User:Triptothecottage/Bureau of Emergency Services Telecommunications

The Bureau of Emergency Services Telecommunications (BEST) was a division of the Victorian Government Department of Justice that provided Triple Zero call-taking and integrated dispatch of emergency services across the state from 1994 to 2005. Established as part of radical reforms of the Victorian public sector under Premier Jeff Kennett, BEST consisted only of a board and small executive staff, which supervised call centres operated by private contractor Intergraph BEST (Vic), a subsidiary of multinational service provider Intergraph.

BEST was one of the first integrated emergency dispatch organisations in the world, and pioneered the use of computer-aided dispatch software in Australia. However, closure of emergency services' individual communications centres, and the transfer of communications responsibility from uniformed emergency service members to privately employed civilians, were resisted by public sector unions and became controversial political issues.

Beginning in 1998, when Opposition members in the Parliament of Victoria alleged that Intergraph managers had directed call centre operators to make regular test calls to Triple Zero with the aim of manipulating performance statistics, BEST and Intergraph came under significant scrutiny. After a change of government, the investigations culminated with a Royal Commission into the Metropolitan Ambulance Service finding Intergraph had acted illegally. The contractor was immediately replaced with a state-owned corporation named Emergency Communications Victoria, and in 2005 statutory responsibility for emergency dispatch passed to a newly-formed Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority, ending BEST's supervision of the contracted system.

Background
At the 1992 Victorian state election, Jeff Kennett led the Victorian Liberal Party to government, promising to resolve the "fiscal crisis" created by the government of John Cain by reducing the size of the public sector and outsourcing government services to the private sector. This New Public Management approach was implemented by corporatisation of service agencies, and, in many cases, then privatising them by sale or contract.

When the Kennett government took office, Victoria's emergency services, all controlled and funded by the state government, maintained their own call-taking and dispatch services linked to the national Triple Zero emergency number. These were of widely varying technological sophistication: the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) had used a computer-aided system called Firecom since 1983; while the Victoria Police D24 system depended on calltakers communicating with dispatchers via a manual system of index cards and conveyor belts. A joint working group of the emergency services had been established in 1991 to examine the possibilities for modernisation and integration of their systems, but little progress had been made.

The Metropolitan Ambulance Service (MAS) had been embroiled in multiple industrial disputes over a 15 year period, and had been the subject of several coronial investigations due to perceived failings in its responses. The new government commissioned a review, which reported its findings of how best to generate cost savings and improve the service in late 1992. Among these was significant technological modernisation, and the government's newly appointed CEO stated his intention to pursue this and organisational reform rather than increasing staffing Meanwhile, dissatisfied with the progress of the working group, the government ordered the parliamentary Public Bodies Review Committee to examine the operations of the MFB, including among other things "the potential for sharing of major support facilities common to emergency service agencies."