It seems that the Country Fire Authority’s Chief Officer, Russell Rees, has become the scapegoat of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Bushfires.

Heaping on the blame, counsel assisting the commission, Jack Rush QC, described Russell Rees’s role on February 7 as ‘divorced from fundamental aspects of the responsibilities he had as chief officer, including the provision of public warnings and the protection of life’.

On Monday May 11, when responding to a question about warnings to the public, Russell Rees told the commission’s hearing that he was not directly responsible for warnings given to the public. Had he thought the warnings were insufficient on February 7, he said, he would have tried to fix the problem.

Clearly, the lack of adequate warnings to communities about approaching fires was due to the failure to collect and disseminate information on the day.

In an attempt to discover who is ultimately responsible for issuing warnings about approaching bushfires, I trawled through a few websites for clues.

I found this job description for Russell Rees, an Australia Day Ambassador in 2009, on the Australia Day website.

‘The role of chief officer is a statutory position under the CFA Act and brings with it responsibilities and leadership accountabilities as the senior operational commander of CFA. In times of serious emergency, Russell leads and directs a fire fighting force of enormous proportions, controlling and directing the overall response and management of anything up to 10,000 people over many days. He is responsible for ensuring a fire fighting force of more than 59,000 volunteers, 400 career staff, over 2,000 vehicles and up to 30 aircraft are ready to meet the variety of emergencies that occur across the jurisdiction of CFA and beyond. As a member of the CFA’s Executive Management Team, Russell works in a team environment to ensure CFA is recognised as one of the premier volunteer-based fire and emergency services in the world.’

Nothing in there about issuing warnings to the public.

On the website of the office of the Emergency Services Commissioner – Emergency Management in Victoria, the role of the Emergency Services Commissioner is described thus:

‘The Emergency Services Commissioner supports the role of the Coordinator in Chief of Emergency Management (the Minister for Police and Emergency Services) in overseeing emergency planning, response and recovery.’

And ‘The Commissioner oversees effective utilisation of the common resources of the emergency services, and encourages and facilitates cooperation between all agencies before, during and after an emergency. The Commissioner develops emergency management policies on behalf of government.’

The Emergency Services Commissioner of Victoria is Bruce Esplin. The Minister for Police and Emergency Services, to whom Bruce Esplin answers, is The Honourable Bob Cameron MP.

In an embittered op-ed in The Australian on 24 June, Tony Cutcliffe wrote of Russell Rees: ‘It will be interesting to see if his past and present ministers will also be required to testify and give an account of their stewardship.’

You might be interested to read about the analysis of a Government report into the State’s extreme bushfires of January 2003 in which Tony Cutcliffe savagely criticised the author’s report, Bruce Esplin.

At the current Royal Commission, the transcript of evidence given by the Deputy Commissioner of the Victoria Police, Kieran Walshe, makes for illuminating reading. On 18 May, Kieran Walshe told the Commission about the structures and reporting relationships that apply to emergencies in Victoria. The co-ordinator in chief of this arrangement is the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, The Honourable Bob Cameron MP. If you’d like to read the transcript, click here. (In particular page 89 from line 17 – it’s a PDF document and might take a little while to load.)

The Royal Commission is due to deliver an interim report by 17 August 2009 and a final report by 31 July 2010. Instead of lining up Russell Rees as an easy target, perhaps instead we need to focus on those who are directly responsible for issuing warnings to the public in times of emergency.

And when all the blame is laid to rest, maybe we need to consider this, from fire ecologist Kevin Tolhurst:

‘Melbourne has two major problems. One is the urban interface, and the other is the water catchment. Melbourne has a significant rural-urban interface, where we see places like Kinglake, St Andrews, the Dandenongs, Pakenham. People like the natural environment, so they want to live close to it, but they are living an urban existence. They are not dependent on that bush, and they don’t fully understand it.

‘I think in ‘39 the people living and working in the bush knew much more about their environment and what they were dealing with. Okay, they didn’t have scale and they didn’t have communication, but at least they understood the bush.’