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

Session 3: Reporting back and general discussion
Chair: Professor Leon Mann
Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Group 1: Warning and preparedness
Rapporteur: Dr Mark Leonard

Powerpoint presentation (18KB)

We were talking about warning and preparedness, and what quickly came out of that is you end up with three topics you have to worry about. One is what you might call the scientific/technical aspects of how you locate an earthquake, how you deal with the tide/sea level data, how you might predict run-up. Another one is how you disseminate that information down to the people who need to know this. And then the preparedness aspect is making sure that people are prepared, they know what to do when such a warning comes through, and various authorities know where they are passing that on.

As to Australia’s current capacity, we are pretty well placed in several areas. We have a fairly mature rapid earthquake alert system at the moment. Some of the more sophisticated analyses that Phil Cummins showed this morning we don’t really have the domestic capacity for, but we certainly have the people who are capable of building that fairly quickly. The deep ocean tsunami modelling: there are several institutions in Australia with pretty good skills in that.

The areas where we are a bit poorer include the tide gauge network. There are essentially no real-time Australian tide gauges in Australia; they are all designed to be dialled up manually. There is no central repository for all the different states, and national run different networks. There is no central repository for all data. We of course have no deep-ocean buoys at all. There are none in the Indian Ocean that I am aware of, and certainly Australia doesn’t have any off our shores.

And then some of the other key elements that would be involved in a tsunami warning system would be run-up models, or inundation models. If you have a big earthquake off Sumatra that causes a tsunami, what are the key areas that you have to worry about, and exactly how far inland will be affected? That is very difficult modelling to do, and requires a lot of data we don’t currently have. That said, Australia is a developed nation and we do have the capacities to fairly quickly fill in these gaps.

As to warning systems, we have good systems in place for what I have called non sudden-impact disasters – cyclones, hail. For cyclones you generally have days of warning, for hail you normally have several hours. These systems in Australia are fairly mature. Public awareness of, for example, cyclones, bushfires, what you should do, is fairly good. It is not so good for earthquakes and tsunamis. But we do have the expertise in how to build these systems and how we might want to apply them to tsunami early warning systems. And we do have a great deal of expertise at every level of government in Australia on building of community awareness and education programs. So we might not currently have that knowledge out in the general public; we certainly have the skills to build that.

So the gaps, which I have been touching on: we would need to improve the seismic network to actually run tsunami early warning systems. We have a pretty good network in Australia but it is not up to scratch for dealing with these very large earthquakes; it has been designed primarily for smaller Australian earthquakes, and that requires different types of instrumentation. As I mentioned before, the sea-level gauges are fairly inadequate in Australia, and the real-time processing of the seismic and sea-level data in Australia is inadequate.

One of the key gaps in knowledge is an appreciation by everybody, I think – the scientists, the government, the public – of what we are going to do about all the false warnings. What is an acceptable false warning rate? The lesson from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre is that you don’t need too many false warnings before people stop taking you seriously. But particularly in the next couple of years while we are building a fairly robust system, this is going to be an issue. We are not quite sure what the answer is to that one, but it is a matter of concern.

Other gaps, as I touched upon earlier: new systems and thinking will need to be done on how we are going to go ahead. For an Australian tsunami on, say, the north-west coast, from Java you have got less than two hours. At best you are going to get a verified warning out in 30 to 40 minutes – just the travel time; the physics limits you. And it’s about that kind of rate with the kinds of networks, realistically, that we are going to be able to put in. Japan has that down to a few minutes, but they literally have hundreds if not thousands of seismic stations scattered along their coast. No-one thinks such a system is going to be built across the entire Indonesian archipelago.

Public awareness of earthquakes and tsunami risk in Australia is very low. I expect that amongst most Australians, even those that remember Newcastle would think it was such a rare event as there is basically no earthquake or tsunami risk in Australia. Whilst it is low in comparison with countries with Indonesia, it does exist.

It was unclear to us just how prepared emergency authorities are to deal with catastrophic disasters. They are extremely skilled in dealing with containable disasters like major bushfires, major cyclones, major floods. But catastrophic ones may exceed the capacity of local authorities. Unfortunately we didn’t really have anyone in our group that could talk to that, but that was something that was of concern.

Contribution to our region (1)
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Contribution to our region: this is where we thought Australia actually, across the whole, both the warning and preparedness, had a fair bit to contribute. Of the Indian Ocean countries we are the most developed nation, and we are the only country that has been running earthquake alert services for some time. We do have a great deal of expertise in ocean modelling, sea-level monitoring, operating tide gauges and things like that. So listed here are some of the things we thought were the more technical aspects that we could contribute to the region. We essentially have the expertise in doing a lot of this.

Contribution to our region (2)
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The last slide was more on the preparedness and warning. There are a lot of people in Australia with expertise in developing education material, and we could play a role in helping countries develop education material and education programs – encourage these things to be built into school curriculums and the kinds of material Australia has in its mostly high school systems. We thought that any kind of long-term preparedness would probably require strong education system involvement. We are thinking something that is going to be working in 10 or 20 years’ time; we thought the schools are probably the only place to build this.

Similarly, training emergency management agencies, to help build capacity, is something Australia has expertise in and could certainly provide. And one of the issues that Hugh Davies talked about was the value of having scientists come to a region post-disaster and actually provide expertise, both to the government and to people, to reassure them about what had happened. But the flip-side of that is that not all the scientists that went to Papua New Guinea after the Sissano Lagoon actually added value. They actually used resources. So that one has to be balanced out.

The other dot point, which I didn’t get time to type in, was about warning for local tsunamis generated from nearby earthquakes, such as the Sissano Lagoon. The only real warning system is local education, and it is not clear that has been entirely understood in the region yet.

Questions/discussion

Paul Grundy – I have just one comment about the lack of knowledge on things like run-up and so on. I just wonder if we haven’t communicated enough with our Japanese scientific colleagues on this, because I know that in Japan they have done detailed analyses of the consequences of various storm surges and tsunamis; in particular areas they have done the numerical modelling. So I think perhaps we need to increase the communication there with some of that expertise.

Mark Leonard – Yes. A lot of the problem with the run-up is that you need extremely detailed near-shore bathymetry information and online digital elevation models to actually to do the modelling, as well as a lot of knowledge about the sea floor. I think the actual computer modelling, the finite difference element modelling expertise, we have; it is a lot of the inputs into the models that we don’t have.

Colin Woodroffe – Modelling run-up would be great, but one of the greatest opportunities to say something about run-up of course is to actually see what has happened as a result of this event. And it is an opportunity to relate it back to bathymetry. You are absolutely right, we don’t have good bathymetric data for those Indian Ocean coasts, but that would seem to me to be an opportunity, a justification, for getting that bathymetric data at the moment, to really use what we can judge from this event as run-up to give us a better idea about run-up.

Mark Leonard – I would completely agree. There is a lot of work being done. There have been quite a few US, European and Japanese workers in there looking at the impact and the damage of the tsunami. And there are at least one or two ships. I think the Germans are planning to send another ship to do the detailed bathymetry. So the whole world is going to benefit from this study in actually working out how we are going to ground truth our models. The Japanese have fantastic models, but they haven’t been ground truthed yet.

