Article

On Thursday, 16 January - two full days before the firestorm smashed into Canberra's flanks - fire, police and emergency personnel were told selectively that the fires would hit Canberra within days.

ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, and his former ministers, Bill Wood and Ted Quinlan, both spoke heatedly on radio today (20 December 2006) about how their cabinet meeting had not discussed whether or not to issue a public warning.

There are only two conclusions to be drawn here: the first is that they made a decision not to issue a warning to prevent panic, or they simply were oblivious of the cyclical nature of firestorms raging into the ACT from NSW.

I have little doubt that the latter is the case. I know all of these politicians personally and believe that they believe they did not deliberately avoid issuing a warning. However, I believe they were very much under the sway of senior ACT bureaucrats, who certainly had plenty of skeletons in their closets.

Wood is an affable gent who has a long record of being told what to do. Quinlan is a different stamp of a man, but the truth is, his role in running emergency services at the time was minimal. It is also a fact that his relations with Stanhope have been strained for years to the point that before he resigned, they rarely spoke to each other.

Stanhope was a well-meaning amateur, recently elected and with little or no practical or municipal background to qualify him to run a local council-state style government. His background was working as a Labor Party insider for the federal party.

But many in the ACT services were told and there is little doubt that all the senior officials around these ministers knew or had reason to know that Canberra was in  perilous danger.

Major fires were raging out of control around the edge of the city and the McIntyre's hut fire in NSW was about to burst forth. Abject NSW Rural Fire Service management decisions saw repeated calls to tackle the fire ignored. This fire on its own was enough to seal Canberra's fate.

This is the exact fire that followed the exact route of several previous fires in earlier decades that had exploded into the ACT. The thing is, earlier fires missed the houses.

This is a few paragraphs from my book Firestorm.

Chapter 10, Thin blue line (page 87).

Police, fire and emergency service heads were told on Thursday, January 16, that fires would probably hit the urban area of Canberra on Sunday or Monday.

ACT Chief Fire Control Officer Peter Lucas-Smith briefed a number of agencies and prominent groups and individuals, including members of the Emergency Management Committee, chaired by the Chief Police Officer John Murray. They were told the conditions were getting worse and that fires were breaking containment lines. With the forecasts of severe fire danger weather, the fires would run to the west and south-west towards Canberra. Fire burning in Namadgi National Park would become a threat to Canberra by Monday or Possibly Sunday.

No warning to this effect was issued to the general public. Senior brigade officers were told the information must not leave the room. In a televised press conference the next day, on Friday, Lucas-Smith said the chances of the fire reaching the urban edge were 'pretty slim'. At a midday television interview on Saturday he said there was always a chance fire could reach the urban area.

So why was no warning issued? Why spend four years trying to derail the Coronial Inquiry into the Canberra Firestorm?

Public officials and those in political office need to realise that they are expected to be accountable for their actions in public life. It is not a game where they get paid a lot of money and then try to prevent an open inquiry.

But this has been my experience for most of my career as a journalist, and it certainly has been my experience in Canberra, that officials believe they can use public money to hide their mistakes and their deliberate wrongful actions as well.

Let’s hope there is a sense of accountability. It is not enough for Stanhope on one hand to accuse the Coroner of being wrong and on the other hand to say it is a very good and useful report.

This is exactly the sort of smokescreen that is thrown up every time public officials have been found out.

Canberra deserves better.

Comments