“He is a hero,there is no doubt about that,” Cooke said of Fitzsimmons. “He’s been a loyal,dedicated public servant for a good portion of his life.

“From my perspective,I have an incredibly good,strong working relationship with Commissioner Fitzsimmons. We are just getting on with the job of the portfolio,and he has my full support.”

Cooke said she had rung each of the emergency service commissioners the day before the report was handed down to inform them of the recommendations that affected their respective agencies.

Under questioning from Labor’s Adam Searle,Cooke would not say if she had briefed Fitzsimmons on what the government’s response would be to the report before it was made public.

“It doesn’t sound like you gave him the heads-up because I put it to you that if you had done that,you would have remembered it,” Searle said. “You’re obfuscating,aren’t you minister?”

Cooke rejected that assertion and asked to take on notice the question about when she had spoken to Fitzsimmons.

Fitzsimmons said he was “extremely disappointed” to hearthrough the media before the report’s release that it would recommend the “reshaping” of Resilience NSW. He also defended his agency’s response to the floods and rejected the findings of the inquiry.

“We’ve never seen a more joined-up,comprehensive,expeditious pursuit of recovery interventions and recovery operations ever before in the state of NSW,” he declared at the hearing.

He said he had shared his views of the report’s findings and recommendations with Cooke and the Department of Premier and Cabinet,which is in charge of implementing the report’s recommendations.

“I don’t think the path suggested is a sensible one,” he said,before later qualifying the remark to say he was commenting on the report,rather than the government response.

He said when Resilience NSW had first got off the ground two years ago,his staff had scaled it back from what it was initially set up to do.

Cooke said it would take weeks and months to work through the recommendations of the report and implement them.

“It is my hope that all Resilience staff will stay within the NSW government,” she said. “I am advocating with them and for them to stay. I’ve had multiple conversations with staff and with Commissioner Fitzsimmons.”

Greens MP Sue Higginson was scathing in her assessment of the government’s response to the floods,declaring to the hearing “we failed big time” while putting questions to State Emergency Service Commissioner Carlene York about record flooding in the Northern Rivers in February and March.

The SESis facing a partial merger with the Rural Fire Service after the flood report also criticised its response to the floods. In Lismore,hundreds of people had to be rescued by civilians on February 28 after a record flood trapped them in their homes. The SES did not have the resources to respond to all the calls for assistance,many of which went unanswered.

“We learnt some lessons from this,no doubt about it,” York told the hearing. “It was nice to hear you say we failed,because I think it’s planning decisions from decades ago,mitigation decisions from decades ago,that we are confronting.”

She said that since the floods,almost 3500 volunteers had applied to join the SES. That included 425 people in the Northern Rivers,246 of whom had already been trained up and were ready to be deployed.

“It’s a really heartening number.” York said. “We put the call out and the community has responded. We’re working very hard to get those resources available as soon as we can.”

York said Lismore had not received any more boats since the February 28 flood,but the local SES unit had received a new truck capable of driving through floodwaters of up to 1.2 metres.

She also said that should heavy rain predicted for the North Coast lead to flooding this weekend,the SES was better placed than it was in February to move fleets and vessels to the region from other parts of the state.

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