The report of the NSW Parliament’s Select Committee on the coronial jurisdiction in NSW was tabled on 29 April 2022. The committee carried out a review of the existing coronial system. Coronial legislation requires the coroner to investigate “certain deaths” as well as “fires and explosions that destroy or damage property”. When deaths occur in bushfires, such as in the Black Summer fires of 2019-2020, these purposes overlap.
The Select Committee report quotes on page 35 from the IBG submission, about the untimeliness of bushfire coronial findings. The report does not appear to have taken up other IBG concerns and includes no fire-specific recommendations.
The NSW Government is due to respond to the report by the end of October.
IBG comment
- For bushfires, the coronial system is slow and unwieldy, but is public and independent. In this respect coronials remain the primary mechanism for objective investigation of bushfires in NSW, even though limited to those that cause death and property damage (note environmental assets are not legally relevant).
- The Select Committee recommendations, if adopted, can strengthen and improve coronial processes, including for coronial inquiries related to bushfires.
- Coronial investigations have the capacity to be thorough and rigorous and to deliver important findings. However they can also cause delays in improvements and public scrutiny when government agencies defer inquiry and comment and decide against releasing documents in deference to a coronial process. Even the NSW Bushfire Inquiry was careful not to impinge upon coronial processes.
- Documents which have been refused to the public but which were available to the NSW Bushfire Inquiry include a report on the number of escaped backburns in 2019-2020 and an investigation into the Mt Wilson backburn escape. Aerial images of the fires were also refused until the Coroner authorised their release.
- The IBG submission to the Select Committee argued that coronial investigations should not be seen as a replacement for more timely and routine operational reviews, nor used as a reason to avoid them. Expertise, independence and timeliness are critical to an effective lessons management system, and such a system should operate routinely and independently of any subsequent coronial. This principle is supported by Lessons Management Handbook from the the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (an Australian Government agency).
- The current NSW bushfires coronial inquiry into the fires of 2019-2020 commenced in August 2021 with hearings scheduled to continue until March 2023. Findings will not be delivered until some time after that, and at least three full fire seasons after the event.
- Bushfires are complex phenomena, where the ’cause and origin’ may not be very relevant to subsequent property damage or deaths which can occur months later. Numerous events, actions and non-actions along the way affect the final outcomes. It remains to be seen how well the NSW bushfires coronial can navigate these complexities to determine the ’cause and origin’ of impacts on towns like Wytalibah, Balmoral and Conjola Park…or indeed whether that is part of what the coronial inquiry will do.
Independent Bushfire Group 