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.

Group 5: Risk – governance and policy
Chair: Matt Hayne, standing in for Dr John Schneider

The shift in focus that we are seeing at the moment towards issues of mitigation really provides Australia and also the international community with wonderful opportunities to really explore issues that just haven’t been on our agenda before. There are issues of both strategic and tactical nature. They do support emergency management recovery and response activities – for example, modelling of specific events and how we actually mobilise our responses to those – but also in a strategic manner we are looking at land use planning, we are looking at prioritisation of mitigation options and we are assessing things like economic and social impact on communities.

It allows you to sell ideas, sell them to government, sell research initiatives to government, in very much a quantitative manner.

One of the problems that I see we have hit recently is that we are doing an about-face in our focus as we redirect towards mitigation and how we actually tackle that issue. It is almost like steering a battleship: it takes quite some time to actually get people around to thinking in that way. I think we have sold the notion very well of what can be achieved. But I think we are seeing the science take some time to actually catch up to the promises that have been made.

So that is one problem, but it is really quite easy to overcome. It is an issue of coordination and prioritisation that needs to come from the Commonwealth government and I think that is just lagging a little bit behind with the science itself.

Group 6: Longer-term issues – economic, social, cultural, environmental
Chair: Professor Stephanie Fahey

Chair – I understand that Professor Fahey, from Group 6, has had to leave. If there is nobody else from that group who wishes to add something, we will go to Group 7.

Group 7: Technology and ICT for recovery and rehabilitation
Chair: Niel Bryans

I wanted to bring out three or four points which might be the basis for potential initiatives which came out of our group.

One point related to a topic which a number have talked about. That is, while Australia has very significant skills and capacities to contribute, we might do it more efficiently if we had a better coordination mechanism so that we could, in fact, have a whole-of-systems approach. Anita Dwyer referred to it as PPRR, and I agree entirely with that sort of description. It is as one which looks at all the dimensions of how we might provide support across the whole response and rehabilitation and sustainability spectrum, and then address how each part of the nation can contribute to that.

The second, perhaps allied to the first, is how do we use information we have got stored within this nation, and perhaps within the other nations as well. A number of us have talked about databases, and certainly I think there may be a case for a national GIS system where we could take the pockets of excellent GIS data which exist, I am sure, in many institutions within Australia and help to develop a national capability, a national database. That would, of course, have maps and it would have...[inaudible]...for knowledge as well, and so it might provide a comprehensive resource which could be drawn upon for planning and disaster relief.

Also, I think, we are seeing a number of institutions going through lessons-learned activities and it might be useful to try and pull those together in a more comprehensive way, rather than having them isolated within the various institutions.

So that represents at least one potential initiative.

Then our group looked at what is a uniquely Australian capability, and we recognised that our capacity to support remote communities, as we do in Australia through our use of radio technology to reach out to disparate parts of Australia, our capacity to deliver remote health services and education services, et cetera, gives us a kind of differentiator from many of our European and other colleagues. So we do have a unique skill to use there.

So if we were, as suggested in our presentation, to look at basic communications systems, fit for purpose for regional communities, and use that as the basis for creating sustainable communities, because they could not only be linked in to the warning systems but then be used to provide basic health information delivery services, education delivery services, and actually help them in some basic economics, in terms of at least being aware of what is going on in terms of markets, et cetera, and then looking at how they can interact with members of other little communities around their region, then this would be both a community-building activity and something which produces coherence within regions.

This seemed to be quite a practical thing that might be attractive and it is something which we have got, I think, a feel for in Australia. So it was another initiative.

Group 8: Understanding and harnessing community response
Chair: Professor Graeme Turner

Consistent with the theme that has come from so many of the groups is the need for the social and historical and cultural context to be filled in before people attempt to develop initiatives or to do research. It is good to see that is happening. It is slightly alarming, though, in that that is happening now, in response to historical events that we have been witnessing, but at a time when our capacity to provide expertise in these areas is actually diminishing and has done, as a number of speakers have pointed out, over time.

Nevertheless, we felt that now is the time to really think about the way in which you would develop integrated research activities or integrated development activities that did involve the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities in a properly coordinated way. And if we are going to do that, then probably we are going to have to find a way of producing networks that will deliver the information about people who are working in those various disciplinary locations, on areas that will resonate with each other and will contribute. That is probably something that we have got a long way to go to achieve, but it is something that the National Academies Forum could certainly take the lead in.

General discussion
Chair: Professor Kurt Lambeck

Now I would like to throw the discussion open to the rest of you who haven’t had an opportunity to talk.

Beris Gwynne – First, my congratulations to the National Academies Forum for an outstanding initiative.

