Scott Morrison details ‘breakdown in communications’ with RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons over army reserve plan

PM defends handling of the army reserves announcement as fire chief says he wasn’t told.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NSW RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison has defended his handling of the bushfire crisis after NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons expressed his “disappointment” at being blindsided by the government’s announcement it was committing 3000 army reservists to help fight blazes across the nation.

Mr Fitzsimmons told Nine’s Today program on Sunday he was “disappointed and frustrated” to have learned about the Prime Minister’s unprecedented intervention via media reports during “one of the worst days” of the fire season and as NSW and Victoria faced catastrophic conditions.

Speaking in Canberra on Sunday Mr Morrison blamed the oversight on a “breakdown in communications” and stressed the government continued to share a strong working relationship with state and territory agencies.

“I want to stress the decisions we took yesterday and enacted yesterday were all about the scale of this crisis,” Mr Morrison said. “It is in no way a statement on the performance of the state and territory agencies.

“There was a breakdown in communications at the defence liaison level with the headquarters yesterday … we communicated the decision soon as it had been made.”

Mr Morrison said the decision to deploy army reservists, as well as the HMAS Adelaide, was made at a National Security Committee of cabinet in Canberra on Saturday and state and territory leaders were notified shortly after.

The government will also lease an extra four water bombers at a cost of $20m to help the planes already available for firefighting efforts as fires burn across NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.

But Mr Fitzsimmons said he spent the majority of Saturday with commonwealth and military liaison officers trying to “work out” how these additional resources could be integrated with the existing fire fighting effort.

He said the announcement came amid the second-highest number of concurrent emergency warning fires “ever in the history of NSW” and a campaign to evacuate thousands of people from “our most vulnerable areas in southern NSW”.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese also weighed in, questioning why Mr Morrison had failed to notify Mr Fitzsimmons of the strategy change when he had found time to call the NSW Police Commissioner in November over the Angus Taylor “doctored documents” saga in November.

“It really is up to the Prime Minister to explain how it is that he was able to ring the Police Commissioner about Angus Taylor but didn’t ring the Commissioner for the Rural Fire Service in New South Wales about a significant change in policy and strategy that he announced yesterday,” Mr Albanese said on Sunday.

At a later press conference Mr Fitzsimmons confirmed the Prime Minister’s Office had “apologised in hindsight” over the mix-up and they were now “working together to make the best out of this announcement”.

“I spoke to the PM’s office last night in relation to my disappointment in the middle of a very busy day,” he said.

“We have people assigned at the NSW level particularly looking at using those crews to help with the recovery and the support operations to people who have been heavily impacted. It will be a valuable thing. It will help our communities.”

A spokesman for Mr Morrison told The Australian NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian had been notified of the deployment of army reservists shortly before the announcement was made public on Saturday.

Mr Morrison thanked the fire commissioners for their extraordinary work in integrating and co-ordinating with each other and with the commonwealth.

Mr Fitzsimmons told Today he had moved through the initial surprise and had never seen “integrations and operations work better”.

He said the NSW RFS had “never been refused any assistance from the commonwealth”.