Group 2: Sustainable reconstruction
Rapporteur: Dr Colin Woodroffe

Powerpoint presentation (107KB)

In our group we had some engineers, some geologists, a development consultant, coastal geomorphology, environmental science and ecology – spanning a whole range, as you can see: marine, agriculture, forestry and soils.

Local consequences
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We started by recognising that it is a diverse and variable system that we are dealing with. We recognise global change; climate is of course not constant. It changes, there are irregular events; there are patterns of change over time. We recognise that the area we are looking at consists of the dynamics of place, as we have heard this morning, of people and of production, and that those are influenced by, first of all, the natural systems – and I think that context was set very clearly this morning by our first speaker – and the social and cultural infrastructures that we heard about later in the morning. And all of those things feed in to the built infrastructure, and we can think of the local consequences, if you like, on that built infrastructure.

So there are a number of areas we obviously need to be aware of, but we need to be aware of these interactions, and that these work in various ways.

It seemed that sustainable reconstruction was the topic we were given, and so we regarded it that we are talking about resilience, we are talking about building resilience. It is very important to recognise, then, that these systems are subject to that natural variability, that there are a whole series of events – of course, this most recent tsunami a very tragic example of the natural variability, but there are other natural hazards and risks: flooding, storm surge, volcanoes, earthquakes – so we do need to recognise that these systems are subject to that variability and to those events.

We asked the question of just how resilient were the systems that we are talking about in this region, prior to the tsunami? We recognise that there are a whole series of factors that may have lowered that resilience – that the reefs have been through bleaching events, that the mangroves have been cleared. We recognise that the social systems are not as resilient as they might have been. The issue of poverty was brought up in our group and we said, ‘Well, I think other people in other groups will be addressing that issue, but it is very clearly one of those constraints on how we address reconstruction in this area.’

So in terms of reconstruction, one of the issues that we thought our group should make some comment on is the issue of building codes and building practices. (They may not be the same thing.) We think it would be important that at this point in time some issues should be considered – as to whether, for instance, communities and settlements should be built, rebuilt, where they existed in the first place, whether roads should again be back in the same place. This is one of the issues that should be considered now, not just build them back in that same place. We were reminded this morning about the people of Sissano Lagoon (PNG) who moved their whole community some distance inland. We felt that was probably going too far in this case, but it would need reassessment. This is the opportunity when we are rebuilding bridges: do we rebuild those bridges in the same location and hence put the roads in the same location, or should there be some setback? Is this the opportunity to say, ‘Well, on this particular creek, a bridge should be further back inland’?

We felt that perhaps within the settlements, like Banda Aceh, there was a need to recognise global climate change, the concept that the sea might rise with global warming, and so is it sustainable to have coastal infrastructure built so close to the coast? Is this the opportunity to say there needs to be a foreshore zone, a setback zone? Obviously, these things could be and should be looked at, at this point in time. That is a major topic, and obviously we could not go much further without more information and more time.

We identified other areas where we should be building that resilience, such as education – risk awareness, clearly, we should be educating people in – and I’m sure this topic will come up again in other groups but we wanted to make the point. We want agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable, and we recognise that that takes some research. I will come back to that topic, because we heard briefly this morning about a project that ACIAR is undertaking and we didn’t get very much information from that.

In terms of the issue about setbacks and what is sustainable, we recognise that integrated coastal zone management is the key that is being more widely applied around the world. We believe Australia has a lot of expertise in this and we would suggest that perhaps, in some of these regions, integrated coastal zone management hadn’t been practised and obviously it is something that should be. And in that context we want to see building the capacity, but we recognise the very important issue – and again I am sure other groups will bring this up – of involving the local community. It is very important, we think, that the people who are living there are the people who have a direct input into the say on where things are built and so on.

Our current knowledge and capacity was the first point we were supposed to report on. We identified, for instance, that we consider that Australia probably is a leader in tropical coastal and marine science and management. I think it is a very positive point. On the other hand, we suggest that perhaps our knowledge of the coasts of much of the Indian Ocean is very poor, very fragmented. I suggest to you that it is very difficult to come up with a vegetation map of what Aceh looked like, what that coast of Sumatra looked like, before the tsunami. We wonder if there really are the same sorts of information on natural resources available – in fact, we don’t think there are – for much of the rim of the Indian Ocean, in comparison with perhaps our own country. Indeed, we might even look at the extent to which we have got that natural resource base for our own coastal zone.

Again, on a positive note, we felt from the Australian groups that spoke this morning that the outstanding emergency and short-term response and rehabilitation was one of the very positive features of the Australian response. On the other hand, we believe the niche for where Australian research development should go is not clear, either within the Australian government or within the Indonesian government. We didn’t feel that those governments were necessarily identifying the areas in which we believe there is the strength amongst our research and development, and calling for that specifically in the context of this reconstruction.

Gaps in knowledge: now we are getting down to some very specific points that came up. We felt that we had heard very briefly this morning about an ACIAR assessment and there was very little feedback, but we felt we would be in a much better position to tell you more about what we knew, and where and how sustainable reconstruction could go ahead, if we had heard more about the information that is being assessed. And we did note that this morning, I think, it was reported that that was an 18-month study. Now, I think it is excellent, and our group was very supportive of the concept, but we would like to know more about that.

Our knowledge about what built infrastructure is there: we believe there is some knowledge; we believe engineers have been out there and done assessments, but we don’t think that information is made widely available at this stage. We think that the social and natural infrastructure is not available.

How might Australia contribute?
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Finally, where can Australia contribute – how might Australia contribute? We have identified seven dot points here which I will go through very quickly.

First of all, we felt that we ought to be identifying a region or a sector, a geographical region or a sector like reconstructing schools or education, for focus – that that would strengthen what could come out of today.

We raised the point again of integrated coastal zone management. That seemed to be a key area where Australia has a lot of expertise and could help in integrated coastal zone management implementation in this region.

We felt that there were great opportunities for links, university to university, university in Australia to university in the region, institution or agency in Australia to government agency or so on in the region. That would be another way of strengthening the links that we already had, partly because we already have some partnerships, and those give us again that advantage.

Again, Australia’s familiarity with tropical coasts: we felt that in comparison with other potential donors and people coming with aid there, the similarity of our environments with the environments in the region was one of our strengths.

Building codes and practices: we believe that in Australia we have been through those experiences, we have those building codes, and we practise – I believe – those building codes. We discussed briefly to what extent it would be possible to implement them, whether they would be practised and what sorts of codes should be involved.

We felt that Australia could contribute by bringing a longer-term perspective on research and development. I suggest that something like that ACIAR project is an example of not just immediate assessment and doing something but the longer-term staying with it, working out longer-term plans and monitoring and so on.

And, finally, disaster reduction and preparedness we believe is a strength for Australia, and I am sure it is one that other groups will comment on.

Questions/discussion

Peter Stevens – One small point with regard to planning for setbacks and things like that: surely the local people will be very concerned about the land tenure questions. They will want to go back to their own land, presumably, which represents a capital investment of their own.

