Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you, Chair. Well the first thing I want to do, having the opportunity to have the SES at the table is to thank you for your incredible work looking after Tasmanians and particularly after the floods. Minister, I’m sure that you are aware of projections from the Bureau of Meteorology that this year’s summer temperatures are likely to be 60-80 per cent higher than average. Budget paper page 243 shows funding for the state emergency service is extremely modest given the scale of the weather extremes and their frequency that we’re likely to see in the weeks, months and years ahead. Why aren’t we –
Mr ELLIS – Can I just double check, when we’re talking state emergency services, Ms O’Connor, sorry to interrupt, you’re talking more broadly around fire and SES?
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes.
Mr ELLIS – Yes. That’s cool. Yes, just so I’m not –
Ms O’CONNOR – I know we’ve got the state fire commission coming in here, but the question’s specific to the SES and the incredible work that they do on a shoestring. So, minister, do you accept that the SES, in order to be able to do its extremely important lifesaving work should be properly funded to do so and that at the moment the funding is inadequate?
Mr ELLIS – Yes, absolutely. This is a key part of –
Ms O’CONNOR – I’m glad to hear you agree.
Mr ELLIS – Yes. I completely 100 per cent agree and this is an area that’s absolutely critical for us as a parliament as we come up over the coming months. We announced a week ago that the Fire and Emergency Services Act, the new Act to replace the Fire Service Act, will be brought back into parliament. Now we’ve made some changes around that to what was initially consulted based on feedback from the community and certainly the levee structures – the changes will need – any change in that space we need further agreement on. We need to continue to work together. The importance of the state being a strong contributor to SES is so important. In the past SES has largely been funded through local government, and you can sort of see why it evolved like that in the early days.
Ms O’CONNOR – As a volunteer organisation.
Mr ELLIS – That’s right. Yes. Closely attached to community and those sorts of things but the reality is that we’re all Tasmanians, and wherever you might be involved in a car accident in Tasmania, you should receive the best possible lifesaving services, and that comes from ensuring that our SES are funded and supported by the state.
So that’s a key part of ensuring that we can continue to grow and build. Now there’s a range of areas where we’re looking to invest further in the SES; $5 million all up in terms of vehicle upgrades because that was an area that local government was looking after. Major investments in terms of our new emergency services hubs in different communities around the state and a lot of those are actually in areas where the SES facilities are clearly the poorest. The Wynyard one, for example, and very grateful for the partnership that we have there.
The Wynyard one’s a shed out the back of a suburban house, and the opportunity to bring that together with fire, police and ambulance actually in that location in Wynyard is really encouraging to build on that capability because you’re absolutely right. We’re seeing more frequent and more severe natural disasters in this state and around the world.
Ms O’CONNOR – Unnatural disasters even if you think about it in the context of climate change.
Mr ELLIS – Well certainly climate change is the key driver for a lot of our concerns to ensure that we’re investing in this space. You know, I’ve been on the record around our absolute need to do more and the Fire and Emergency Services Act that we’ll be bringing back into parliament will be the next step on that journey, but we will need to continue to work together as a parliament and as a community to ensure that we continue that journey. Because we’re entering a more dangerous future and doing that with an aging population is a big challenge, so we need to continue our focus.
Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you, minister. It’s refreshing to hear a conservative government minister be so honest about the reality of global heating.
Mr ELLIS – More woke thank you think, Ms O’Connor.
Ms O’CONNOR – Well, you’re an intelligent man, but then there are climate deniers in your party who are also arguably intelligent who continue to stick to their old beliefs. But has work been done, and it would be a broader police fire and emergency management body of work, I’m sure, and you’d be working with DPAC – but in terms of the SES just looking at what the bureau is projecting and the long-term trends that our scientists tell us we’re facing. What sort of scoping work has been done by the SES on how it will need to adapt and scale up in future?
Mr ELLIS – Yes. I’ll pass over to director of SES, Mick Lowe shortly. We need to continually invest in and continue to grow our volunteer base because when we talk about resource to risk, our people are our biggest resource. We need to grow that despite the national trend among all volunteering organisations of declining numbers, we need to actually over-exceed that. We need to grow our organisation.
The other big one is around climate modelling and resilience and that’s been an area where the SES has really been among the nation leaders in terms of our ability to map the impact of things like flood on our communities, and get a picture of what further work we need to do for that resilience and make some investments, but look I’ll pass over to –
Ms O’CONNOR – While you’re passing there’s a question here about how you engage with communities on such things as rapid evacuation plans. I’d be really interested to hearing any work that’s being done in that space as well.
Mr LOWE – Through you, minister. This is something that we’re working very hard across SES on. Within SES there is a part of the organisation known as the Flood Policy Unit. They are working across the community and across Tasmania. One of their responsibilities is the Tasmanian Flood Mapping Project. That’s about having accurate mapping that we can use as both a predictive model, but also use to inform planning, both pre-incident and during incident across the state.
That is a project that’s jointly funded by the Tasmanian and Australian governments and is being rolled out at the moment and was used to great effect just recently. The Flood Policy Unit also does community flood plans and community flood guides. The flood plans are to assist the municipal areas to address their particular concerns. They’re inward-facing, and that’s complimented by community flood guides, which is community-facing to help communities be able to prepare for the impact of flood across the state.
Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you very much for that answer. That does raise the next question which is, is part of that work – and I presume it is – is the preventative work. If you’ve got the mapping that tells you where the risk is, you can see what you need to strengthen in terms of, like, fast infrastructure fixes or whatever it is that you need to do to mitigate the risk of lives lost and property damaged.
Mr ELLIS – And you think about, say, projects like the – I was just there yesterday – the Latrobe flood mitigation works. The levee around the town. That’s been a great investment for Tasmania and believe it or not flood levees are some of the highest return on investment that you’ll find for any physical infrastructure that you can possibly build. Because the money that you spend ahead of time in resilience saves you a lot of money in terms of recovery.
Ms O’CONNOR – Stop making sense.
Mr ELLIS – I give the federal government their dues, this is an area where they’re looking to really step in as well, partnering with states and local government to invest in that resilience ahead of time. Also invest in response so that we can ensure that people are kept safe and then hopefully that – we’re not going to ever reduce the recovery bill because we are seeing more frequent and more severe natural disasters but reduce an even broader impact. Some of those physical infrastructure investments are really important. We need to continue to partner with both levels of government. I’ll pass back to Mr Lowe if there’s anything further to add there.
Mr LOWE – Thank you and through you, minister. This is where the flood modelling that is being conducted enables those statewide flood risk assessments to be done. That informs and that’s where we work with local government and across the whole of government and other stakeholders and agencies to use that to ensure that when there are projects that are conducted that we have an understanding of the level of protection that is afforded and that that can be assessed ahead of time.
What does that mean? We have the annual exceedance probability. Think of that as very broadly being whether something is going to be a one in 50 or one in 100-year event. When you build infrastructure, you want to have a clear understanding of what’s the scale and nature of event that that infrastructure is capable of protecting against, and that’s where that work that the flood policy unit does is just so important to inform those very large investment decisions.
Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you. Just finally, it’s not a question, it’s an observation that when we used to talk about things being one in 50 or one in 100-year events, we’re now seeing they’re happening every three, four or five years. So obviously there’s a different kind of metric that you apply to the assessment, given the uncertainty and chaos that’s involved with global heating.
Mr LOWE – Yes, absolutely.
Mr ELLIS – In Mr Gaffney and my community, we’ve had 3 one in a 100-year floods in the last 10 years.
Ms O’CONNOR – Right. Do the maths on that. They’re one in three-year floods. Yes.
