Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

A royal commission. That might be helpful because when this report was conducted by this parliament, not by the Howard government—in fact, John Howard did not want it—it said a lot of things which were good advice, but the governments of two states, New South Wales and Victoria, forbade their public servants from coming and providing the expert evidence that might have helped. They said it was because they were too busy, but they all turned up in the gallery with notebooks and took notes of the names of poor individuals who had the courage to attend independently and advise the parliament on how we might fix the problem. At least a royal commission could give protection to those witnesses, and I hope it does. But it will be meaningless. There have been royal commissions before. They are all there, all stacked up somewhere; this book just happens to be one of the last, and we have done nothing about it. To the contrary, we discover today in the media that one local government authority was forcing people to plant trees around their houses as a condition of building them. Someone can say, ‘It’s Tuckey playing politics again.’ I have not mentioned a name, and I certainly do not lay the blame on this government or the Labor Party. As far as I am concerned—I published an apology yesterday—I am equally complicit, because I gave up after this report got chucked in the wastepaper bin by our government. I should not have. I think some of those people would still have died. There would have been a very nasty fire, but it would not have been a nuclear event, and I think the expert opinion I have quoted supports me in that.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity I have just had. I hope we, the members of this parliament, can move on appropriately from the grief we are now recognising so properly and come up with practical and simple solutions. Maybe—and I did suggest this once—because of the federal nature of this problem we should have an inspectorate of safety for the forest. And maybe we should not give states natural disaster funding, which is a form of insurance, if they deliberately create an unsafe environment, because that is what it is. If it were an OH&S jurisdiction, there is no doubt what people would be saying in this place today.

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