Colin Woodroffe – Yes. It was actually a topic that we were slightly divided on in our group, in terms of to what extent the New Guinea example was one that we would even want to see. We didn’t think that complete replacement from the coastal zone was to be encouraged. We felt that people obviously identify with the coast, they have primarily fishing and so on. We certainly identified with the fact that the local community must be involved in what is going on. If I can take one example that we discussed, we felt that there was a lot of value in identifying areas of mangroves and coral reefs that should be preserved to keep the biological diversity, for obvious sorts of reasons that we can see from a conservation point of view, but we were very conscious that that is something that the local community must be totally in support of, and empowered and making those decisions, recognising the reasons why that is happening. We felt it was a real danger that this would be the time that those natural resources might be over-exploited – over-fishing of what remains and so on. We recognise that it has to be the local community that decides what is a sustainable and conservation-wise and environmentally sensible process of zoning the coast.

Group 3: Health systems
Rapporteur: Dr Bronwyn Morrish

Powerpoint presentation (125KB)

I think that probably everyone is aware that the health response to the tsunami was extraordinary, and it was a very people-oriented response. There was a lot of thought around the table about how health could still improve, even though it has generally been considered that the response of Australia to the health disaster was really quite exceptional.

One of the fundamental things that we came down to is that we were a small group of people talking about some very big issues, and this forum, for example, provides an excellent opportunity to engage health experts from across Australia to make sure these questions are actually answered.

But in terms of our perspective, what we thought our strengths were in Australia is that we have excellent health institutes, we have health individuals with high levels of skills and experience, we have a high level of technical knowledge and our epidemiological data is excellent, and our capacity to acquire that, too. We have excellent lab capacity and skills to carry out diagnostic tests to identify diseases and other conditions, and we also have a very robust mental health system. We have an international research reputation – in fact, in all of these areas our reputation internationally is very high.

But probably one of the most amazing things about Australia’s response to the tsunami was our willingness to respond to that. We can really expand and develop that willingness.

Another important aspect of Australia in this region is that compared with a lot of other countries around the world we don’t bring a lot of political baggage, and therefore our interventions can be better taken up by other countries.

But with these things there are always the gaps. One of the gaps that we identified was our ability to respond and deal with complexity. For example, in the tsunami the response went from an acute care response of dealing with terrible injuries and death and trauma to dealing with issues of public health and population health, and how then we can best fit in to even more complicated issues of rebuilding a health system that has pretty well been completely collapsed by the tsunami.

Some of the gaps that we also felt existed in Australia: one was our knowledge of the culture of the region. There is also not a great emphasis on learning the language any more in Australia, and our understanding of the region is also fairly limited.

One of the major gaps that we felt we could address was data. We didn’t really know what was out there, what the immunisation rates were. And so diseases came up that were perhaps not expected, because we just didn’t know what the level of immunisation was in the country. We didn’t know what the resilience of the population was, to deal with the trauma of the tsunami. And we felt that there wasn’t very good health mapping, both in Australia and in Indonesia, in terms of what expertise was out there, what resources were out there. Included in that are indications of population vulnerabilities. For example, it then made it very difficult for us to match resources – for example, just knowing how many toilets would be needed for particular populations that were gathering.

Also in the region: because especially in Indonesia, in Sumatra, this region has been closed to Australia for some time, we don’t have that long-term relationship to build on that was spoken about earlier, that Australia has with Thailand, for instance.

Also, our whole education in terms of health personnel is that there is often a focus on health being a ‘response’, the health response dealing with the event rather than being involved in prevention and planning, and then the consequences of that action. That is something that we really need to develop further.

We also encountered some thoughts about how there wasn’t a very well-coordinated capacity to get advice, and that that has a potential dangerous outcome in terms of someone giving the ‘advice’ who isn’t necessarily the person best equipped to deliver that.

As I touched on earlier, one of the striking things that came out of the tsunami, particularly in Indonesia, was that there were many diseases that physicians had not encountered or had very rarely encountered – for example, tetanus and measles. We would traditionally call these ‘old’ diseases, I guess, because they have been mostly eradicated in Australia. And because of the collapse of the health system there, there was also a limited capacity to treat people who had these diseases. This is something that we think is potentially being lost from medicine in Australia because these diseases are being eradicated in Australia and our capacity to treat them when they do arise is so good, and it is not necessarily the same in countries like Indonesia.

Another gap that we thought we could definitely go towards filling is being able to engage our health centres in Australia and our medical institutes in Australia and get them thinking about health issues in our region, and the kinds of things that might be important to them and therefore how we can best help those countries in terms of developing their resources, such as training people and their infrastructure and their equipment.

As I also touched on a bit earlier, there is a bit of a gap in our political and cultural understanding of the region, particularly with respect to how they deliver their health.

We had a few points in terms of how we responded to the emergency, in terms of our health system. There were many reports in Indonesia of aeroplane loads of essentially unwanted medical supplies and aid just arriving, and this was slightly demoralising for the countries who were receiving this aid, because they kind of felt that they were getting secondhand equipment and secondhand supplies. I think we need to learn from that and coordinate our response a lot better, and to make sure that what they are getting is the very best that we can offer.

Another important area we talked about, which has been touched on in previous talks, is the importance of developing mechanisms to enable the people to help themselves and to build back up to what they could do in the past.

There were some discrepancies in the kind of assessments being done, and so that needs to be standardised.

We thought a really good thing we could do is to have a database of Australians with the sectoral and regional experience. These kinds of databases are being developed in all sorts of institutions around Australia, but if we can have some coordinated way of accessing that information and of sharing that information, that would go a long way towards matching what Australia’s expertise is with the need that is out there. We can especially contribute to the education of health professionals in Indonesia, through having training programs and having collaborations between universities and medical institutes, and so we were thinking about the possibility of acquiring money to get infrastructure and human resources to develop centres of excellence for all areas of health, but particularly for public health research and population health.

We can also learn a lot by improving the communication between our countries. For example, we could put an emphasis on developing hardware like telemedicine so that we can directly communicate with people who are teaching medicine in Indonesia.

At a more general or more national level, programs to improve our language and cultural skills of Indonesia and the region could be implemented. These would be not necessarily across medical practitioners, but across our whole nation.

And the exchange of knowledge has always been a really positive mechanism for improving delivery of health and education, so we talked about twinning between institutes or sending doctors over to Indonesia and to other countries and vice versa.

Just finally, to determine, together, their and our public health priorities such as, particularly for prevention of diseases, so immunisation and women’s reproductive health.

Questions/discussion

Question – This is more of a comment. It probably shows how well you do with just a few people in your group, that you managed to do so much! I think we also have to be very careful in the region, thinking that we don’t have any’ political baggage’, which I think your term was. I think you ought to reconsider that the Bali bombing was perhaps a result of our overseas political practices in Iraq and perhaps in Timor too. What I can see coming is another issue with Indonesia over transmigration in West Papua Province. So I think Australians going out into the field in these situations need to be very aware how we are seen from the other side, and not imagine that we have this wonderful halo.

Bronwyn Morrish – You are certainly right there. That is a situation that has certainly changed in the last few years. But still, compared with a lot of other countries around the world, our reputation in the region is pretty good.

