Tag Archive for: Natural Disaster

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.

La La Land under siege

The devastating wildfires in California have turned the City of Stars into a scene from an apocalyptic Hollywood movie.

It’s hard to fathom that a disaster of this magnitude could strike a major coastal city today, and difficult to understand how we’re still seeing widespread destruction of homes and businesses. About 12,000 structures have been lost since the fires began on 7 January, with many more likely to follow.

Like Los Angeles, Australia’s capital cities are close to national parks and are vulnerable to bushfires. In 2003 a massive fire hit Canberra. Almost 500 houses burned down, but the city lost no critical infrastructure.

Whether that was thanks to good luck or good preparations, we need to look again at protection of major cities’ critical infrastructure against increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters.

Amid the devastation in LA, some buildings remain unscathed. These structures show the importance of preparedness and attention to disaster-resistant design and resilient building materials.

Two particular examples of resilient building design and materials that have been making headlines worldwide are in Malibu and the Pacific Palisades. Buildings there incorporate a range of wildfire-proofing measures, including fire-resistant roof materials and absence of eaves and roof vents.

Internal features include tempered glass and class-A wood, which is as ignition resistant as concrete or steel. The structures also have walls that resist flame and heat for up to one hour. Externally, sparse desert-style landscaping and concrete retaining walls provide effective setbacks.

Meanwhile, the Paul Getty Museum is an example of resilient infrastructure. It sits on a ridgeline in the Santa Monica Mountains and has withstood several wildfires, with this month’s Palisades fire coming within 1.8 metres of the eastern walls. Completed in 1997, the museum features fire-resistant landscapes, materials and systems, including a network of underground pipes connects to a one-million-gallon water tank for emergency sprinkler activation.

Built to the highest fire-resistive standards, it has exterior features including 300,000 travertine stone blocks, and roofs covered in crushed stone. Interior walls are concrete, and the building’s self-contained design includes air pressure systems to separate different areas and prevent smoke infiltration.

So far, the LA wildfires have destroyed an area of about 60 square miles (approximately 16,000 hectares), an area larger than the city of Darwin. In comparison, the Australian 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires burnt more than 16 million hectares of land, resulting in a loss of about 5900 buildings and an estimated insurance loss of $1.34 billion. The economic, social and environmental impacts are still felt.

Reinsurers in Los Angeles have indicated that they will face significant losses and will seek to recover their costs. This will have affect insurance premiums globally, and any may result in rising insurance costs and difficulties in securing coverage. According to climate-change risk analysis modelling, one in 10 properties in Australia will be uninsurable within the next decade. Meanwhile, Australia is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis, where insurance is increasingly seen as a luxury expense and is often deprioritised in favour of essential needs such as housing and groceries.

As insurance becomes unaffordable, the government should shoulder the burden of protecting infrastructure. This raises an important question: how well-prepared are our major cities’ critical and social infrastructure to withstand and respond to the increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters that climate change is driving?

50 years ago, Cyclone Tracy was, at the time, the worst natural disaster in Australian history. As reflected in ASPI’s special report Cyclone Tracy: 50 years on, the disaster played a pivotal role in the development of the National Construction Code, which established a standard to enhance resilience against natural hazards such as bushfires, floods and earthquakes. It wasn’t until 1991 that an Australian standard was set for improving the fire resistance of homes in bushfire-prone regions.

The LA wildfires have shown that natural disasters do not respect boundaries set by urban planning. Many of our major cities, including major Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, are bordered by big national parks, making the urban edges highly vulnerable to bushfires, especially as climate change makes conditions hotter and drier.

A reform of the National Construction Code and Australian fire resistance standards are needed to ensure new infrastructure can withstand major weather events. This could be similar to the implementation of sustainability and energy-efficiency standards for new buildings. Governments at all levels can lead by example by improving the disaster resilience of their own assets.

Implementation of a government-led rebate system, similar to the Australia’s solar rebate system, is an example of how government can help offset the costs of adapting existing structures to make them more resilient.

In the short term such a reform would not only reduce the loss of structures during natural disasters; it would also cut building-lifetime energy costs. Over the long term, it would help lower the cost of insurance premiums and, importantly, reduce post-disaster recovery time.

The LA wildfires have underscored the urgent need for governments to rethink their assumptions about bushfire risk and infrastructure resilience. LA is facing a long road ahead to rebuild its infrastructure and restore essential services. Australia must take steps to avoid experiencing a similar crisis.

