Tag Archive for: disaster relief

Australia’s disaster response should build resilience

When ASPI’s Cyclone Tracy: 50 Years On was published last year, it wasn’t just a historical reflection; it was a warning. Just months later, we are already watching history repeat itself.

We need to bake resilience into infrastructure, supply chains and communities, ensuring they are prepared for the next disaster, not just rebuilt to fail again.

This requires: a long-term effort to disaster-proof communities; cross-industry collaboration to strengthen supply chains; and a national resilience strategy.

In 1974, Cyclone Tracy forced Australia to rethink disaster preparedness. But in the five decades since, we’ve seen flood after cyclone after fire.

The February 2025 floods across northern Queensland—from Cairns to Townsville—once again exposed the region’s vulnerabilities.

Communities in Ingham and Cardwell faced widespread devastation. For two weeks, road networks were severed, triggering food shortages and economic disruption. In Cairns, homes that had only just been repaired after Cyclone Jasper were inundated again, highlighting the compounding effect of disasters. Townsville, while spared the catastrophic flooding seen in 2019, remains at risk and may not be as fortunate next time.

In response, the federal government has committed $84 million to strengthen disaster resilience in northern Queensland—a necessary but vastly insufficient sum.

The cost of inaction is rising rapidly, not only in infrastructure damage but in the long-term economic and social stability of the region.

The weaknesses seen during the February floods were not new. Essential supply chains were crippled as roads disappeared under floodwaters. The housing crisis worsened as displaced families were left scrambling for shelter in an already overstretched market. Small businesses, the backbone of regional economies, were once again left picking up the pieces.

And yet, the response remains the same: mop up, rebuild, repeat.

Communities need immediate disaster relief. But real resilience isn’t about recovery—it’s about making sure the same destruction doesn’t happen again.

That means disaster-proofing communities by:

—Retrofitting homes in high-risk areas with stronger materials and flood-resistant designs;

—Updating building codes for future-proofed development;

—Reinstating and expanding the Resilient Homes Fund to cover cyclone- and flood-prone regions;

—Reviewing the insurance system so unaffordable premiums don’t leave people uninsured; and

—Investing in community-led preparedness, building resilience with local knowledge and digital tools.

While much of the focus remains on housing and road repairs, supply chain resilience continues to be overlooked. When floods cut off road transport, food shortages quickly followed. The conversation remained reactive, surfacing only after supply lines had already collapsed. There was no plan to use alternative routes.

Collaboration across industries can strengthen supply chains and critical infrastructure. It should include review processes after disasters.

Australia’s national logistics framework must embed resilience into infrastructure planning. Maritime transport, for example, could have played a much stronger role in maintaining essential goods distribution. But without a contingency plan, there was no mechanism to pivot away from road transport.

Australia needs a national resilience strategy to consider ways to bolster northern infrastructure, supply chains and communities.

The strategy should consider alternative freight corridors to reduce reliance on flood-prone roads. This could include pre-established plans for emergency supply distribution via maritime transport and would require strengthening port infrastructure.

Beyond supply chains, emergency infrastructure must also be adaptable. For example, the temporary single-lane bridge built by the Australian Army over Ollera Creek restored access between Townsville and Ingham, but was unsuitable for heavy vehicles.

A national resilience strategy should also consider strategically positioning maritime assets. Historically, HMAS Cairns has supported various naval vessels, including landing craft. Given the region’s vulnerability to cyclones and flooding, relocating both light and heavy landing craft to Cairns would enable faster disaster response across the region. HMAS Cairns is already well-equipped to support and service these vessels.

This isn’t just a northern Queensland problem; it’s a national crisis. The Colvin Review found that 87 percent of Commonwealth disaster funding is spent on recovery, while the economic cost of disasters is projected to reach $40.3 billion annually by FY2050. The Insurance Council of Australia advised that redirecting funds from the 9 percent stamp duty on insurance premiums to resilience measures could save $6.3 billion by 2050. Yet, funding remains locked in a reactive cycle—fixing damage rather than preventing it.

As we head into a federal election, there’s a risk that disaster resilience becomes just another political football—but it shouldn’t be. The escalating costs of disasters affect all Australians, regardless of who is in power.

Fifty years ago, Cyclone Tracy forced Australia to rethink how it built cities, leading to sweeping reforms in building codes and urban planning. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli has repeatedly stated a commitment to ‘building back better’. It’s time to turn those words into action.

