Volunteering made easier
Crawford working on solution
IMPROVING the time management of emergency service volunteers has topped Craig Crawford’s to-do list in his new role as Emergency Services Minister.
The Barron River MP has been posted mostly in the state’s southeast corner in recent days, inspecting a new fire station in North Stradbroke Island, meeting rescue pilots on the Gold Coast and sitting through long briefings about his new portfolio.
The geographic trend will continue as he takes up the departmental reins and focuses on statewide priorities, rather than the electorate-centric lifestyle of a backbencher.
“My weeks will probably run fairly similar to (Mulgrave MP) Curtis Pitt’s,” he said.
“I’ll be in Brisbane for at least the first half of the week.
“Cabinet sits on the Monday, then hopefully I can get back to the Far North in the second half.”
Mr Crawford said he did not want to introduce any radical changes to the emergency services sector – at least not yet – and it would take time for him to learn his portfolio’s intricacies.
The former paramedic’s biggest concern was making it easier for people to fit volunteering into their busy lifestyles.
“We’ve got to be aware that people are time-poor,” he said. “When an organisation says we need you for two days this weekend, a lot of people can’t commit.
“Training has to be done, but we have to make sure we’re not wasting people’s time.”
Mr Crawford said increasing the use of virtual reality in training could be one way to fight the tyranny of distance.
“VR is entering the training space quite a bit and there is definitely an avenue for it within the fire service and SES for training,” he said.
“There are some facets of training that will always require actual exposure to a realistic event, so you can never replace everything with virtual reality. But you can certainly use it as a partner, so regional people don’t always have to travel so far away from their home and work.”