Chair – Bronwyn, I noticed you focused mainly on physical health. Did your group talk about mental health as well?

Bronwyn Morrish – We did, yes. Certainly that was one of the areas that we felt we could definitely develop stronger links with, in terms of sharing education, and particularly with training people in these countries to deal with the mental health problems, not just as a result of the tsunami but in general. It is a very under-resourced area.

Group 4: Continuity of knowledge
Rapporteur: Dr Ed Aspinall

Powerpoint presentation (60KB)

We began really by defining the problem – that is, what did we actually mean by continuity of knowledge. We settled on a fairly broad definition, namely, that we were talking about knowledge broadly in terms of not only education but also the arts and culture, and, within the education sector, social and natural sciences, although in fact we should stress that much of the discussion in the end really focused on the higher education sector – not all of it but a fair amount of it.

We also defined knowledge not only in terms of Australian knowledge of the affected region but especially in terms of local expertise and knowledge. In fact, most of the discussion focused on how local expertise and knowledge had been affected by the tsunami.

In terms of current knowledge and capacity, I should say at the outset as well that our group focused virtually exclusively on Indonesia, especially northern Sumatra, mostly simply because of the expertise of the various people who were members of the group, three of five in particular having had quite a bit of experience in that part of Indonesia.

In terms of our current knowledge and our current capacity relating to the broadly defined field of local knowledge in the tsunami-affected area, different members of the group noted various downsides, firstly in terms of something which was raised in one of the earlier sessions today, that the Sumatran region, northern Sumatra in particular, has been relatively neglected in Australian development policy over a long period, and that this has had long-term negative consequences in terms of the depth of knowledge there is in Australia about this part of Indonesia. The example was given that – I think I am right in recording these numbers – of the 350 or so ADS scholarships last year only something like eight were from the four provinces of north Sumatra.

So there is an absence of deep networks, the kind of deep networks that would go with years and years of engagement with this particular part of Indonesia. The point was made that when the tsunami happened, the Australian relief effort had to do a lot of learning on its feet, as it were – we did not have the kind of networks in the educational sector, in the health sector and so on which would exist in other parts of Indonesia if that had been where the disaster happened.

The impact of the conflict, of course, was also something we discussed, that the security situation in Aceh, in particular, for some years now has impacted on our ability to get to know this part of Indonesia in any great depth.

Another point which was raised was that generally speaking there is a lack of Indonesia expertise, including in the area of language – something that the previous group has also noticed.

And of course, then, local institutions and knowledge were in turn lost in the tsunami. So, in that process of rapid learning during the relief program, the kind of people that relief agencies, people from the higher education system and so on, would usually plug in to in Indonesia were in turn also missing.

Against these points there were some more positive points made. In Australia there are in fact spread across the higher education sector – which I guess we were especially talking about –some particular individuals in particular institutions who do have deep knowledge of this part of Sumatra. We are starting to learn, since the emergency response, some detail about the impact that the tsunami has had on the institutions which foster and maintain local knowledge, especially in Aceh. Mention was in particular made of Michael Leigh, of Melbourne University, who recently returned from Aceh and has prepared a report (which I think was also mentioned in an earlier session) on the higher education sector in Aceh. It is fairly brief and succinct but it does detail the impact the tsunami had on the higher education sector and it outlines some proposals for ways in which Australian institutions might respond. I will come back to them later.

It was also pointed out that, although in formal institutional terms Australia hasn’t had a really significant footprint and therefore knowledge in this part of Indonesia, there are in fact many informal networks of Australians, or Australian-related businesses and institutions in particular, who do have a good degree of local knowledge. For instance, the example was given of a network of businesses in the coastal tourism industry along the west coast of Sumatra, many of whom, precisely because of their being embedded in the local region, having knowledge of the local area, having infrastructure and so on, were able to play a very significant role in the relief effort immediately after the tsunami.

What are the gaps? A range of issues were canvassed. One of the important things we noted was that in terms of the tertiary education system, in particular, in Aceh and more broadly in the tsunami-affected area, we are developing a picture of the impact on the social sciences – and Michael Leigh’s report here is particularly important – but we still don’t have a very good picture of the impact on other areas of the higher education sector: research institutes and the like. We don’t have a good sense of natural and health sciences, engineering, these kinds of areas of the education system within the tsunami-affected areas, especially Aceh.

Also – and this is a point which was stressed as well – as we go forward in developing a response which will help to restore local education system and local knowledge and ability to respond to the disaster and so forth, we are not quite sure about how the education system beyond the province of Aceh itself might fit in to the reconstruction effort. We know that there are a number of universities and research institutes and the like in neighbouring provinces throughout northern Sumatra, which in some cases specialise in issues like coastal biology and so on which would obviously be of relevance for reconstruction, but we don’t have a really good picture of how they all could fit together.

So there is a need also to audit the kinds of Australian or Australian-linked networks which are already in place, the kinds of informal networks, the local businesses and the like, that I have already mentioned.

We also spent a fair bit of time talking about particular issues which might just reflect the lack of knowledge in our group rather than a gap in knowledge more broadly, but questions like land titles, for example – how much of an assessment has been made of land issues? The question of standardisation is a technical issue in reconstruction. The example was given of a member of our group who participated in developing the water delivery system in East Timor and had problems with the various pipes and so on not fitting together. So, what kind of knowledge is there of these kinds of issues? Primary health care, primary education were others.

In terms of national contribution, a few points were made, perhaps not in any particular order, although perhaps there was a general agreement in our group that one priority should be to build on the proposal – and this is again a very specific proposal which appears in the report from Michael Leigh – to establish an education and research training institute in Syiah Kuala University, the main state university in Banda Aceh. The idea is that such an institute would play a role in reconstructing the capacity of the tertiary education sector in Aceh by placing an Australian staff member in the social sciences to cooperate with an Indonesian counterpart and run short courses which would increase research and teaching capacity.

At present the emphasis, or the aim, is to focus this on the social sciences, and the suggestion was made that this should really be expanded into the natural sciences, engineering, health and education – in other words, precisely those areas which will need to be rebuilt in order to have a direct impact on the reconstruction effort.

Just very briefly, some of the other priorities which our group canvassed but didn’t really have much time to go into in much detail were things like the role of scholarships, obviously a tremendous need, both for the general student population in Aceh – many students, for example, from Aceh study in other parts of Indonesia, their families have been killed and so forth and they are unable to continue with their studies – and also in terms of scholarships for rebuilding capacity in the teaching staff of the universities.

Libraries and computer facilities were also mentioned, such facilities already having been quite poor before the tsunami as a result of years of conflict and neglect.

The question of the arts and culture more generally, local forms of cultural knowledge, was put on the table although we didn’t really discuss it in great detail. And also a continuing need to develop our knowledge and understanding of the political and social context in the area.

Group 5: Risk – governance and policy
Rapporteur: Anita Dwyer

Powerpoint presentation (32KB)

We realised we were the only group with ‘risk’ in our title, and we thought it was quite pertinent that it also be linked with policy and governance.