I am from the Foundation for Development Cooperation, which is based in Brisbane. We are an independent development think tank, non-government, and we have been involved in the international development business for 15 or so years.

I would like to make two points and then offer a cautionary note. First, I would agree that there is a considerable amount of untapped expertise in Australia which could be brought to bear in the current circumstance. It has been a great concern to us that not only has Asian studies been in decline but development studies is now considered passé. It has resulted, I think, from a national disengagement in relation to our region and to multilateral efforts generally.

I would like to acknowledge, in respect of that expertise, the NGO sector, which isn’t well represented here today. There are outstanding Australians working with NGOs who have a lot of experience in these areas and who can add to the practical implementation of these discussions. I would also like to note that AusAID have been struggling with diminishing resources now for many years, and there are excellent people in AusAID who are also not represented.

The second thing I would like to note is that we have, I think, an unprecedented opportunity, through rather tragic circumstances, to take advantage of a level of political commitment that we haven’t seen before, and additional funding which has been made available, to respond to the situation with a 21st century response – that is to say, not just reinstating what was there before but actually trying to use the opportunity to take a few steps forward. But we need a coherent strategy that would be developed in consultation with regional partners.

And I would have to say that the eight break-out groups that you have identified would be the eight that I would have chosen as well, and allow us to have input in a number of areas.

The second thing that we need besides a coherent strategy is a process, and we are not good at process in this country. Multidisciplinary activity isn’t easy to do, as you have just intimated. Multisector partnerships don’t work either. So we desperately need that leadership and coordination that another speaker referred to just a few minutes ago.

The cautionary note is that I think we need to keep our discussions today in perspective. The same number of people who died in the tsunami die every month from preventable causes, and so this discussion needs to be about reducing vulnerability, not just responding to a disaster.

But I do think that, if there were to be a coherent strategy and if we could tap the energy and resources available, there could be a tremendous opportunity to reinvigorate Australia’s engagement with the region in a whole-of-government approach.

Chair – These are very helpful comments, and I couldn’t have put some of these points better myself, really. I certainly fully support the comments about the past distancing of government policies from the region. The case of the tsunami directed attention to the fact that the agency in this country that is most appropriate for making assessments was really not in a position to do so, because it had been told to retreat back to the Australian territory. Now, of course, there is a comment, ‘Why didn’t you make the predictions properly?’ et cetera. So there are some lessons to be learnt there, and I think a clear statement from government on the policy for the future would be very helpful in that regard.

Michael Fay – I would like to pick up two points, one that Allen Kearns made about integrated coastal zone management and whether to focus on a particular region or to focus on sectors, and also a point that Barbara Leigh made about the conflict situation in Aceh making it difficult at an education, a planning and a political level to know really which way to go in relation to things happening in Aceh at the moment.

In terms of an integrated coastal zone management region, the borders of Aceh, north Sumatra and west Sumatra, when you look at it ecologically or environmentally, are actually artificial. So I would encourage us to be looking at the island communities stretching from west Sumatra, north Sumatra and Aceh, where the environmental problems that face the local communities on those islands are all the same, and to look at what non-formal Australian linkages there are into those island communities – non-government linkages and the small and medium enterprise engagement with that region, particularly the coastal zone and the offshore islands – and I think we have got a better chance of actually attacking the causes of poverty which impact on the destruction of those island communities if we look at it as an integrated coastal zone, rather than saying we are just going to pick one island because it happens to be in Aceh, or one island because it happens to be in north Sumatra. I think there are common features that we need to look at, crossing islands and provinces.

Leon Mann – It seems to me that there is a missing group of institutions in the analysis. If we look at Indonesia, we say, ‘Well, where is the equivalent of CSIRO?’ because there is an equivalent in Indonesia, ‘and what knowledge is that institution bringing to bear in order to find solutions?’ There are no academies in Indonesia, and I think if the National Academies Forum, and the four Academies in this country, could do something in order to advance that – and certainly it is both a political and a social agenda – that would be all to the good.

But you also look at what must be the equivalent of NGOs of various kinds, and universities, in which there is expertise. In Indonesia there is no doubt capability to do survey research, to do mapping of various kinds, et cetera, to examine resilience. How do we engage with that? Are we engaging with them? What are they doing? It seems to me that is a part of the ‘hidden’ knowledge which hasn’t been manifest during this day, and I think it would be useful to actually find out what they are doing and, if there is nothing very much happening, to see how we might be able to involve ourselves and assist it.

Chair – There is a little bit of progress in that area. There is a body called FASAS, the Federation of Asian Scientific Academies and Societies, and in fact the heads of the individual members will be meeting here in September. This was planned long before the tsunami occurred, of course, though one of the issues on the agenda will be exactly to explore that.