Editors’ picks for 2022: ‘Australia needs more than a strategic merchant shipping fleet’

Originally published 2 November 2022.

We often think about national resilience at times of crisis or conflict. However, the foundations for resilience are built with every decision we make before a crisis begins to unfold. Resilience is a nation’s ability not only to withstand expected disruptions but also to better position itself for an unknown disruption.

An Australian merchant shipping fleet, operating day to day on coastal or international trading routes and able to be drawn upon in times of crisis or conflict, would make a positive contribution to national resilience. However, policy and legislation have failed to address the disadvantages Australian ships experience and deterred the growth of the Australian fleet.

In a time of economic, climatic and security disruptions, it’s more important than ever to foster diverse ways of moving goods around Australia. Enhanced sovereign coastal trading would reduce the nation’s dependence on road and rail infrastructure, which is regularly affected by major flooding as we’ve seen across large parts of eastern Australia this year.

Coastal trading is the movement of cargo or passengers on ships between ports in different states and territories. It has been a live issue for the shipping industry for some time, which has from time to time prompted the federal government to enact a series of amendments to the Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Act 2012, most recently in 2017. Those amendments were ‘intended to arrest the decline in the number of the Australian ships operating in the domestic maritime sector’ by ‘creating incentives for business to utilise coastal trading’ and thus reduce freight costs. It was expected that the number of Australian vessels undertaking coastal trading voyages would grow and that this ‘increased capacity would foster more competition [and put] further downward pressure on freight costs’.

However, five years on, those amendments have failed to halt the contraction of the Australian fleet. The complexity of the operating environment has allowed foreign-flagged vessels to cloud this policy failure.

In the lead-up to the May federal election, which it won, Labor acknowledged that ‘less than one per cent of Australian seaborne trade is carried by Australian ships, forcing our nation to rely on foreign governments and companies for our essential imports’. The party committed to ‘appoint a Taskforce to guide it on the establishment of the [Strategic] Fleet as quickly as possible. The Fleet is likely to include up to a dozen vessels including tankers, cargo, container and roll-on-roll-off vessels.’

Labor said that while ‘these ships will likely be privately owned and operate on a commercial basis’, it would ‘ensure they will be available for use by the Defence Forces in times of national crisis, whether that be natural disaster or conflict’.

That taskforce is now being established and its membership is expected to be drawn from the shipping industry, major charterers, unions, Australian businesses and the Department of Defence.

However, the Productivity Commission’s draft report on Australia’s container ports, released in September, presents an alternative view. The report found that the proposal for a strategic fleet ‘requires further evaluation as on present evidence it is not the best remedy for concerns about domestic shipping capacity and training’. It also notes: ‘A privately owned, Australian-registered strategic fleet would have limited ability to mitigate the types of issues that have recently affected Australia’s international freight task.’

The commission suggests as an alternative that:

Capacity could be acquired as needed from the international market without the costs involved in supporting a strategic fleet. The shipping charter market provides access to a wide variety of vessels that could be used to address specialist case-by-case needs. And the Australian Government could access international resources—including the charter market—in times of natural disaster and emergencies.

Australia has no requisite expertise in engaging with the shipping charter market and, in times of crisis or conflict, it’s unlikely Australia will find international ships available to support it. That’s because these vessels are owned or registered in countries that may have their own requirements and supporting Australia may not in their national interest.

There are several issues of national significance to consider in evaluating the potential solutions.

Fostering a sovereign coastal trading sector could deliver benefits beyond availability in emergency situations. While addressing industry-specific issues of competitiveness with foreign-flagged vessels and maintaining a skilled Australian workforce are important, we need to think bigger. On a positive note, there appears to be consensus on the need to address barriers to establishing a sustainable Australian fleet, though the views of industry and unions diverge about how that should be done.

Another issue relates to the focus on a ‘strategic fleet’ that would be co-opted by Defence to support its preparedness and mobilisation in response to national disasters and conflict. Here, the assumption is that voyages undertaken by the strategic fleet one day are not needed the next. It doesn’t recognise that, in times of mobilisation, civil society must also continue to function in some way and at some level and contribute to national mobilisation requirements. This would be the case irrespective of the nature of the disaster or conflict.