In defining the problem, which was a fairly broad one, we focused on risk management practices in general. We did tap in to the tsunami, but we were looking at more of a broad, holistic approach to risk management. When we talked about risk we looked at issues such as hazard, communities, vulnerability – the complex relationships that actually come forward and place people at risk from certain events.

These aren’t just my ideas but are representative of the group, and we did have people from government and industry as well putting forward ideas.

In terms of our current knowledge and capacity, I did want to acknowledge the difference between knowledge and capacity. I think we recognised that in Australia we do have a fairly high-level knowledge in many areas, especially in our policy and governance framework. We are catching up in those areas with regard to risk management, and as a result that is reflected in a little bit of a lag in our capacity, perhaps, when we look at our regional contribution.

First we looked at some of the current drivers in government. Many people are familiar with the Australia New Zealand Standard 4360 (ASNZS:4360) on risk management, just recently updated. We acknowledge that it is a very basic manual but it is not comprehensive. It gives a great introduction to perhaps some of the elements of risk management, but we recognise that for the purposes of policy and governance it is not as comprehensive as perhaps we would like it to be.

The recent COAG Review into Natural Disasters – and I know the bushfire one is to be released fairly soon – is perhaps our current leading comprehensive policy into natural disasters and risk management. I think it is quite an innovative piece of research, and it looks at many issues that are very complex – 66 recommendations, many of which are being addressed by various departments across all three levels of government in Australia at the moment.

One of the other drivers in government at the moment, which is picked up in the COAG review, is the need for efficient allocation of resources – that is, cost-benefit analyses. How we do these and what sorts of results we are looking for are another question, but I think there is the recognition now that we do need to take a step back and actually understand the broader picture of risk so that we know where to best place resources.

We are in a phase of emergency risk management in Australia at the moment where we are moving from just response and relief to also incorporating mitigation and recovery measures. That was acknowledged in the COAG review.

We also looked at issues of responsibility, in terms of some of the current drivers in government and the policy developments: local versus national, as well as private versus government. This may be a factor of our complex government structure, in which we have three levels of government, but also the issue of risk and responsibility – who is responsible for certain aspects of risk, and where can we best channel some of those responsibilities?

In looking at our current knowledge and capacity we did focus a little bit on our three-tiered government system. We looked at the federal government; we do actually have a role at the federal level in terms of leadership and coordination. The states, under our Constitution, have responsibility for emergency management, so that responsibility still lies with the states. And local governments do have duty of care. But we did recognise that states and local government are often underresourced and also highly variable in their emergency risk capacity. When we are coordinating and leading this at the national level, having that variability, and also perhaps underresource issues, play a significant role in how we actually administer some of our emergency management policy initiatives.

The red point there, on holistic risk management: we did look at perhaps the broad framework that many emergency managers would be familiar with, and some researchers in the audience as well: what we call PPRR, Prevention – which is also now coined Mitigation – Preparation, Response and Recovery. We recognise that in government different PPRR responsibilities lie with different agencies, and at the federal level these are traditionally on the preparation and response areas. So perhaps at a national level we are lacking in some of the prevention or mitigation, and long-term community recovery issues as well. A lot of these are picked up by local and state government.

We do have activities in place in the various agencies to look at some of these holistic risk issues – and by that I mean the PPRR – including with tsunami risk, but we are still in those early stages and I guess that is perhaps where the lag in capacity versus knowledge is in our governance system at the moment.

In looking at the gaps: at the moment we recognise that we need a government structure that supports holistic risk management approaches. While we have shifted towards an integrated approach, and the COAG review very much supports such an approach, we still lack a model, which we talked about in our group as, for example, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. That actually is a fairly good package. They look at all processes of risk management, from the technical side down to the social and environmental and the policy, and they also have quite a good federal–state relationship.

In the federal government/state government/local government area, in terms of holistic disaster management responsibility we perhaps don’t have leading agencies. We do have some leading agencies for some aspects of PPRR, but not the holistic process.

We looked at the lack of linkage between recovery and mitigation, and we do think that that is being addressed in certain areas within Australia at the moment.

If we look a little bit further abroad into our region, we find issues associated with aid and response – how do we link this to sustainable recovery? We didn’t come up with an answer to that one.

We looked at one of the main gaps, in databases on disasters and infrastructure hazards. Databases and comprehensive data collection activities will allow us to do analysis and get a greater understanding before we actually go into an area such as Sumatra after the event.

We tapped in to the issue of communication between NGOs, government and researchers. I noticed someone from Questacon raised that this morning, and I think it is quite a pertinent issue for government as well, not just scientists.

In further considering some of the gaps in our knowledge and capacity we also looked at regional integration and approach to risk management. We did mention that the tsunami was perhaps the first event that could have required Australia to link with regions in terms of affecting Australia. We have had many natural disasters here – bushfire, flood and so forth – but very few of them may have required or did require strong linkages with our region in order to assist us. So we looked at that as being an issue as well.

One of the gaps is making decisions in government based on evidence and risk-based research. We did in this capacity see risk assessments as a form of regional aid. We looked at a gap in the link between regional organisations and we noted that there are some recent links with BAKORNAS, the Indonesian version, I understand, or similar to EMA. And also we noted the lack of cross-disciplinary understanding to contribute to holistic pictures of risk and holistic decision making.

In terms of our national contributions, we looked at better coordination and leadership which will enable us to better respond in a holistic manner – again the PPRR, the entire process of risk management – to regional disasters. We felt that Australia has a very strong resource base to look at risk research, which many countries in our region do not currently have the capacity to do. And we can contribute this in a capacity-building manner.

We can use risk assessments as a way to give public confidence and communicate information, and we can make the link between regional risk assessments and ongoing aid and development programs. Coordination of aid is also something we can also assist with, and we also looked at the leadership of holistic risk management, again emphasising the entire risk management process as something that Australia has high-level knowledge in.

I thought I would give us just a quick take-home sentence. In conclusion, we felt that by linking holistic risk management, including risk assessments, we can actually contribute to sustainable economic development. I think it is a strong tool that we can use in terms of not just responding with aid in the response and relief phase but also contributing our aid in terms of risk assessments in the region as a form of mitigation and long-term community recovery as well.

Questions/discussion

Peter Osman – I wondered if you could comment with regard to databases and risk assessments. There was mention of an Indonesian policy document several volumes thick, but only written in Indonesian. Could you comment on the possibility of accessing the kind of knowledge that might exist in such a document?

Anita Dwyer – I have to admit I wasn’t familiar with the document until it was raised this morning. I don’t know how we can actually seize on the opportunity to get that information. I think there is a need to be able to do that. While we do consider our process for developing risk assessments as fairly effective, I am sure that there are ways that we can actually improve our risk assessment processes as well, and the Indonesian experience would be valuable.

If I could just tap on to the database and data issue: the COAG Review into Natural Disasters recognised the need for consistent post-disaster data collection. It is something that the federal government is looking at at the moment; numerous federal agencies are working with the states closely to actually look at Australia’s capacity for collecting data, so that we can better understand some of these costs long-term to the communities and local economies. When our group were looking at our contribution in terms of developing risk assessments for the region, we saw some of that as being quite useful, whereby we can seize on the processes and the methods that we use here to actually contribute to a data collection process and risk assessments in Indonesia.

