Do we need a dedicated disaster agency?
BACK in the late 1990s, when she was the most talked-about politician in the nation, Pauline Hanson visited Dubbo.
I wasn’t covering her visit, that was being done by two workmates, but when she made a last-minute visit to the former military museum I was the only one available to dash out and organise some photos and interview her.
While 15-odd photographers for national publications took full advantage of the photos I set up – Ms Hanson in a tank turret, helmet on, saluting – none of the journos present realised the scoop of the month was happening right before their eyes.
It began innocuously as I began interviewing her as we wandered around the military vehicles, and I thought I’d take an angle that suited the photo backdrop.
Here’s a rough outline of the conversation from memory 20odd years later:
“What do you reckon about National Service?”, I asked.
“Not National Service, National Civil Service,” she replied. “What’s that?” I asked. Ms Hanson explained her concept of having every 18-year-old serving the nation for 12 months, under military-style discipline and living in barracks, but as well as a smattering of military training, she wanted it to be more about young people getting structure and learning trade and other skills while helping in community projects and disaster relief.
My editor put that story onto the AAP news wire and the next morning it was the lead story in virtually every major outlet across Australia.
Unfortunately every single newsroom, TV, print, radio, deleted the “Civil” from the “National Service” and made out Pauline Hanson wanted everyone to join the army.
Not a single reporter called either Ms Hanson or myself to get the facts, they just made them up all by themselves.
I wrote a follow-up article which stated that I would never believe anything written about Pauline Hanson, unless I’d written it myself.
But the moral of and question raised by the story is this: What if we as a nation had demonstrated some vision and created a National Civil Service organisation two decades ago?
How much better we could have responded to disasters such as drought, wildfires and most recently, the floods which have devastated so much of the East Coast?
In the past week or so various people have been calling for this.
Paddy Gibson was one who wants to see a “properly resourced civil disaster response and rebuild organisation, not reliant on volunteers but properly paid and trained”.
What a shame the collective media stuffed up this issue so badly more than 20 years ago, although we can say that about so many other things as well.