LA fires: changing climate demands constant and focused preparation

The fires in Los Angeles are estimated to be the most expensive disaster in US history at US$250–275 billion, or 24 to 26 percent of Australia’s annual GDP. That loss has accrued in just over a week and is rising.

This was not a natural disaster. That would imply a lack of human responsibility. Rather, this is what happens when a human-warmed climate catches us off-guard—even in a city that knows fire.

Australia has done significant work since the 2019–20 Black Summer fires, and the floods that followed, to appreciate climate risks and prepare for them. However, much of that work, including the National Climate Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Plan, is yet to be released. As the federal election nears, all parties should remind themselves to not treat climate as a political football—a priority only when disasters strike or when it’s convenient.

These events will continue to surprise if we fail to understand and address the locked-in disaster risks, and they will occur at greater frequency and cause greater loss if we continue warming the atmosphere.

While climate change isn’t the only factor in play in LA, it’s a big part of why officials were taken by surprise. Compound climate-amplified disasters build quietly but strike swiftly. In this case climate appears to have primed the intensity of the fires.

California is no stranger to whiplashing climate conditions. It experienced a three-year drought from 2020 to 2022, followed by two years of significant rainfall—recording LA’s seventh-wettest year in 2022–23. That rainfall drove vegetation growth, then a sustained drought and higher than average temperatures at the start of the current winter dried much of that new vegetation.

The Santa Ana winds that fanned the flames with hot, dry air are typical for the area in winter but were particularly strong with gusts at nearly 160km/h last week—at times grounding firefighting aircraft when they were needed most, pushing fires faster down hillsides where they’d normally slow, and spewing embers far beyond firelines. The winds may have been strengthened by warmer than average ocean temperatures and a meandering North American jet stream, which has been increasingly disrupted by climate change in recent years and may have also contributed to the atmospheric rivers dumping rain over LA in the years before the fires.

Yet those factors alone don’t explain why the fires started, why they’ve been hard to control, or why they’ve caused such damage.

Clear answers on the origins of the fires will come once investigations conclude. Speculating now doesn’t help. Misinformation abounds online, as it increasingly does after disasters, with harmful effects on responders, confusing the response and muddying the analysis needed for future preparation. For example, conspiracy theories hold that the US government used weather control to intensify Hurricane Helene—which struck the southeast United States in September last year—to cause widespread damage. That led to Federal Emergency Management Agency responders facing armed threats.

The Eaton fire, the second-largest in LA, may have been sparked by damaged electrical infrastructure from powerful Santa Ana winds, as has happened in the past. If that’s the case, it adds more pressure to California’s ongoing efforts to prepare its infrastructure for intensifying natural disasters.

Preparation has been underway for some time, but risks remain—in part because there are no cheap solutions. By California’s own estimates, burying all distribution and transmission lines in the state could cost US$763 billion—roughly 70 percent of Australia’s 2024 GDP—and would take years. Nonetheless, the economics of such climate adaptation has become clearer since just a single week of fire has reached a third of that cost.

Urban development has also played a role. Malibu and the surrounding area are traditional fire country—the chaparral vegetation evolved to undergo periods of fire. But there are now eight million people living in fire-prone areas in southern California. Fire-resilient building designs as well as fuel reduction and landscaping around houses might have slowed the growth of the fires in urban environments, protecting more homes. There is no easy way to get around the consequences of building and living in high risk areas; all we can do is try to avoid it in future.

Even though many affected communities are aware of climate and fire risk, they clearly didn’t believe they were vulnerable. Rebuilding with fire resilience in mind will be necessary, especially as fire insurance will become unaffordable for many.

While much focus has been on insufficient water supplies to fight the fires, most reservoirs were full—contradicting misinformation that California’s environmental planning restricted access to upstream sources.

A more plausible explanation for California’s underpreparedness is that urban water infrastructure simply isn’t designed for wildfire.

The Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, where many celebrities lost their homes, is at the end of the local water line, so receives less water pressure. As hydrants were tapped for water, the pressure dropped, draining emergency tanks in the neighbourhood.

An investigation will assess the reasons for, and effect of, the ongoing closure of the Santa Ynez reservoir in the Palisades area—hopefully including why it wasn’t rapidly brought back online late in 2024 as climate conditions worsened.

That brings us to the funding, staffing and preparation of LA’s fire authorities. Attention focused on the mayor’s budget reductions, but they were only a 2 percent cut from last year. While that may have had an effect, clearly the scale of the need was far beyond a few percentage points.