Peter Osman – Could I just amplify a little bit. I remember hearing on several occasions from people working in developing countries that they saw many data resources and surveys that  had been carried out but were never used. Is there a place, do you think, for obtaining pre-tsunami data, and making sure that we not only create new data but access the old?

Anita Dwyer – Absolutely. One of the presenters this morning, talking on mental health, mentioned the need to avoid reinventing the wheel, and I think that as researchers – me being one of them – we are very aware of that issue. Yes, I think that pre-disaster information, in any post-disaster collection activity, will always be valuable. We always need to know what the current state of the community is, their priorities, and some of their current economic and social data, in order to understand the impact. So yes, that data collection is valuable now, even before a disaster.

Chair – If I could raise a question: in the regional risk assessment, do you need to take into account cultural differences in the understanding of what is risk and risk awareness, risk acceptance, risk calibration and so on?

Anita Dwyer – Yes. Not having undertaken a regional risk assessment I am not 100 per cent sure, but yes, in any risk assessment the idea is that it is the most objective way of trying to understand the risks posed to a community. So by actually having that scientific approach you try to take a step back and incorporate all of the issues. Cultural issues would definitely influence that. And in collecting risk information the hazard data is just part of that. The elements within that community, as well as the vulnerability of those communities and their infrastructure and their priorities, would definitely influence the risk to that community. So incorporating cultural and local community issues is definitely an aspect of a comprehensive risk assessment.

Group 6: Longer-term issues: Economic, social, cultural, environmental
Rapporteur: Dr Lenore Lyons

Powerpoint presentation (54KB)

Just by way of introduction, I would like to make a few comments about the group itself. We had a number of people who had on-ground expertise in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, and brought their experiences to our discussion. We had representatives from a range of different disciplines and across a range of industries. However, due to the time constraints that we faced in looking at four dimensions – cultural, social, economic and environmental – we felt that we weren’t able to give comprehensive attention to each of these dimensions. At the same time, we felt that emphasis needed to be given to unpacking each dimension but also recognising their interconnectedness and the dynamic relationships that emerged between them.

So, facing those constraints, what we did was talk at a broader level rather than focusing on each of these dimensions separately.

In addressing that very first question, What is our current knowledge and capacity? – in terms of the situation on the ground what do we know? We know that there has been a differential impact on communities, nations and economies, that not each nation faced the tsunami disaster in the same way and that different communities within those nations have been differentially impacted.

We recognise a range of macro-level phenomena, many of which have been mentioned today already: poor communities have been the most affected, demographic change has been one of the most significant outcomes in terms of death rates in the region, there has been an enormous impact on livelihoods in terms of the environmental degradation and its effect on agriculture and fisheries as well as other types of industries like tourism, and the environmental dimensions of this are still being examined, as we speak, in terms of the impacts of salination and other kinds of problems.

We also know that there have been a range of micro-level issues faced by individuals in those communities, as well as those who have sought to assist them – trauma, fatigue and fear being amongst those – but also a certain level of resilience amongst those communities.

So that is what we know about what is happening now.

We also know that in relation to strategies and interventions to address the longer-term impact of the tsunami disaster we must involve local communities. There needs to be a sense of responsibility and ownership amongst these communities. Any strategies need to be sustainable over the long term. They also need, obviously, to be cost-effective and they need to be politically acceptable – and that itself is not an easy task.

We also know that Australia has important and demonstrated expertise in a range of areas: in sociocultural issues and contexts, in language skills, in disaster management, in technical and scientific knowledge, and also in broad knowledges in the social sciences and the humanities, which we focused on specifically, including for example studies of demographic change – demographic change being one of the issues that were raised as an important and significant issue for us to examine. We have expertise existing in Australia already on these types of issues.

That’s what we know. What we suspect is that our knowledge, however, may be inaccurate. We are faced, obviously – and this has been mentioned by some of the other groups – by a lack of on-the-ground experience or expertise. It may be politically tainted, on both sides. It may not be sustainable over the long term: I have mentioned that we have pre-existing strengths in our knowledge of the Asia-Pacific, in terms of area studies and language skills, but our language skills and our sociocultural knowledge are not sustainable over the long term. For example, the recently released report by the Asian Studies Association of Australia shows very clearly that we are looking at a demographic transition in relation to skills and expertise in Australia, which shows very clearly that that expertise is in the hands of those over 40, in their 50s and 60s, very near retirement, and that we have not been building capacity in these areas amongst younger generations.

We also suspect that our knowledge is very much culturally bounded and value-laden. We know this from over 50 years of development experience in the region, development experience which has shown that when we go in with preconceived ideas, supposedly built on locally specific knowledges but with a certain lens attached to them, we can in fact be impacting in ways that we had not thought of, and we don’t actually see those impacts for several years.

So, in assessing what we know and what we suspect, in relation to the priority gaps in our knowledge and capacity what should we be doing?

We recognise that one of the major gaps is that we don’t really have a clear idea of what is actually happening on the ground. Our knowledge is fragmented; we know that some individuals have particular expertise and have been working on very specific projects, but that knowledge is not often shared and in many areas there are big gaps. There is a lack of coordination across disciplines, and for industries and institutions. In fact, there is increasing competition – encouraged, obviously, by the federal government – in relation to higher education, which does in fact disintegrate pre-existing collaborations or the possibilities for networks.

There has in many cases been an inability or, in many cases, a lack of infrastructure to disseminate research findings, whether they are in the science, technical, social science or humanities areas, so we need to develop strategies for sharing information and sharing those research findings with those who can use them best.

And we also, obviously, need to draw on the expertise of those who have local and on-the-ground expertise and experience. That is not always happening. There have been several references to a lack of knowledge of the region or a lack of language skills; in many cases that knowledge does exist but we are not actually linking up with the right people.

Other types of gaps: we raised questions in relation to potential gaps in expertise. Are we using our local capacity in culture and language? We are not really clear about that. Are we identifying other key resources in the community that we could utilise? Once again we are not very clear about that. Are we building on the experiences of those who have built and maintained successful cross-cultural partnerships? There has been a lot of discussion about the need to involve local communities, to ensure ownership of decision making in relation to involving partners on the ground. There have been successful examples of cross-cultural partnerships in this country, for example, and elsewhere, but what we aren’t experiencing, I think, is actually bringing in people who have had that experience and asking them to talk about how they have done that and how this can be translated into other arenas.

We also feel that we don’t know how decisions made in one area are impacting on other sectors. As I explained, we were asked to look at four dimensions. We are not very clear about how the decisions that are being made, for example, in relation to addressing environmental degradation will actually impact on social and cultural dimensions.

Why are these gaps significant? We decided that these gaps are important because decisions made now will obviously have long-term effects. A lot of the decisions that are made have been made on the run – necessarily – but we don’t know what their long-term impacts will be. These gaps are important because one size does not fit all when it comes to developing solutions, and we need to ensure that our sociocultural knowledge informs our scientific and technical work, and vice versa. And I think that is where we have a lot of work to do.

