely incompatible. In terms of standardisation of the actual system, currently that’s impractical.”
Many of the worst fires in the Black Summer occurred on the borders of NSW, Victoria and the ACT. The commission is examining how authorities were able to co-ordinate their responses.
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Mr Alder told the commission NAFC is currently putting together a national framework to unite all the nation’s aerial firefighting assets under a single strategy.
“That process is still in its infancy, it really only commenced a couple of months ago,” he said.
The commission heard drones could become the future of the fight against bushfires with their ability to work in smoky and dark conditions.
HVP Plantations’ Ruth Ryan told the commission she felt the state borders should be “dissolved” in the future when dealing with cross-border bushfire battles.
McDermott Aviation president, John McDermott, told the commission his crews had to wait to be called in by state dispatchers to respond to a fire.
The commission has been beset by heavy delays, Senior Counsel Assisting Dominiqe Hogan-Doran SC acknowledged on Tuesday.
More than 3600 documents totalling 44,000 pages have been provided to the commission in the last few weeks.
It means important topics – like the controversial discussion of fuel load management – have been delayed until later this month.
The commission will resume on Wednesday.
Originally published as Bushfire recovery chief says government lines left victims treated differently