Inadequate staffing was a pressure early on, even with 9000 firefighters in LA County alone.

That isn’t a cheap solve, either. If LA needs greater capacity on hand at any time, its budget would have to grow significantly. That demand would have to compete with resources needed to prepare for and reduce the risk of future fires, including potential private firefighting capacities. Again, early investment in preparedness will reduce the complications in and need for future reactive responses. But building out future response capacity will take time.

The bottom line is that LA’s various failures in preparation means it was caught off-guard, but this disaster wouldn’t have been so extreme without climate disruption priming such an intense and unexpected set of fires.

The same dynamic has occurred in Australia, and it will continue if we don’t take climate risks seriously. These events are no longer surprising; they’re sad, they’re painful, but also entirely predictable.

The vital role of the civilian community in responding to natural disasters

In a recent Strategist article, ASPI senior fellow Gill Savage talked about the importance of preparedness for Australia to ensure our ‘economy, society and communities are sustainable and resilient despite the complex multi-hazard environment we face’. She noted:

Preparedness is not about prediction. Leaders shouldn’t get caught up in trying to define what precisely we need to prepare for and when. Instead, they need to be ready for compounding national disruptions of any kind, at any time. Given the interconnectedness of our modern world, integrating broad economic, social and environmental preparedness will be better for resilience than mapping out overly detailed contingencies.

Less than two weeks after this piece was published, we witnessed the terrible fires in Hawaii. It’s a tragedy that is still unfolding, and the immediate focus must be on the human toll and loss. However, in time there will be some important lessons to learn from this natural disaster on how the community, government, industry and local knowledge can all come together to bring rapid solutions—something that governments are still not always good at delivering in isolation.

The civilian community is often the first line of defence during natural disasters. Residents are typically the initial responders, providing immediate aid to those in need before formal emergency services arrive. Their knowledge of terrain, resources and community dynamics enables swift and targeted action, which can significantly affect survival rates.

The civilian community response complements the efforts of formal emergency services, providing essential support in times of crisis. While professional responders play a crucial role in disaster management, their resources may become stretched thin during large-scale disasters.

Effective disaster management requires a multi-faceted and holistic approach that involves coordination among various stakeholders. The civilian community response adds a grassroots dimension to this approach, involving local knowledge and expertise that is often overlooked. Communities are uniquely positioned to identify and address specific vulnerabilities and challenges that may not be apparent to external agencies. By integrating community perspectives, disaster management efforts become more comprehensive, adaptive and responsive to the needs of the affected population.

In Hawaii, much of what has been covered in the media are the outstanding efforts by local residents (and others) to ensure donated food, clothes, toiletries, bedding and other supplies get to the right areas in Maui. This has helped thousands of people who were uprooted from their homes or were left facing major damage due to the fast-spreading fires.

But given the modern reliance on the internet and mobile phone coverage, a fundamental and critical first response was the need for stable telecommunications connectivity. Immediately following the fires, a widespread telecommunications blackout hampered government and grassroots efforts to distribute those supplies in the worst-affected neighbourhoods.

To provide a solution for this critical need, and one that local authorities were unable to meet quickly, there was a remarkable local community effort that ultimately involved cooperation between local Hawaii businesses, the US Space Command, SpaceX and other key stakeholders. Fundamentally, it came down to trusted people-to-people linkages.

A local consortium quickly banded together led by a Hawaii resident and tech entrepreneur in the defence and national security sector (and Strategist contributor), Bernice Kissinger, and a local technology provider, SMX.

While SMX doesn’t have any employees on Maui, there are around 100 SMX employees on nearby Oahu. As the company witnessed the tragedy unfold, the leadership team wanted to find a way to help the community and show the company’s commitment to helping supply aid.

As a leader in next-generation mission support, digital transformation and IT solutions, SMX leveraged its expertise in supporting technology solutions in remote and austere environments, access to technology resources and industry partnerships to help address one of the many critical challenges on the island: connectivity.

SMX, Kissinger and others were able to leverage their relationships with the US government, the local government and SpaceX to obtain Starlink units from SpaceX to deploy to Maui. Within days of the initial request, 16 Starlink systems, complete with generators, were delivered to the island. The Starlink system is a satellite internet constellation and several SMX employees have been on the ground supporting the installation and training local responders.

