AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005
Session 4: Panel discussion – The way forward
Chair: Professor Kurt Lambeck
Let me just go back to a comment that
John Zillman made this morning about the purpose of the National Academies
Forum (NAF). It is essentially to try and harness Australian expertise across
the science, engineering, humanities and social science disciplines – I think I
am quoting you correctly, John, here – to provide advice to government
agencies, advice that comes from largely the non-government part. Today’s
meeting has tried to do that, specifically to explore what expertise exists and
what should be done in this post-disaster phase.
It is worth commenting on how this meeting came about, because some questions have been asked about it. The meeting arose from a suggestion by DEST to the National Academies Forum to explore, in a general way, how this expertise that resides out there can be used in the post-tsunami period. Well, that is what we have been trying to do today, to try and get some sort of understanding of what knowledge we have, an understanding of what we think could be done and how we could contribute to this.
We are approaching now the end of the meeting, so in a sense where do we go from here? We do have a product to deliver, a report of today’s outcomes.
The report itself will include summaries of today’s presentations, the group reports (I thought those summaries from the rapporteurs were excellent), together with a series of overarching issues that we will have to try and extract from the group reports. And that is one of the things we want to try and explore a little bit in the discussion for the next half hour or so.
What I would really like to do now is first of all to ask the Chairs of the groups to see if there is anything that they wish to add, to fill in gaps, and in particular whether there are any comments they wish to make about overarching issues that haven’t been identified up to this point. I will just give the Chairs an opportunity to go around and add anything they wish to add, and then I am going to throw the meeting open to a general discussion.
Group 1: Warning and preparedness
Chair: Professor Brian Kennett
The warning issue is perhaps different to many of the others, in the sense that we have a model of what can be done, we know what technically is feasible; it is a matter of getting in place some of the ingredients, like buoys in the Indian Ocean that don’t exist, and then making the intergovernmental communications work to get warnings out to countries, and from governments to the people on the seashore. So there is a component there which is, in a sense, you know what to do but you have actually got to make it work in an Indian Ocean context.
The second part, in terms of preparedness, is really best described as an element of education at all levels – the education that can be provided for what we would normally anticipate to be relatively infrequent events. It means that ingraining this into the educational consciousness is probably the most effective mechanism.
Group 2: Sustainable reconstruction
Chair: Dr Allen Kearns
The thing that sticks out for me around sustainable reconstruction is that it is as important to look at the rebuilding of the sustainability of the natural systems and the social systems as the built infrastructure itself. In order to do that, I think it is necessary to take two approaches that were discussed in our group.
One is to identify a particular region or location at some scale – a city and its catchment, or some form of geographic entity – where integrated coastal zone management can be developed and practised and put into place, because sustainable reconstruction is going to require a long period of time and long engagement with communities and with government, and therefore it really needs any form of integration to be in a particularly nominated place.
Opposed to that, and somewhat aligned with it, is to focus on the importance of certain sectors which Australia has real strength in. I think that the mention earlier today around looking at sectors like education and health would be very, very important. So that may be a geographically dispersed approach across the whole of Aceh, but it is not to replace the earlier thing I mentioned, around an integrated coastal zone management approach in a particular location.
I think there has been a real difficulty for AusAID, as I understand, in dealing with multiple donors from all round the world, all wanting to get a project here and there, to bring about that integrated regional focus. It would almost be like partnering with a part of Aceh, and that would become the place where we could play out a lot of this fantastic knowledge we have here in Australia, which I think is in danger of being fragmented and not used to its full capacity.
Group 3: Health systems
Chair: Dr Moira McKinnon
Certainly the Australian health system has skills across a wide range but specific in themselves, such as epidemiology, trauma, lab response. The gaps and the challenges for the health system of Australia are to pull these skills into a deliverable system to fit in to what Indonesia needs.
I think there were four main points that came out of the discussion. One is the need for better data, and the data assessment to be quite broad across communicable diseases, mental health, vulnerabilities of population, and how we match that with the resources, not only in Australia but also in Indonesia.
The second is the concept of building health capacity in Indonesia. They have talked about wanting centres of excellence and a build-up of a body of really good health ability, even in public health research, to do, for example, their own epidemiology – so, ‘train the trainer’ – and even in physical institutes and international networks to be developed with developing health systems in Indonesia.
One of the challenges for health too I think is that health is an endpoint. So there are many endeavours going on that need to be pulled together and looked at in the risk-benefit, from the health situation, the health of the individual and the community. For example, I think our group talked about the siting of a village far away from the beach. In the long term that may be not beneficial to that population, in terms of its food supply, its children’s health. So there needs to be a holistic view to reconstruction, and I think health is the focus point of that. We are really looking at the health of the population.
Finally, on the Australian side, it is really clear that we need to become more aware of Indonesia throughout our education system – in our medical and nursing training, with tropical diseases we haven’t seen for a long time, but also in the general schooling, about languages.
Group 4: Continuity of knowledge
Chair: Dr Barbara Leigh
Knowledge, as all of you know, doesn’t just reside in universities. So in looking at where we might go for the future, we were looking at universities but also industry, also government, also local communities, looking at what individuals had to offer as well as what organisations had to offer – both within Indonesia and also within Australia.
We also recognised that ignorance exists in both countries too, and that we would want to address that ignorance within Australia so that Australia could become more literate, not just in knowledge about the tsunami but also about Asia.
I guess the final point that I would like to make is that Aceh is at war, and I don’t know that we have addressed that so much. I would like to commend to you the work that Dr Ed Aspinall has done on that, because the political constraint of operating in a war zone, in any kind of reconstruction, is really quite considerable. And to understand the history of that conflict and the nature of the political conflict, I really would commend you to read his work and the work of Dr Tony Reid, who is in Singapore, because that will influence the kind of things that it is possible to do.