The Bushfires Royal Commission has heard final submissions and will deliver its final report to the Governor on July 31. Should the Commissioners accept the thrust of what Counsel Assisting, Jack Rush QC, has to say, the government will find itself in a deeply uncomfortable position, as will many of the people who were supposed to be in charge of emergency response on Black Saturday.

It is not the function of a Royal Commission into this kind of event to seek out scapegoats; however it is impossible to recommend changes to a system or an organisation without recognising its failings, and if personnel and culture are part of that then they need to be identified.

Many of the people supposedly coordinating the response on Black Saturday failed us, both on the day, and in the lead up. Their actions, or more correctly, their lack of action, were symptomatic of a system and a style of leadership that Jack Rush found to be deeply flawed.

Rush describes a culture of “hands off”, process-driven, uninvolved management. It called itself leadership when it was nothing of the sort, and hid behind misappropriation of management terminology to disguise its inability to make decisions, give orders, or perform any useful function. This is the culture that Rush dissects, and that I will attempt to explain.

Emergency Management and Response (EMR) is a very complex field, and attempting to simplify it is dangerous, however, given our limited space, I will have to give it a try. EMR requires three levels of response, which are, at their most basic, Command (the chief of the fire crew on the ground), Control (the regional leader, directing multiple fire crews to various locations) and Coordination (the top level, ensuring that the two beneath are adequately resourced and allocated, as well as liaison with other services such as police and ambulance).

It is clear from the evidence that Coordination failed on Black Saturday, because the Coordinators either didn’t understand their role, or simply took a cowardly view of it, and used it as an excuse to do nothing.

For all the frenetic activity in the Integrated Emergency Coordination Centre (IECC), lamentably few decisions were made, or orders given. The people in charge couldn’t see that they had a responsibility to be giving orders and directing resources; they seemed to think that this would be interfering in operational matters and “micro-managing”, and saw their role as nothing more than receiving information and talking about it amongst themselves.

For all the influence that military doctrine has in EMR, those at the top, (the Generals, so to speak), showed no understanding of their responsibilities, and bastardised their positions into utter uselessness. The General shouldn’t be yelling orders at a Platoon Commander about where to place his heavy machine guns, this is true; what he should be doing is telling the Colonel in charge of the battle that aerial surveillance shows a heavy build up of enemy troops in the forest three miles away, and air support will be made available, and by the way, you chaps are doing a spiffing job out there, what ho.

The most egregious example of troops left without a leader is Christine Nixon. Rush devoted sixteen pages to her evidence, its inconsistencies, and her inaction on Black Saturday. Her failings on that day, and in the witness box later, could fill a book. One of the few things she got completely correct in her evidence to the Commission was that it wouldn’t have made much difference whether she was there or not. The fact that she can say this with anything but shame speaks volumes for the management culture that is so entrenched in Victoria’s emergency services.

As far as she was concerned, it was enough for her to have delegated ACs Kieran Walshe and Steve Fontana to run things at the IECC and the SERCC, and thenceforth to be available to receive phone calls, assume that everyone was doing their jobs, and do pressers at the fire zone the next day. Beside the fact that she mistook delegation for abrogation of responsibility, it is not a leader’s job to assume anything. It was her job to chase information, to question everyone, and to be making, not just receiving phone calls.

Her statement baldly said that, at 6pm, she went home. The only thing she did before going was to inform the media unit that she would be travelling to the fire zone early the next morning. After that, she kept in touch by, apparently, listening to ABC radio, and monitoring the TV and the internet (none of which she could do while out for dinner, by the way) but she had her phone with her, and swears it wasn’t turned off, even though call records show NO activity on it between 6pm and 9pm. If she wasn’t receiving calls, why the hell not? Shouldn’t she have been calling Walshe and Fontana and the other people she’d supposedly left in charge?

A leader doesn’t sit and wait for others to pass information to them. A leader strides into the room and demands to be told what’s going on, and makes damned sure that everyone under their command is doing what they’ve been tasked to do. The impression gained from reading her statement and from watching her in the witness box was of the boss’s wife wandering onto the factory floor, smiling hello, and “just generally getting a feel for the situation” by “looking over people’s shoulders” (her exact words).

As State Coordinator, she had statutory responsibilities to ensure that things were being done. Instead, she assumed (and I lost count of the number of things she assumed) that everyone was doing what they were supposed to, and that she would be told if anyone wasn’t. It was someone else’s responsibility, it seems, to make sure things were being done, and it certainly wasn’t her job to take notes (despite the fact that the Victoria Police Manual mandates note-taking in an Official Diary).

After her second day in the witness box (she was recalled after it was revealed that she’d gone out to dinner that night, and serious inconsistencies were beginning to come to light in her evidence), she made the standard mealy-mouthed non-apology that we’ve come to expect from managers like her. It wasn’t her fault, she claimed, because she’d received very little assistance from the state or from VicPol in preparing her statement – this is a bare-faced lie, but even if it were true, it’s still pathetic that someone in such an important position goes scurrying away from criticism, blaming everyone else, complaining that it’s just not fair and please leave her alone.

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Having said all that, I return to my second paragraph: the point of the Royal Commission is not to simply present us with a collection of scapegoats. Those who failed us so badly that day should be named, and should be subject to our repudiation, it is true. But they were merely playing the roles laid out for them by the system and management culture they had to work with.

When the Royal Commission recommends sweeping changes to the culture of Emergency Management in Victoria, along with the hundreds of other expensive and politically embarrassing recommendations it makes, we must ensure that the government pays heed, and does its best to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

It would be a tragedy if all that came from the work of the Commissioners and the dozens of others who toiled so hard was “what Christine had for dinner.”

All submissions, statements and transcripts, are available on the Royal Commission website: .

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