Given that it took almost three days for the US government to provide a substantial response to the disaster, this is an example of how the community can step in and fill the void. And it didn’t only include the hardware, but also came with essential training and education for local providers. This has provided the local community with much-needed internet and mobile coverage.

The Starlink terminals have been strategically deployed in the impacted areas. A mix of terminals were spread between makeshift evacuation camps for first responders and their families who lost everything in the fire. Site included construction and industrial areas, essential facilities like sewage treatment plants, schools, various emergency shelters and community centres, churches and markets.

All parties agree that central to the success of this project has been the understanding of, respect for and use of official chains of command. All proposals were put initially to US government emergency response agencies and the state emergency management agency before engagement with local community leaders. This also included liaison, consultation and cooperation with the US Space Command, the Maui Economic Development Board and various small-business owners.

It’s important that lessons are learned from this tragedy. As part of that, governments need to recognise the important role that local networks can—and usually do—play and build this into national disaster and emergency management policies and procedures.

Bushfire royal commission points way to evolution and revolution in disaster management

The royal commission into Australia’s natural disaster arrangements released its findings on 30 October. The commission’s report was the result of many long hours of consultation, investigation and analysis, including consideration of 1,772 submissions, with the support of legal counsel assisting.

In the lead-up to the inquiry’s formal commencement, some commentators (including me) questioned whether a royal commission was needed given that the New South government had already announced a review of aspects of the fire season in that state and Victoria had indicated that its inspector-general for emergency management would lead an inquiry into the state’s preparedness for and response to the fires and the relief and recovery efforts.

As far back as 2014, ASPI noted the well-trodden path of post-event reviews in a report, Working as one: a road map to disaster resilience for Australia. That work also detailed several common themes occurring in reviews of natural hazard events in Australia and overseas. A concern I voiced in January this year was that a royal commission must not simply rediscover the same lessons that had already been garnered over many years from previous investigations into emergencies and crises.

This position was fuelled in part by having read the very comprehensive but relatively unnoticed 2005 Review of Australia’s ability to respond to and recover from catastrophic disasters by the Catastrophic Disasters Emergency Management Capability Working Group. This group was set up following deliberations by the Council of Australian Governments in 2001.

So, how useful are the findings of the bushfire royal commission and has it moved the debate forward? Most of the recommendations in the report are logical and obvious. Others fit into two categories: clear improvements, and definite evolutions in thought and form. Some of the evolutionary suggestions have the potential to be revolutionary.

Two sets of recommendations point to evolutions in practice that could generate opportunities for agility in decision-making in support of efforts to reduce disaster risk in Australia.

The first pair relates to establishing ‘clear and accountable national arrangements’ for disaster management and recovery. Recommendation 3.2 states that ‘Australian, state and territory governments should establish an authoritative advisory body to consolidate advice on strategic policy and relevant operational considerations for ministers in relation to natural disasters.’ Recommendation 3.5 further suggests that ‘The Australian Government should establish a standing entity that will enhance national natural disaster resilience and recovery, focused on long-term disaster risk reduction.’

The second area of evolution relates to ensuring adequate levels of capability and capacity for disaster management at national and state levels. Recommendation 24.1 states: ‘The Australian Government should establish accountability and assurance mechanisms to promote continuous improvement and best practice in natural disaster arrangements.’ In parallel, recommendation 24.2 suggests: ‘Each state and territory government should establish an independent accountability and assurance mechanism to promote continuous improvement and best practice in natural disaster arrangements.’

The government’s announcement last week that it intends to develop a ‘National Resilience, Relief and Recovery Agency’ and an information-focused ‘Resilience Services’ function in support of both the new agency and Emergency Management Australia is timely. While details are yet to come, they seem promising initial steps forward in response to the recommendations.

Effective disaster risk reduction focuses heavily on prevention and preparedness capacities, but it also implies coordination—an element that is central to an effective use of the breakthrough that these directives of the royal commission imply.

Both the proposed new national agency and resilience services function will hopefully facilitate breaking down historical silos between national, state and local agencies responsible for infrastructure planning, energy, social cohesion, housing, health care, education, economic development, social welfare, disaster management and environmental protection—all things of value to society. Collaboration is a key aspect of the evolution of Australia’s capability in disaster risk reduction.

It is critically important that Australia enhances its coordination of ‘lessons remembered’ from our collective experiences of dealing with natural hazards. Such outcomes would certainly be better than repeatedly rediscovering things that we’ve all forgotten we already knew.

