AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005

Close
Dr John Zillman

I think it has been a very good day. It has been a very information-dense day. We had a pretty stimulating opening – Bruce Billson certainly gave us a very comprehensive view of what has been going on. He has been very much at the centre of it himself. And of course Tim Fischer in his inimitable style gave us some of the personal insights that he has into the issues of dealing with disaster in Asia, in particular.

The scene was set well, with excellent presentations. I think we learnt a lot. It was very information-dense.

Our break-out groups, as far as I could tell, worked extraordinarily well – too short, with so much ground to cover in so little time, but I found it fascinating listening to the reports back. It is just amazing, as somebody noted, how coherent it all sounds when you get the report back in PowerPoint. It is just so much better than the discussions themselves!

There were a lot of common themes, as I guess everybody noted – education and databases and the whole importance of local knowledge. We looked into what we know, where the gaps are and what we can do, and I think that was a fairly good structure for the working group discussions and reports back. We got a very clear picture, I think, on a very large number of areas where we do have unique Australian skills to contribute to disaster recovery, in the medium and the long term.

I think the real purpose of this exercise – under the auspices of NAF, as has been mentioned a couple of times – was to find a way of accessing the huge amount of expertise that is resident in Australia but isn’t normally accessible to government in working out how it should respond to an issue such as this. And as the day went on I saw that breaking into two different dimensions of what now goes to government from us, the participants in the workshop and, formally, from NAF.

There were some extraordinarily important ideas, suggestions, key proposals, things that really need to be treated more seriously than those of us on the outside assumed they were being treated at the moment – some clear messages came through – and I think that should be in our report that will go to government.

And the second thing is the more institutional, infrastructural aspect: how can this group, brought together under the auspices of the Academies, a relatively small group – we would hope fairly representative, but deliberately a smallish group – suggest to government that they can more effectively access the much larger pool of skills that we don’t fully represent but at least know exists? That is where I think a real challenge for our group writing tomorrow, our Rapporteurs, is: to suggest to government how we might achieve that more effectively. If we can do that well, then I think the workshop has really been very, very worthwhile.

In closing, I would just like on behalf of NAF, the National Academies Forum – and in particular the four Presidents of the Academies, Dr Jim Peacock of the Academy of Science, Professor Graeme Turner from Humanities, and Professor Sue Richardson from Social Sciences, represented here today by her predecessor, Leon Mann – to thank everybody for their participation. Clearly, we appreciate the support given to this workshop through the ARC and the Asia-Pacific Futures Research Network, through CSIRO, through DEST of course. I would like to thank the staff of the academies, who worked very, very hard for the effort that went in to make this workshop happen very, very quickly. We had very little time to prepare, and so thank you very much to those who worked so hard on that in such a short time.

I would like to thank all the speakers, who responded at pretty short notice and gave us great presentations. They were really very much valued.

I thank the chairs of the break-out groups, who had no easy task, and I especially thank the rapporteurs, because theirs is the really tough task and they did it wonderfully. I think in all those dots points and things we have got a wealth of ideas and information to be built on.

And, of course, thank you to everybody here for participating.

I have great pleasure in closing this NAF workshop. Thank you very much.