Indonesia, incidentally, is not well represented on that body, which forms part of a larger body called the Inter-Academy Panel. That has as one of its functions capacity-building, trying to build up academies in countries. The focus has been very much in Africa and Central America, South America and the Caribbean; there hasn’t been so much emphasis yet in this part of the world. But that is on the agenda.

Moira McKinnon – As I said to my group, I was actually privileged to be part of the health working group of the Australian-Indonesian Ministerial Forum which met a couple of weeks ago in Australia. Just picking up on the last comments: one of the points the Indonesians raised was that they wanted academies, they wanted to develop centres of excellence, they wanted to have a ‘belly’ of research and a ‘belly’ of ability beyond just the field or the developing-country type of face. They said that with trepidation, but I think that was a really strong sentiment that was coming through, that they want to be there on the international face and that they want to be able to deal with their own problems within a decade by having a body of science within Indonesia behind them. So I was just picking up on that comment, to reinforce that. I don’t know how we can do that, but a billion dollars over five years is something that we can look at.

Peter Stevens – Just two or three small comments, if I may. Firstly, it has been a remarkable day, and as Allen Kearns was saying to me at afternoon tea, talk about information overload! We have certainly received an awful lot, particularly through the reports of the eight working groups.

Two comments, if I may. I don’t know whether it would have been appropriate, but I certainly think it would have been: was anybody from the Indonesian Embassy at high level rank invited to attend and to tell us something of the Indonesian point of view of this forum?

Secondly – not waiting for an answer to that – the title of the forum was ‘Harnessing Australian Expertise for Recovery’. Until Ms Beris Gwynne spoke a few minutes ago, I didn’t think there were any NGO people here. (I’m pleased to see that I am partly wrong, anyway.) Secondly, and very importantly in my view, the thing that most of the people who are damaged and distraught and destroyed in the tsunami really need is the way to make a buck. They have got to get back to work and make a buck. Is there anybody here from the private sector who can tell us something about how to set up small and medium enterprises in a place like Banda Aceh?

Chair – The first question I will deflect to Sue [Serjeantson]. Perhaps you are the best person.

Sue Serjeantson – The Asia-Pacific Futures Research Network has given this conference considerable support, and it was actually sponsoring, I think, three people to come from the region today. As we know, events this week have disrupted many people’s lives, especially those at the front line of response.

Chair – Can anybody from the floor comment or respond to those other questions, or challenges?

Beris Gwynne – It might be a partial response. There is considerable discussion going on at the moment about the role of micro-finance, being small-scale savings/lendings schemes, micro-insurance, which is typically linked to the re-establishment of small enterprises in these sorts of situations.

In terms of the private sector role, sadly there is a feeding frenzy at the moment because there are so many millions of dollars flying around. I think that needs to be separated from the notion of micro-enterprise development.

Dave Buckley – I think I am one of the few industry representatives here today. I have just returned from six weeks in Sri Lanka and yes, I will wholeheartedly endorse your comment that the main thing people want is support to get their livelihoods back, be it the livelihood that was taken from them – their fishing or agriculture – or just to earn a buck, as you say. They don’t want to sit in camps; they want to actually start being productive, start rebuilding their lives. The number of times we were stopped by people who said, ‘Look, can your organisation buy us tools so I can repair my house, repair my boat?’

A number of the NGOs are doing very good work over there in relation to cash-for-work programs, just harnessing people out of the camps to go into the affected areas, recover building materials, remove debris, clean up the place so they can begin to rebuild those communities. Other programs are just simple stuff like making concrete blocks to make the building materials. There is a lot of that going on.

There is a flip side to that, though, in that the NGOs who are flush with cash are paying a lot of money, and unfortunately that is causing artificial inflation within those communities. So it is a balancing act as far as giving these people their livelihood back and giving them an income is concerned, without actually causing the local economy to over-inflate and ultimately collapse when these people are removed.

But yes, you are 100 per cent right that they are desperate to re-establish their livelihoods and earn some money, and rebuild their lives.

Nambiar Sadanandan – Just a couple of comments. These communities made their livelihood substantially on a natural resource base – fishing, agriculture, small timber growing, woodlots or whatever – and maybe a little bit of tourism in some parts of it. So obviously one important thing we can do is to build that natural resource base in a sustainable way for the long haul. Therefore here is the challenge for us, both as a group and as a nation, that we really are committed to building these things for the sustainable journey rather than for the immediate relief, because very soon this big flush of money and international attention will disappear. You would have seen it over and over again in many disasters. That will go away by Christmas time, I can assure you. And then people are left to at least five decades of misery, unless we rebuild the sustainable resource base upon which for centuries their livelihood was built. So that is one point: we need to really understand the difference between sustainable physical resources and sustainable natural resource bases, and the governance required to drive the agenda in between the two.

