Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Can the Prime Minister explain how his entire office found time to attend a marketing seminar run by ad man Russel Howcroft on a catastrophic fire day in December? Why did the Prime Minister organise a meeting with Russel from marketing but refused to meet with the 23 former fire chiefs who were pleading for the government to take this bushfire season seriously?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The meeting that you refer to was not a meeting that I attended. The meeting that you said was requested, and it has been well publicised, related to former fire chiefs, as you know. I engage with current fire chiefs. The current fire chiefs provided advice going into this fire season that was the same fire advice that was provided by Emergency Management Australia when I asked Emergency Management Australia to come and brief cabinet well before the fire season last year on what was necessary and to ensure that we were compliant and that we were taking action to ensure the Commonwealth was in the best position it could be to support state and territory authorities as they moved through this devastating fire season. That included the additional funding that we announced that I referred to earlier, in response to the member for Gilmore's question, to support the aerial bombers. In November the government undertook a trial program for the compulsory call-out of reserves to ensure that, in the event we were to move to that situation, it could be done seamlessly.

This has been one of the most significant responses of the government to ensure that we went from a situation of around 895 Defence Force personnel on the ground in December to 6½ thousand and more that were on the ground in January. That changed because the government changed the disposition of the Commonwealth's deployment of Defence forces on the ground—not to respond to requests but to take this to the extreme of constitutionality; to respond to the situation that emerged that week, where on the Thursday it was the first day that the state of disaster had been declared in Victoria. That hadn't occurred before. That happened on the Thursday. There was the compulsory call-out on the Saturday. The preparations for that compulsory call-out were already underway when Victoria made that declaration. Those opposite, in their questions today, are betraying a willingness to seek to politicise this disaster, and it's very disappointing.