Usually it is the bureaucrat’s ultimate nightmare – breaking new ground with no safe precedents to rely upon, no manual, no best-practice guidelines and models to ensure all bums are covered, all decisions justifiable, all funds accounted for and all careers protected.
Whatever finger-pointing goes on about the lead-up to the fire, it appears that the recovery work and administration has been exemplary. Well this is Canberra, so we should do those things well. There has been hardly a peep of criticism about the running of the Bushfire Recovery Centre – a good test for smooth administration.
There was little warning.
The manager of the centre, Di Butcher, taken from the child protection service of the Department of Education Youth and Family Service, found the experience surreal.
Usually human services are always struggling for money. Each section has its own procedures and ways of doing things.
“With Recovery Centre we were given the autonomy to just go ahead and to it,” she said. “We have got people here from every government department. Housing, mental health, child protection – a whole lot of people used to working in challenging areas, but everyone had a different style of reporting. We co-ordinated that quickly.
“We found out from the people affected what was needed. Often we have had to change tack very quickly. Unthought-of issued just emerged. So we spoke to people higher up about the things we found out.
“Often we just pick up the phone and say this is what we need. They say go ahead and do it. There is a huge level of trust. There is very little in writing and very little waiting for things to be signed off. There was a calculated risk-taking — totally different from the usual public administration model.”
At the outset the head of the head of the Bushfire Recovery Taskforce, Sandy Hollway, said that it was better to get it 80 per cent right quickly than to have delay.
Perhaps it is a lesson for other administrators. The model had to be hastily put together and they had to just get on with it. The result to date has been first rate and acknowledged by the McLeod inquiry which was otherwise critical of what happened before the fires. Other inquiries and a coroner’s inquest is under way.
But on the recovery side, the ACT Government appointed an ACT Bushfire Taskforce. The Recovery Centre worked through it. A Community and Expert Reference Group were established headed by Elizabeth Whitelaw former head of the Canberra Business Council. The council brought together community groups, fire-affected residents, business, unions and Commonwealth authorities.
Among charities and community groups who joined the recovery effort were: Anglicare, Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, YMCA, Phoenix, Communities@Work, Woden Community Service, Belconnen Community Service, Lifeline, Volunteering Australia, Relationships Australia (a Commonwealth agency), Apex, Lions and Rotary.
Every ACT agency and department was brought to the task.
Despite the autonomy at the Recovery Centre, Di Butcher said there was a great deal of accountability on an individual level for people working at the Recovery Centre because everyone who came to work there had a good credible profile.
“If someone takes all the barriers away and gives you a bucket of money to do it, there is a huge level of vulnerability,” she said. “Not only do you want it to be a success for your career. It is deeper than that. As Canberra citizens we are out there saying, What can I do to contribute?
“There is that dual personality going all the time. Career and citizen. You are quite passionate about it and the work we do here, but we did not want the passion to interfere with the day to day stuff.
“I think that professionally we will never get this opportunity again. Then I think should I be saying that when we are working through this dreadful tragedy. But it has been a big privilege to have been part of it. And it will be a challenge for us to go back to our ordinary work.”
The centre needed people with operational skills – such as social workers, psychologists, welfare workers and human-services workers as well as administrators.
But, Di Butcher explained, they did not want to appear as a social worker or psychologist. “Rather we had a low-key practical approach of what can we do for you,” she said. “We got together a group of mature, skilled group of people. We needed reasonably autonomous people with initiative who could work without detailed instructions but we did not want people who would go out there as maverick and burn themselves out. And there was very little time to select them.
“We wanted it to be the best it could possibly be. It was our opportunity to create a model that we think has never been used. . . .
“We had 20 services here in the first few weeks. As the needs diminished in one area and they left we would bring someone else in. We had a case-management model and a community-development model and we merged them. And we had an outreach model. Yes it is a one-stop centre, but those you miss you go out and find.”
Uniquely the centre blended Government, Community, charity and business functions.
“We invited Salvation Army and Anglicare to be part of our team,” she said. “We had not done that before. NGOs and Government working together in one location. . . .
“The Recovery Centre has been an exceptional model that we own. There is a lot of interest in it – Australia and overseas. We have been asked to make presentations at conferences. It is perhaps a best-practice model.”