Federal powers firmly in spotlight

Scott Morrison now has the cover to bookend the political disaster of last summer’s bushfire season and address a gaping hole in the national disaster response that was exposed by the crisis.

The states won’t necessarily like it. While uncritical, many of the recommendations from the bushfire royal commission were directed at them. It defined the responsibility for fighting fires, at an operational level, as being a state responsibility.

This was never in dispute.

What the crisis did expose was the constitutional grey area that had not become apparent until the sheer scale of the natural disaster unfolded.

The federal government had and still has no ability to declare national state of emergencies for fires, or floods or for pretty much anything else. But community expectations, largely fuelled by the superficial pile-on over the Prime Minister’s Hawaiian holidays, shifted over summer.

Morrison became a focal point of anger at a national level and brought the commonwealth’s role into sharp focus. The problem was that it had no role other than that determined by the states and territories.

The key proposal from the 1000-plus page report now gives independent authority to what the Prime Minister had flagged as an issue to address at the height of the crisis when trying to battle the political fallout as well as the recovery process.

The federal government’s concern ahead of the release of the report was that commissioner Mark Binskin would fall short of recommending new federal powers to enact a national state of emergency that would allow the federal government to deploy troops and its full resources without state or territory request.

While the federal government must have national emergency-response powers, it cannot be seen to be taking over the management of the national bushfire crisis.

Overall, the report was a sober examination of the crisis that avoided the pursuit of blame but identified clear reforms to ensure resilience and national co-ordination of recovery responses.