The firefighters’ union is calling for an overhaul of the ACT Emergency Services Agency (ESA), the ACT Government agency responsible for emergency management services, and an investigation into how money allocated to firefighting is spent.

The United Firefighters Union of Australia (UFU) ACT Branch warns that the ACT is not prepared for another fire like those of January 2003 – and in their view, the fault lies with the ESA.

• Read also: Union says systematic failures leave firefighters short (20 January)

“After the Canberra bushfires destroyed nearly 500 homes and took four lives, the ACT’s ESA has still failed to learn the lessons of 2003,” Greg McConville, national secretary and secretary of the ACT branch, said on Wednesday 18 January, the 20th anniversary of the firestorm.

According to the UFU, the ESA has failed to protect the community, refused to transparently disclose its budgetary decisions, and been unwilling to engage with critical stakeholders and the community.

The ESA comprises the ACT Fire and Rescue Service, the ACT Rural Fire Service, the ACT Ambulance Service, and ACT State Emergency Services.

Inquiry into funding and procurement

The union calls for the Auditor-General to inquire into how money allocated to fire services has been spent, and for the ACT Integrity Commission to investigate the ESA’s procurement processes (funding commitments and expenditure).

The UFU alleges that the ESA has exponentially grown in staff, funding, and resources – at the expense of frontline fire services. Mr McConville said that the ACT Government had allocated $45 million to ACT Fire and Rescue in 2020 to modernise and enhance fire services; although these costings were listed in the budget, the UFU had heard nothing about the expenditure, and funding had not flowed to the fire service.

“The public, firefighters, and their representatives have no way of knowing whether this money is being spent as the government intended,” Mr McConville said.

“The operating revenue of the fire services [ACT Fire and Rescue and the ACT Rural Fire Service] remains cloaked by layers of bureaucracy which the Coroner and the McLeod report [Ron McLeod’s Inquiry into the Operational Response to the January 2003 Bushfires] identified as unacceptable after the 2003 bushfires.”

Since 2016, however, ESA positions have expanded by 60 per cent – even though the budget papers did not provide for this at all, Mr McConville said. The ACT ESA amended the Emergency Services Act 2004 in December 2021 to expand its senior management, the UFU stated.

The Legislative Assembly was told key stakeholders had been consulted about the changes – but firefighters and the UFU were “blindsided” by the amendments, Mr McConville said. “No explanation has ever been given as to how this occurred, or who misled the Assembly,” the UFU stated.

Georgeina Whelan, commissioner of the ACT ESA, was confident the Auditor-General would find no problems with how the $45 million was spent. That money, she said, had been used to grow ACT Fire and Rescue by a third, and renew half its workforce, and to invest in the ACT Ambulance Service (growing by a third over the next five years) and the ACT Rural Fire Service (500 active volunteers).

A recent Auditor-General’s report, Ms Whelan said, highlighted significant improvements over the last seven years in how the ESA procured and acquired equipment and managed funding. There was, Ms Whelan claimed, “full transparency in what we do”. While the ESA centralised procurement, service representatives informed how the finance committee expended funds.

But the fact that procurement is not done by ACT Fire & Rescue, but for them by the ACT ESA is a problem, Mr McConville believes. What has been delivered – vehicles suffering from the same faults as those in the 2003 fires – does not meet requirements, while promised fire stations have not been constructed yet, the UFU alleges.

Ms Whelan said that all equipment, training, and acquisition of vehicles was co-designed between the ESA, ACT Fire and Rescue, and the UFU. Workplace consultative groups spend hours working together on user requirements and design leading to acquisition, and the ACT meets national and international safety standards.

Mr McConville confirmed that the UFU was consulted, and agreed on a statement of requirements, but he maintained that what arrived did not address the inadequacies; the ESA had not delivered what was agreed upon.

What is the purpose of the ACT ESA?

The ESA is descended from the Emergency Services Bureau, established in 1995, to better co-ordinate the response of urban and bushfire services, ambulance, and other emergency services to emergency-related incidents.

According to the UFU, the ACT ESA seeks to redefine itself as an operational service, contrary to the recommendations of the McLeod report and the Coronial Inquest. The UFU argues that the ACT ESA must be recast as an administrative and co-ordination body, as the McLeod report and the inquest recommended.

The McLeod report recommended that the separate organisations that made up the emergency services group that the Emergency Services Bureau co-ordinated should be replaced by the ACT Emergency Services Authority, a statutory body separate from, and independent of any state department, outside the public service, and reporting directly to the minister for emergency services. Similarly, the Coroner agreed with Mr McLeod’s recommendation that the Emergency Services Agency be removed from the then-Department of Justice and Community Safety and become again a statutory authority.

