AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005
Disaster recovery – processes, implications and management
Mr Murray Proctor
Acting Deputy Director General, Asia and Corporate Resources, AusAID
Powerpoint presentation (1185KB)
The Honourable Tim Fischer, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for this invitation to speak today. I appreciate time is very tight, so I will seek to be prompt.
I would like to cover three things. One is very briefly to recap what happened in the first week of January. More importantly, I think, I will also talk to the future about the recovery and reconstruction process, particularly as it applies in Banda Aceh and Indonesia, which is probably of significant interest to you in terms of intellectually but also in the scope of Australian funding that will be applied to that. And finally, if you can bear with me, I will just have some personal reflections on drawing on expertise in these situations, at least as I have seen it in the past.
Australia’s emergency response
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Let me go first, very briefly, to the first eight days after the tsunami. An amazing range of things happened within Australia alone, and of course you could see that reflected in many other countries of the world. Others have spoken to these; could I point out that, in terms of the Australian aid program, an initial $10 million from our existing funding was then added to by the government, by $50 million, for the initial regional response.
AIPRD overview
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By the end of the first week the Prime Minister had announced a commitment of A$1 billion for the Australian-Indonesian Partnership for Reconstruction and Development, which is of course not just about Banda Aceh, as he made very clear at the time, but a longer-term commitment by Australia for that reconstruction, for other needs through disasters and events in Indonesia, and to accelerate the long-term development of Indonesia.
So what does that in fact mean? It is a jointly announced billion dollars, a five-year time horizon, half of the money in grant aid – as we traditionally provide – and half of the money in very concessional loans, totally additional to our ongoing bilateral program that is run for the government by AusAID. (That is, as you can see there, A$0.85 billion over five years.) So it is heavily focused on partnership between the two countries. As I said, it is not just about the tsunami, although a significant amount of money from this commitment will go there – and of course now to the earthquake-stricken areas around Nias.
The emphasis really was longer-term, on sustained cooperation, the economic and social development of Indonesia, and, of course, the reconstruction.
Just to let you know how it works, because this is rather unusual in our system: there is a Joint Commission, overseen by the President of Indonesia and our Prime Minister; there is a Joint Commission, notionally chaired by those leaders but in fact probably more often attended by the Foreign Ministers of the two countries, our Treasurer and the Planning Minister from Indonesia. That annual meeting will set the overall direction of priorities for the billion-dollar package.
In reality, of course, the more immediate decisions will be made by the Secretaries Committee – on our side, at least, chaired by the head of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the Finance Department and the Director General of AusAID. And they will advise Australian government ministers of proposals and process. In reality, there is a Secretariat based in Foreign Affairs, and AusAID will be implementing more of the actual activities. We have placed a whole new operation into Jakarta, headed by a senior liaison officer who, amongst other things, actually does speak Bahasa Indonesian, along with most of her team.
AIPRD early priorities
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What will this money do? There is no full answer to that, partly because it is a partnership; we have to work through with Indonesia what its priorities are. However, on 17 March there was the first meeting of the ministerial Joint Commission, and that committed itself to a number of things. Particularly, rehabilitation of Aceh will focus on the hospital infrastructure and capacity-building – as others have pointed out, a large number of people (60 per cent of the hospital staff, for instance) were just killed and it is not there – and, more broadly, help to restore education and health services and other local government services.
There was also an initial commitment to the notion of better linkages between the two countries, with a government partnership fund. Initially this will focus on expertise, knowledge-sharing and capacity building in the two areas of economic governance and public sector management. That reflects very much, I believe, the concerns of what is needed to accelerate growth in Indonesia.
AIPRD early priorities (continued)
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David Templeman has talked about disaster preparedness. You will notice that one of the other early priorities for this initiative is to actually help Indonesia develop its capacities to respond to disasters, particularly at the community level. That will involve a partnership between Indonesia’s disaster coordination agency and Emergency Management Australia, particularly focused on boosting community organisations such as Muhammadiyah, which is a moderate Islamic group that is culturally present in very many of the communities of Indonesia.
So what has been achieved? (I will finish on the process at this point.) The first Commission meeting on 17 March agreed the principles for the relationship, how it will be governed, an overall loan framework, those early priorities and procurement arrangements. I will just flag a couple of those.
Loans are yet to be determined. They are a specific focus, although they are generally about accelerating development, and loans tend to be for infrastructure, of course.
The procurement arrangements are open to New Zealand and Australian providers and to Indonesian firms, measured by at least 51 per cent ownership by Indonesians.
In the next couple of weeks you will see workshops that were flagged earlier by Mr Billson, respectively over the next week from Monday in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, with Darwin to be done shortly thereafter, at a time to be set.
We are in the process now of looking at some very detailed project designs for those early measures I mentioned to you, and you will be seeing increasing amounts of open tendering, or at least seeking expressions of interest for firms to work in particular areas.
This is an enormous challenge, and of course the earthquake of the last few days has only made it worse – for Indonesia more than ourselves. I suppose I should flag that the Indonesian President was to visit today. That has been postponed; I am sure I would not surprise you by saying that further initiatives under the billion-dollar package will almost certainly be announced when he does come down.
Let me turn now very quickly to the challenges in reconstruction. There is always a process which is not handled well, around the world, of going from immediate relief to reconstruction to development. You have seen it in East Timor as still in play, of course: the massive rush of resources and external expertise in the relief phase, and then the much harder and longer-term drag – not that the first phase is easy – to reconstruct people’s lives and economies and to achieve further development.
This is a major debate, and for those of you with an interest in arcane issues such as this, the Brookings Institution did some excellent work fo