Also I just want to alert ourselves that this is a discussion without stakeholders. The true stakeholders are out there. Imagine we are one of those villagers out there. What would I require as the father or an uncle?

The third one I want to remind ourselves is that this exercise does not become, without our intending to be so, a way of bringing our research itself on a robust basis. I agree we need to do that, but it can easily turn around in a way that our focus gets to be how to build our research in a coordinated way, rather than looking from the receiving end of the misery.

Michael Fay – As one of the few representatives from the private sector I think I should respond to the question about what can be done by small and medium enterprises, and what is being done by some of the NGOs right now. In coastal regions of Aceh they are trying to work with local communities to rebuild their fishing industry, because that is the livelihood of the majority of the people on the coast. Their boats have been destroyed, their platforms have been destroyed, so until large amounts of aid start flowing through, the NGO community is working to help individual communities to rebuild their fishing infrastructure.

In terms of what some of the small and medium enterprises, particularly Australian ones that are involved in marine tourism, are doing on the west coast, they are working in partnership with island communities to rebuild the ecotourism infrastructure of those islands, because the destruction of the environment is caused by poverty. The only way past the destruction of the environment, whether it be bomb fishing, destruction of reefs, cutting down of primary rainforest because of poverty or corruption – or both – is to work with local communities to instigate environmentally sustainable tourism and development, and that needs to be a partnership between the local communities, the governments, the regional governments, the district governments and, in the case of Australia, Australian educational institutions, I believe, working in partnership with Indonesia universities – if we are talking about Indonesia – in key locations where there is expertise in coastal resource management.

Summing-up
Chair: Professor Kurt Lambeck

This morning we heard the very impressive account of the immediate response to the tsunami, and we have also recognised, as the day progressed, that the long-term response is possibly going to be as challenging as, if not more challenging than the short-term response. And when we put it all together we will have a long list of all the things that really we should be thinking about.

The long-term response will include both the specific consequences of this particular tsunami and also – and I think more important – the general lessons that can be learnt from this particular event, and it will help us in responding to future disasters. I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that, as Brian Kennett pointed out, tsunamis in any one location are not a particularly common event. The repeat time in that particular part of the world, as we heard this morning, may be close on 100 years. But disasters of natural and other causes are, of course, much more common phenomena, and I think we do need to try and take away from today lessons that can be applied to other disasters, not just in that part of the world but in other parts of the world that affect Australia as well.

I do not propose to try to summarise what we have learned today, but I am just going to finish up with one anecdote, because a couple of comments have reminded me of it. One was the comment about using the village fire alarm as an appropriate warning system. The other was a comment made about the importance of maintaining a collective knowledge in a community about disasters.

One of the overriding themes that we can identify from today’s session, for example, has been the education one – and that is education at all levels. It is something that all of the rapporteurs have discussed in one form or another, either for the reconstruction of shattered systems or for the training of the in-country trainers who have to ultimately deal with the post-disaster consequences. What causes me to pick up this issue is the Hamaguchi story, a story that comes from Japan, from the Edo period, because this particular story of a tsunami puts the problem of maintaining the public education, or the public awareness, in rather sharp focus.

The story is one of a wealthy farmer who lives in a thatched farmhouse on a small headland overlooking the sea. Now, Japan has been wracked by tsunamis since time immemorial, but the frequency of occurrence in any one locality is apparently sufficiently low, even today, for there not to be a very good collective memory on how to respond when tsunamis do occur.

Apparently – and I believe this is a true story – it was late in the day, the harvest had come in, the people were down on the waterfront celebrating a successful harvest, and the sea fell quiet. Nobody noticed it except for the old man on the hill, and he, from his dim childhood memories, recognised the signs. He saw the sea retreating; nobody paid much attention. And he realised also that because there was no folklore about this he was not going to be able to convince the villagers to head up for the hills, even if he could get down there in time.

So what did he do? He didn’t have a village fire alarm, but he set his house on fire instead. His straw house went up, everybody rushed up (if his house was going to burn down, everybody else’s house was likely to burn down) and thereby he saved the community.

I don’t think it is appropriate to even suggest that perhaps a good warning system for tsunamis in Sydney Harbour may be at Kirribilli House. I wouldn’t dare suggest that. But I do think stories of this kind indicate the difficulty of maintaining a long-term awareness of disasters in a particular community, and the benefits of a warning system.