It’s also important to recognise that the assumption that civil society can be co-opted for defence purposes doesn’t sit well in a democratic society. A better understanding is needed of the minimum level of support that Australia, not just Defence, needs in times of mobilisation to sustain Australia’s economy and its physical and social infrastructure.

If a conflict or extreme natural disaster occurred today, civil society would suffer immediate and severe disruption, compounded by reliance on foreign shipping. In the case of conflict, many of these ships are from nations that would have a direct or indirect incentives to avoid it.

The response to a disruption would involve the government requisitioning Australian ships to relieve the impact of the immediate crisis on Australian interests. This is the approach adopted by other OECD countries. At the time of requisition, any other activities these ships were involved in would be secondary or irrelevant to our needs.

There are also sovereignty concerns inherent in mobilising for national security and defence purposes both foreign-flagged and Australian-flagged ships crewed by foreign nationals. History tells us this is an issue for Australian-crewed vessels. In 1967, for example, the Seaman’s Union boycotted the merchant ship Boonaroo in opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and waterside workers refused to unload the munitions ship Jeparit. Viewed through today’s lens, these actions are understood in the context of growing public opposition in Australia to the Vietnam War. However, it raises a questions about how the concerns of foreign nationals would play out today.

When the Victorian town of Mallacoota was surrounded by fire on 31 December 2019, fuel company Esso deployed a Norwegian ship and helicopters to the area. The ship arrived on 1 January and was a second registry vessel operated and crewed in Australia by Australians. It wasn’t until the morning of 3 January that the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Choules arrived and commenced evacuations. The quick response by Esso was likely driven by its proximity to Mallacoota, but it’s important to appreciate that it was a diversion from other nation-sustaining activity. What we’ll never know is how long the Esso ship could have continued to be deployed in this manner before it had significant economic impacts on other sectors.

There’s no suggestion Esso should have done otherwise, but in these times of concurrent and cascading crises, for a strategic fleet to be a sustainable option it needs to be accompanied by measures that support Australian international trading vessels. That requires us to address the imbalance favouring foreign-flagged vessels over sovereign vessels.

Perhaps a different way to consider the issue is from the perspective of a ‘coastal trading highway’—not a novel idea for Pacific island nations. For an island nation, a coastal trading highway would complement the national road and rail freight sectors. Such an approach would create a broad sustainable base that can better accommodate diversion of some ships into a strategic fleet.

Some benefits need quantifying but could include cost savings on road maintenance arising from the impact of heavy trucks and reducing the road toll on our national highways.

But there are also known benefits, particularly in terms of achieving the government’s commitment to a 43% cut in greenhouse emissions below 2005 levels and net zero by 2030. Road freight results in three times the emissions of sea or rail freight. The shipping sector is rapidly moving to clean fuels, and now appears to be ahead of other sectors in the race to net zero.

Australia needs more than a domestic strategic fleet; we need a framework that encourages a mix of coastal and international trading ships. Solutions solely for a small coastal strategic fleet don’t address the real strategic problems Australia has created for itself in this sector.

The many attempts to tackle the issues facing sovereign coastal trading highlight that this is a complex and challenging problem. However, the push to establish a strategic fleet is yet another example of focusing on a symptom rather than solving the core problem.

Disaster resilience and northern Australia

Post cyclone Australia

The Abbott government wants to accelerate the development of northern Australia. To advance that goal, Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg recently announced a taskforce to explore options for reducing insurance premiums in northern Australia.

The taskforce will examine whether to set up a government-run reinsurance cyclone pool, or a community-owned northern Australia mutual insurer, to provide cyclone-specific cover.

Presumably the taskforce will look at the Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation that provides government-backed reinsurance coverage for terrorism incidents. The cases of terrorism and natural disaster are actuarially different, although it’s possible the ARPC could administer a separate pool for natural disasters.

People, buildings and communities must recover fast and with minimal disruption after major disasters.

The concept of resiliency—the ability to withstand a severe disruption, blunt the impact, recover quickly, and adapt to emerge stronger than before—is a key focus of both federal and state governments’ natural disaster management strategies.

Leveraging insurance is a key part of disaster resilience. But as I’ve noted in an earlier ASPI report on this subject, after each disaster many people express concern about underinsurance and high premiums in disaster-prone areas.

Since insurance companies use risk-based modelling to determine insurance premiums, if natural disasters increase then homeowners and business will see price hikes. The Australian Government Actuary, for example, recently found that the estimated cost of cyclone risk is likely to be the main reason why north Queensland premium rates are, on average, significantly higher than premium rates in most other parts of Australia.