The current ACT ESA, however, is a business unit of the Justice and Community Safety Directorate (JACS).

Mr McConville argues that JACS is too powerful: “I used to say that the Justice and Community Safety Directorate was run by five ministers. I was wrong. The Justice and Community Safety Directorate runs five ministers. It is a large bureaucracy, and the ministerial officers in the Legislative Assembly do not hold a candle to the organisation or power of the Justice directorate.”

JACS, Mr McConville claimed, is able to evade accountability, while its budget did not list line items for fire trucks, firefighter training, communications, or logistics.

“The public pays our levy for those things, and it deserves to know that those things are being delivered as intended,” Mr McConville said.

The relevant 2022–23 budget statement lists the following items related to fires (Table 28: 2022-23 Justice and Community Safety Directorate Infrastructure Program):

While more frontline fighters, Fire & Rescue staff, and a second crew at the yet unbuilt Acton Station are listed, it is unclear from the budget statement what bushfire preparedness covers.

Ms Whelan disagreed that the McLeod report and coroner’s recommendations had failed to be fully actioned, as the UFU claimed.

“That’s a contest of ideas,” she said.

The McLeod report, she said, had highlighted that the infrastructure that accommodated emergency services was a barrier to interoperability and communication. (The McLeod report noted the difficulty of achieving complete systems interoperability between the ACT emergency services agencies, ACT Policing, and the NSW Rural Fire Service, which had different standards; argued that agencies should be able to communicate effectively during emergencies; and recommended that greater interoperability between emergency services organisations throughout Australia should be a long-term aim.)

The report also recommended that the alert mechanisms for residents should be improved, and that the level of resources for the training and operational exercising of volunteer bushfire and emergency service personnel should be increased, and quantities of equipment were insufficient.

“If you move forward 20 years … we have, in fact, been able to demonstrate our learnings, our growth, our adaptation to that,” Ms Whelan said.

“Our current response across all four services is one of the fastest response rates and quality response rates in the country. Our equipment is second to none. And all of that is co-designed with our membership and with our Union representation.”

According to the latest Report on Government Services (2020–21), firefighters responded (including call taking time) to 50 per cent of structure fires within 6.9 minutes, and to 90 per cent within 10.8 minutes – in both cases, the fastest in the country.

The 2019/20 bushfires were an excellent example of the ACT’s alerts and warnings system and its communication with ACT residents, Ms Whelan said. Another instance: last week, the ACT ESA dealt with two grass fires, a storm, and a fire in NSW within four hours.

Restructure ACT Fire and Rescue

While the ACT ESA is responsible for fire, ambulance, and state emergency services, Mr McConville believes this joined-up model is expensive and ineffective.

The UFU proposes that ACT Fire and Rescue be restructured as an enhanced (statutory) fire and emergency services authority, as in other jurisdictions, with its own supporting staff, unencumbered by bureaucracy, and reporting directly to the minister for emergency services, who could in turn report to the Legislative Assembly for its expenditure.

“Letting agencies stand alone again would create a direct line of accountability, so that the public could be assured that the resources allocated by government are delivered for the purpose that they were intended,” Mr McConville said.

“This is a major issue of accountability and transparency. The public needs to be assured that what it has asked for, what firefighters have bargained for, will be delivered, and that they will be safe.”

But Matthew Mavity, chief officer of ACT Fire and Rescue, said the current system worked, as ACTF&R’s performance proved.

“By any metric you choose from the Report on Government Services, we are the best performing fire service in Australia; we are the safest community in Australia in my view.

“What I would say is that no system is perfect, and we constantly seek to review how we go about our business, whether that’s frontline operations or support operations. The model that the government chooses is not really within my purview; I work to the legislated role. Basically, the support I get is how we perform to the best standard in Australia.”

ACT Government response

Mick Gentleman, ACT Minister for Emergency Services, said he had every confidence in Ms Whelan and ESA chief agency heads, while he thought the troops on the ground were doing a fantastic job.

“Whether it’s Fire and Rescue response, whether it’s paramedic response, we are the fastest in the country … and well thought of in other jurisdictions,” Mr Gentleman said.

An ACT Government spokesperson assured the ACT community that Canberra was “one of the safest cities in the world, with well-funded, well-resourced, and well-governed emergency services”.

ACT Fire and Rescue’s performance was among the best in Australia, the spokesperson said: its response times were “the envy of many fire services”, and the number of incidents it responded to remained stable at around 12,000 per year, despite significant population growth in the ACT.