We need to always appreciate the benefits of anticipating the appearance of emergent natural threats, risk vectors and related cascading and cumulative impacts. In this respect, I return often to the words of a former chair of the Coordinating Committee of the International Standard on Risk Management (ISO 31000): ‘We need to skate to where the puck will be.’

For Australia’s future needs, following the ‘puck’ as quickly as we can is likely to not be enough. We need to act quickly yet carefully to enact and sustain the royal commission’s evolutionary recommendations and then ensure they deliver revolutionary impacts.

Do we need a bushfire royal commission?

The prime minister has announced that the cabinet will consider a royal commission into aspects of the ongoing fire disaster once the bushfires are under control. Some form of national review seems inevitable, given the fatalities, the severity of the blazes, the vast area of land burned, and the loss of biodiversity, homes and infrastructure.

It’s unclear whether a royal commission would replace a previously planned bushfire inquiry. The minister for natural disasters and emergency management, David Littleproud, announced on 5 December 2019 that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy would conduct an inquiry into the ‘efficacy of past and current vegetation and land management policy, practice and legislation and their effect on the intensity and frequency of bushfires and subsequent risk to property, life and the environment’.

The royal commission proposal has its critics. Some have voiced scepticism about the political motivations behind it and suggested that businesses (and the public) would prefer governments to make decisions and act rather than ‘hide’ behind yet another inquiry. Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons has questioned the need for one, noting both that disaster response has been one of the most reviewed issues in the history of Australian governance and that defining the scope for an inquiry is a highly complex task.

A 2017 review by the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre lists 55 major bushfire and disaster inquiries in Australia since 2009 that produced a total of 1,336 recommendations. The study suggested that many of the same themes and points for improvement appeared consistently across those reviews.

ASPI noted this well-trodden path of post-event reviews in a 2014 report, Working as one: a road map to disaster resilience for Australia. That work also detailed several common themes occurring in post-event reviews in Australia and overseas.

In New South Wales, Premier Gladys Berejiklian has announced her intention to hold a formal review (not necessarily a royal commission) into all aspects of the fire season in that state.

Premier Daniel Andrews has tasked Victoria’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management (IGEM) with leading an inquiry into preparedness for and response to the fires and to review relief and recovery efforts.

The Office of the IGEM was established as a part of a range of emergency management reforms within the Victorian government following the 2009 Black Saturday royal commission. The IGEM oversees the state’s assurance framework for emergency management, which seeks to ensure continuous improvement and promotes a coordinated, sector-wide approach to providing assurance in three core areas: that the system is working as intended; that the system is working as intended but there are opportunities for improvement; or the system is not working as intended and there are opportunities for improvement.

Queensland followed Victoria’s lead and established its own Inspector-General Emergency Management in 2014.

Emergency response might be considered a simple concept. When the bells go, the lights and sirens are turned on and emergency personnel respond. For events at single or a few locations, that image might be valid, but for large-scale multi-site events it isn’t.

In larger events, there’s a greater emphasis on wide-area tactics, on the strategic placement of resources and on coordinating efforts across increasingly chaotic and dangerous settings. Large complex emergencies entail multi-institutional responses over long periods. Emergency management is a much more complex task than emergency response.

How should the nation handle the many post-fire-season reviews currently on the table? Four issues come to mind.

First, care needs to be taken to prevent the multiple reviews from tripping over themselves, wasting resources and diffusing bipartisan support for examining the effectiveness of the ‘national’ emergency management response.

Second, it’s critical to ensure that the right voices are heard in the reviews. In addition to first-response agencies and state and local governments, affected communities need to be deeply involved. Community engagement is very important because national resilience begins at the local level.

Institutions such the Insurance Council of Australia, the Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative and the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities, as well as scientific and technical bodies, are central in planning for longer term recovery. Participants in the series of roundtable meetings convened by the government with business leaders and scientific research groups this week have recognised this fact.

Third, we must fully understand how hard it is to enhance resilience at the whole-of-nation level. Bushfires have many ongoing and cascading impacts on people, ecosystems, infrastructure and local and regional economies, and recovery from those impacts will take a long time. A fact-finding royal commission might not be the best way to explore these complex issues.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, we must ensure that the reviews don’t rediscover the same lessons and directives that we’ve already learned over many years in previous investigations into emergencies and crises.

Great national benefit can be gained from the various reviews, including options for more proactive federal government activity and support during disasters.

However, we need to ensure that the inquiries’ terms of reference reflect the fact that there are different contexts for local, state and national responses which, if aligned, can enhance national resilience.