But the Abbott government has already received clear advice on this problem. That guidance isn’t consistent with setting up expensive reinsurance pool for cyclones, which would risk government budgets and blunt price signals by trying to provide low premiums to high-risk homes.

We should be promoting cost savings through mitigation. Last Friday, the Productivity Commission released its final report on natural disaster funding. It concluded that:

‘Current government natural disaster funding arrangements are not efficient, equitable or sustainable. They are prone to cost shifting, ad hoc responses and short-term political opportunism. Groundhog Day anecdotes abound’ (p. 2)

It suggested that the states and Commonwealth needed to split the costs of reconstruction 50:50, and the money kick in only once a higher threshold had been reached.

The Commission identified natural hazard risk as the key driver of insurance premiums and recommended a five-fold increase in annual mitigation funding, phasing out of stamp duty on insurance and improved land use planning laws.

It looked at insurance pools that have been introduced internationally to transfer natural disaster risks to the taxpayer and subsidise the cost of insurance. The Commission found that private risks just grow without robust price signals, with real dangers of government bailouts for reinsurance pools.

It concluded that:

‘International experience has shown that government intervention in property insurance markets through subsidies is overwhelmingly ineffective. It creates moral hazard as well as fiscal risks. Some foreign governments have had to bear significant costs following large natural disasters because their insurance schemes failed to accumulate adequate reserves’

David Murray’s financial system inquiry released in December, noted that the cost of insurance can be high, especially for coverage in higher-risk areas, such as flood plains and cyclone-prone areas. But it concluded that this issue should be primarily handled by ‘risk mitigation efforts rather than direct government intervention, which risks distorting price signals’ (p. 227).

The clear message is that the best way to lower premiums and reduce the risks of natural disasters is through public investment in mitigation to protect infrastructure.

The cluttered security agenda

Swan PathwaysI’m grateful to Kym Bergmann for his recent post on the Prime Minister’s surprise visit to Iraq during bushfire season here in Australia. For one thing, Kym puts on the agenda the whole issue of how we weigh different sorts of security threats and why some get more attention and others less. I take Kym’s post as a plea for greater attention—and resources—to be devoted to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. And he’s likely correct that if it was my family’s lives and home in danger from approaching bushfires I might well think saving them a greater priority than combatting a radical extremist group in Syria and Iraq.

Still, I find myself in broad disagreement with his argument. And that’s because I think challenges from actors who are deliberately trying to change the strategic order are different to those from events (or ‘actors’) who are indifferent to change in the order. I think that judgment remains true even when the indifferent actors kill more people. For example, compare World War I with the 1918-19 Spanish flu. The flu killed more people than WWI, indeed, roughly twice as many, though statistics vary wildly. And its effects were felt across broad swathes of the globe, including Asia, largely untouched by the war. But students in school today are still much more inclined to learn about the war than about the flu. Why? Because one is a geopolitical event and the other a health issue. Putting it in more Clausewitzian terminology, one’s about violence that has political meaning and the other’s about sickness and death. Read more

Australian emergency services in need of a lift

Emergency D-:

As we’re reminded every bushfire season, Australians are more vulnerable during emergencies that can arise with little warning. We do a fair job of dealing with them, and thankfully we’ve been very lucky to avoid facing a catastrophic event that would produce extensive casualties: a significant terrorist attack, a large-scale industrial accident, a collapse of a city skyscraper, an air disaster, or a tsunami hitting a big population centre. Even an ongoing heat wave that occurred across the country would challenge our healthcare services. The truth is that we’re unprepared to respond to a major disaster.

Those judgments are based on the findings of the December report by the National Health Performance Authority on our emergency departments. As I’ve argued in the context of our preparedness for a mass casualty terrorist attack, surge capacity—the ability of the medical system to care for a massive influx of patients—remains one of the most serious challenges for national emergency preparedness.

The NHPA report shows that no major metropolitan hospital in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania or Queensland had met state emergency department benchmarks in the first six months of last year. The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine noted that, across the nation, the sick patients—those who needed to be admitted—are more likely to have inappropriately long stays in emergency (Word doc). Research overseas (PDF) has found that patients admitted to hospitals via crowded emergency departments might be more likely to die in the hospital than similar patients admitted during slow periods. Read more