In addressing the third question, then, What contribution can we make at a national level to the region? we have four specific recommendations. The first one is to enhance teaching, learning and research capacity in Australia in relation to social, cultural, economic and political knowledge of our region, particularly by strengthening area studies, by addressing language training in Asian languages – an area that has dropped off considerably in recent years – and also by emphasising the important insights that we can learn from historical studies, even of other geographical regions, in relation to disaster management.

Our second recommendation relates to training and education, in effect of communities themselves (there has been some mention of this already); language training in relation, for example, to English language training to enable better communication between us and our regional partners; graduate training to replace the loss of human resources; technical training in disaster management and reconstruction and relief; and exchange programs, which can do all of those things in a variety of different ways.

Thirdly, we need to better harness Australia’s expertise by building networks across disciplines, by cooperating and collaborating across industry and across institutions – I have already mentioned increasing competition. What we may find in the aftermath of this disaster is that there are a lot of, for example, ARC applications that will go in from individuals located in specific institutions and that they are not linked in any way with what other individuals are doing across the nation. Other things would be identifying key resources in migrant and expatriate communities and using those, and pooling resources in developing effective dissemination strategies.

Finally, this is looking beyond Australia’s specific contributions and talking more about how we can build regional capacity. The suggestion was to develop an international or regional pact to address natural disasters. This would be a regional-level body or organisation which would focus on disaster recovery, so that rather than looking for Australian-based solutions we would focus on developing an architecture for regional collaboration that would indeed find solutions that build on local knowledge and capacity, and address the problems of future issues around natural disasters in that way rather than trying to find all the solutions within our own borders.

Group 7: Technology and ICT for recovery and rehabilitation
Rapporteur: Steve Pendry

Powerpoint presentation (10,174KB)

In looking at the issue of applying technology, the sort of summary I guess I could make is that by and large the technology or ICT applications would largely be focused on infrastructure restoration.

An infrastructure perspective
(Click on image for a larger version)

In terms of infrastructure perspective, as you can see from the slide it covers a whole range of things, some of which may not necessarily be directly applicable in some of the more remote regions. In the discussions of our group we tended to focus in on a number of things, particularly health, education – which fits under government services – food supplies, things of that nature.

In addressing Question 1, What is the current knowledge or capacity? we initially started talking in terms of the immediate response versus the long-term restoration or rehabilitation phase following a disaster. In that discussion it became apparent that mostly people felt that the emergency response capability that Australia has, and our knowledge in that area, whilst not perfect is reasonably acceptable. We heard this morning from speakers that within a matter of a day or so committees had been set up to manage the process; food and emergency supplies were dispatched; you had medical people on site within a matter of a couple of days. So we felt that rather than have our group spend its time focusing on that aspect of the recovery, we would focus on the longer-term rehabilitation phase.

So in addressing that question we agreed that in rehabilitation it was more than simply going back to the status quo and trying to restore people to where they were. The opportunity exists, as a result of this disaster – and any future events – to actually build the community to a point where it not only had its standard culture and existing infrastructure established but was better placed to deal with any potential future incidents, which may be tsunami or climate-related activities.

We recognised that Australia has high expertise in information and communication technologies, technologies generally. We have expertise in agriculture, health, education. But we looked then to what was actually going to discriminate the contribution that Australia might make in the rehabilitation of disaster-affected areas. We recognised that one of the things that Australia was good at was in fact applying technologies in support of reasonably remote rural-type economies and communities, compared with, say, the US and Europe, which maybe didn’t have that same requirement.

And of those sorts of technologies and the sorts of things that were needed to support those more remote communities, we identified that simple, cost-effective communications were possibly one of the keys, because they provided the underpinning infrastructure on which would be possible to then grow other applications – for example, delivery of distance health and distance education, which we saw as crucial to the restoration of the capabilities in disaster-affected areas. In addition, Australia had expertise in things like low-cost solar energy systems, and obviously power supplies in disaster-affected areas would be an issue of concern. It is no good people going over there, for example, relying on mobile phones if they can’t end up recharging their batteries.

We then turned our attention, having if you like scoped our discussion down to something that we felt was manageable, to then address what might be our priority gaps in our knowledge and capacity.

We identified that we have significant knowledge in Australia in a whole raft of technological areas, particularly in the ICT domain. But what we don’t seem to have is a whole-of-nation coordination of those pieces of expertise. There is collaboration between various scientific research organisations, between universities, but I don’t think there is any argument that a lot of our knowledge is fragmented and, even yet, we do not seem to have the necessary coordination of that activity, particularly when it needs to be pulled together in support of a disaster recovery effort.

In addition, it appears that the coordination of linkages between our country and those disaster-affected countries was lacking in a number of areas. This could easily point to a need for better command-and-control type capabilities. Certainly it leads to a requirement for, simply, coordination at higher levels.

We identified that there were certainly gaps in our geographic information systems, and that that knowledge would have facilitated all phases of the Australian response to the tsunami recovery. Whilst we have got a variety of geographic information systems held by various agencies in Australia, by and large they are not linked, we don’t have a ready means of data mining across those various geographic information databases, and by and large they are probably very lacking in terms of what they contain in the way of information about some of the regional countries, in particular those areas that were adversely affected by the tsunami. And many of those geographic information databases don’t contain demographic information, for example, that would have been vital in assisting with the planning and the execution of any recovery.

Furthermore, there is a large number of agencies that are involved in the disaster recovery, not only in the emergency phase but also in the longer-term restoration of normality to those countries. There are obviously a lot of lessons being learnt by those various agencies, but at this stage we don’t see any evidence of an integrated lessons-learned database being developed so that that information can be then used for development of our response in future contingencies. Even, for example, within the Department of Defence we made an inquiry directly to the 7th Brigade, who are currently supporting activities in Aceh, to see what information we could gain from them. And even though they are still operational in that area, as yet they have actually not documented many of the lessons learnt. They are certainly aware of some key issues, and no doubt given time these things will be adequately documented, but the extent to which they might then be put into a form that is accessible by other people, or into a database where they can actually form part of a general knowledge base on disaster recovery, is probably somewhat doubtful.

In addition, we certainly don’t have databases of local knowledge, and other speakers have raised this point consistently. The reality of it is that we don’t appear to know particularly much about the region, the culture, the people, the values that they hold and therefore what will and will not be acceptable insofar as restoration of the infrastructure in those countries is concerned. So that is an area, I think, that a heck of a lot more work can be done on, and it may well be that it will involve access to databases in those countries – if indeed they have themselves, and that may even be somewhat questionable.

On the third question, of what our national contribution to the region might be, the focus of the group was fairly broad, as I said initially. Therefore, what I have taken the liberty of doing, I guess, is trying to integrate a number of the recommendations of the group into somewhat of a more holistic proposal which first of all is based on identifying a technology that the local community has the ability to ‘up-take’. There is no point in wheeling truckloads of very high-tech equipment that, once the providers of that have left, the country is unable to sustain and that ultimately will fall into disuse. It simply opens the door to predators that might want to go in and soak up some of the funding that has been provided to restore the country.