It may be that Australia needs a federal-level assurance framework for disaster resilience and an independent inspector-general to coordinate ‘lessons remembered’. That would certainly be better than repeatedly rediscovering things that we’ve all forgotten we already knew.

ASPI launches its Risk & Resilience program

Image courtesy of ASPI 2016

The aftershocks are now continuing to rattle the survivors of a series of deadly Japanese earthquakes with the death toll now at 48.

Natural disasters are predictive surprises: we don’t know when they’ll occur, but we know that they’ll happen, so planning and preparation can and does need to be done in advance. Scientific advances have enabled experts to better understand natural disasters and their effects. But too often basic lessons get re-learnt, with the same mistakes being made.

When it comes to natural disasters, no place in Australia is completely safe. But whether a particular community succumbs to such a natural disaster will depend on its resiliency and preparedness.

On 18 April I was privileged to host the launch of ASPI’s Risk and Resilience program, along with a paper by  program head Paul Barnes, titled ‘Bolstering National Resilience: What can be done?’ The Risk and Resilience program is generously supported by Emergency Management Australia.

The program was launched at Parliament House by the Minister for Justice, Michael Keenan MP, who has federal responsibility for emergency management. I was pleased to hear the Minister open his remarks by pointing out that ‘ASPI does a wonderful job and they’re always worthwhile listening to and since I’ve arrived in this portfolio they’ve been a very valuable source of advice to me in a number of areas … from, I think, a very common sense and sensible place’.

The Minister pointed out that ‘natural disasters are a part of the landscape of Australia and that [they] are going to continue… the chances of Australians being caught in a natural disaster is actually going to increase over time…’ The Minister noted that our emergency management system is ‘very heavily weighted to how we clean up’.

But he also suggested that what we can do significantly better is to think harder about ‘what we could have done more to provide resilience to that community’. He asked, ‘Could we have built our buildings in a better way? Could we have provided better advice to people so they know with confidence what they should do in the event of a natural disaster?’

The Minister stressed the importance of mitigation: ‘The government needs to demonstrate that it is both working on prevention, that it is working before Australia is subject to a fire, cyclone, weather-related disaster. We need to answer the question of how we are protecting ourselves in advance… how can we provide resilience to affected communities before natural disasters strike?’

The Director-General of Emergency Management Australia, Mark Crosweller was also at the launch of the program. In his remarks, Mark noted the inevitability of disasters, the need to connect and communicate with communities and the need to change the language used to describe risk and resilience to better engage with local communities.

Mark warned though we need to start to prep for the ‘Big One’; while the most consequential events are the least likely, we don’t spend enough time focused on the consequences. Very few policymakers have actually lived through a catastrophic event and had to deal with one on a mass scale. We need to be able to ‘imagine before and act when the time comes’, he said.

Under our federal system, emergency management is primarily a matter for the states and territories. So it was also important to hear the views of Tony Pierce, the Inspector-General of Emergency Management from Victoria and Ian Mackenzie, the IGEM in Queensland. Their roles are independent of the emergency services, whose capability and capacity they ‘inspect’.

Tony noted that there’s now a risk of treating resilience as a ‘buzz’ issue, but resilience needs to stay as an issue on the table: an ongoing conversation about community resilience is needed.  Tony noted the Christmas Day Wye River fire in Victoria as an example where a community understood what was going on and acted on response plans they themselves developed.

Ian Mackenzie said that ‘if we asked 10 people to define resilience we would probably get 11 different definitions’. He made the important point that interoperability in the emergency services industry isn’t just about radio channels, but more about culture: about ‘playing nice with each other and learning the differences in cultures and approaches’.

I noted three big takeaways from the discussions at the launch of ASPI’s Risk and Resilience program.

First, prevention is important (but so too is well coordinated recovery.) Right now we have disincentives for seeking resilience; we need to do more to create incentives for preparation. The insurance industry can play a key role here.

Second, was a recognition that while there may be lots of unknowns about how communities will handle disasters, response is local: we should be doing more to identify those who may need help and getting to know them in case of emergency.

Third, one of the most important imperatives for the next government will be to make Australia a more resilient nation.

ASPI’s Risk and Resilience program will promote inclusive dialogue on ensuring readiness for complex emergencies through better planning and preparation, and considering capability needs for future emergency events.

To do this the program will engage with practitioner and industry groups, including the emergency services and the ADF, for practical discussions aimed at improving disaster resilience.