So the whole object of the exercise that we undertook here was to build and provide a capability that would create a sustainable community – and again other speakers have mentioned the need for whatever we do in this restoration process to actually lead to a sustainable outcome in the long term.

This proposal then was based around some sort of simple, low-cost communication system, potentially radio-based, that can be linked in to global warning systems for things like tsunami, cyclone and other natural disasters, hopefully to provide these people with enough early warning that the commensurate disaster in terms of deaths and so forth can be avoided. This would be, at the local level – the ‘last mile’ was also the issue mentioned as concerning people – how do you get from, say, a community-based system to each of the individuals? It is clearly, in a lot of these communities, not going to be mobile phone or even just local AM/FM radio, but you may have to resort to something like the traditional Australian country town fire alarm, where there are a few big sirens around town, they are linked in to this system, and a siren warns and people know that it is time to head for the high ground.

By using the system for a range of other things, such as distance education and health support, you will then in fact keep it exercised so it doesn’t fall into disuse. A lot of these things, if they are put there and they are only actually used when a disaster occurs, when you go to use them you find they are no longer functional. So it is imperative that it be used for further activities, such as the health and distance education. It would also provide, hopefully, remote access to GIS systems, to assist in things like restoration of agriculture and other development activities; it would provide intercommunity communications, creating increased national cohesion, economic development and general awareness across the community.

Questions/discussion

Michael Fay – Did you consider the applicability of Radio Australia as a pre-existing radio communication network that exists through FM stations right throughout the tsunami-belt countries and has a focus on health and education and training, as being able to be enhanced in some way to contribute this radio-based early warning system that you were discussing in your group?

Steve Pendry – The short answer to your question is no, we didn’t consider the Radio Australia aspect. I think mostly our focus was on the very small, remote villages, and the fact that most of the people within such a village were unlikely to have their own radio and therefore the ‘last mile’ issue was really the thing of concern. So we were looking more to some sort of centralised system that could be used as a community facility, but with a link between it and the individual people, for example for the early warning, through some sort of, as I mentioned earlier, siren system. Certainly if a radio-based system was put in, linkages to things like Radio Australia and its education programs would be another adjunct, if you like, to that.

Michael Fay – I just mention that because Radio Australia has links with FM stations in, for example, Medan and Padang on the west coast of Sumatra, so maybe AusAID would be interested in providing the radios that would allow people to make that last mile.

Group 8: Understanding and harnessing community response
Rapporteur: Nicholas Farrelly

Powerpoint presentation (31KB)

The tsunami focused the attention of all of us on the way that people tend, even in the harshest of circumstances, to pull together. As BBC, CCN and Al Jazeera flashed around those first dramatic and a bit ambiguous pictures, people started to wonder. Other people were wading through the muck and forming ad hoc teams, getting together as a group and looking for survivors. Other people still were just sitting and wondering how bad could this actually be. The tsunami, in many ways, shows us that communities respond. All sorts of communities respond.

Communities, as you all know, come in many shapes and sizes. They are certainly diverse. And the communities that I am talking about here are diverse too. We are not just talking about local communities, we are talking about ‘linked’ communities, trans-global communities and communities that exist only among those who are watching the same TV show.

What we have tried to do here is to get down to the local level, to a level where many of the other issues that have already been discussed today have real relevance in people’s lives. The aspirations and the ideas in those communities are as diverse as they are in this community, so we really need to bear that in mind as well. And of course we shouldn’t overlook the fact that within Australia there are communities, there are diasporas, there are other groups that can be drawn in to the process of broader community response.

To try and answer the first question, or to shed some light on how community relates to our current knowledge and capacity, we looked at the way that all of us are involved in communities and have built up certain networks and relationships that are relevant in this situation. As academics and other researchers, you probably all have networks of alumni and contacts from projects that you have been involved with in the past. Because of many very far-sighted Australian engagements with our region, we certainly don’t start from a hollow base. The base has been filled and now it is, I guess, a time to use some of those networks and relationships as we find them.

You might wonder whether having alumni in Indonesia is relevant, but the consensus in our group was that basically the networks that have been built up, even those that sometimes have fallen away, are still certainly relevant and still can be beneficial in the current context.

This is most important because it is those networks and those communities that we are all involved in that perhaps show where some of the weaknesses are. I know it has been mentioned by a number of previous speakers, but of course the alarming, in some cases, diminishment of interest in many parts of the Australian scholarly community in Indonesia and our close neighbours is in this case a real worry. Our group was particularly concerned that this has a real impact on how we can actually engage with communities on the ground.

We were concerned that there is perhaps a disconnect between what happens from the bottom up and what happens from the top down, and that somewhere in the middle there, perhaps at some provincial level or some other subregional level, there can be real problems. So it is important that the communities at the elite level, at a national level, can be tied much closer into the aspirations that exist at the local level.

We were also concerned in some ways that many of the communities that are relevant to this discussion of response no longer exist in a form that they existed in before 26 December, and that many of these communities were communities that were under stress anyway. There was conflict and in many places there was considerable trauma, whether through ongoing insurgency or through economic or other problems.

I guess the key issue that we wanted to focus on was perhaps the way that we could all better engage with some of the ‘hidden’ expertise. There has been much talk today of databases and other systems of making our knowledge accessible, and we certainly would agree with all of those.

When governments throughout the world tried to respond to some of those very dramatic events of 2001, they found, I think, much to their surprise perhaps in some quarters, that there was no readymade group of scholars and experts who could adequately advise them on developments in the Middle East and in other Islamic countries. They did not train up, over the decades, the Arabic speakers and the experts in the cultures and religions of those countries who could be helpful in their time of great challenge. And perhaps there is another lesson here, that Australians and everybody else cannot ignore in the long term some of these very important linguistic and cultural issues, because you just can’t ‘readymake’ a scholar of Indonesia, you cannot ‘readymake’ somebody who speaks fluent Javanese. It is just not possible. And because of that it needs to be a long-term and very engaged community response.

We figured that much of the expertise that Australia could offer in terms of engaging with local communities was in terms of the media and the Internet, and particularly in making connections. Australians, and particularly Australian academics, are often very good at networking, at creating things that join together. We were particularly impressed by some of the ideas that came from today’s case study from Papua New Guinea, and we feel that many of those ideas are relevant in this situation in the Indian Ocean.

And so to really do something here, the knowledge needs to be accessible, it needs to be integrated. There was much talk in our discussion group of a systems approach that brought together different types of knowledge and made it usable, beneficial and relevant to the situation that it was being used in.

We canvassed the idea of locally acceptable forms of governance, perhaps Islamic governance, that actually fitted with the aspirations and ideas that flowed in local communities, and we were particularly interested in making it easier to get access to the information that you need, to work at the community level.

In conclusion, I think it is important to emphasise that in the knowledge in this room and in the universities throughout Australia, there is considerable understanding of community responses and community issues. And because of that, people should not shy away from the challenge of getting involved. There are great opportunities for comparative research and perhaps there are almost unique and unprecedented opportunities to really contribute as social scientists, scientists, historians, to communities at that local level.

And the important thing to do here, we all agreed in the group, was to somehow bridge the gap between practice and operations, and what happens in the academy and among the academics.