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

Disasters – understanding the phenomenon
David Templeman
Director General, Emergency Management Australia

[TITLE SLIDE]

The Honourable Tim Fischer, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you for the opportunity for Emergency Management Australia to contribute to this very important but challenging conference discussing issues in relation to recovery post the tsunami.

Before going on, I want to acknowledge also what Tim Fischer said in relation to the enormity and the magnificence of the response undertaken by many of my colleagues. I think it is also important that we just take some time out to acknowledge the roles of the states and territories in the response to this disaster. We could not have done it in Australia without the support from the states and territories.

Bruce Billson mentioned AusAssist Plan. We stood up AusAssist Plan but in standing it up and relying on particular resources we needed to get those resources from states and territories. Those first medical teams that went in to Banda Aceh, into the Maldives and into Sri Lanka came out of state and territory resources, and the effort that they took into account in doing that can’t be overlooked. I think it is important that the total esprit de corps, the total goodwill and the total level of cooperation in getting that immediate response together would not have worked if we did not have that sort of relationship that we do, and that effective partnership. No barriers got in the way in relation to Australia’s response from the get-go.

I thought today also, in terms of setting the scene, that we should not only think about the tsunami but it is also important that we take some time out in meetings like this to remind ourselves of the many impacts that we have experienced in Australia and in our region over the last 30 years. Let’s just reflect on this for a moment.

[SEQUENCE OF DISASTER PHOTOGRAPHS, WITH MUSIC, BEGINNING WITH Floods Melbourne 1 June…]

I put those up deliberately, not only to remind ourselves of what we have done and the enormous improvements that we have made in Australia but because there is still a lot more that we have to do, and also because of the enormity of the task on top of that that we need to do in the region. Bruce Billson mentioned the Pacific, and we have seen what has happened in the Pacific over the last three years. Just about every one of those small island states has been affected in one way or another by the level of cyclone activity.

The key point I think it is also important to bear in mind in relation to thinking about post-tsunami here, even given the enormity of the task, we have to be asked to assist. We just can’t go and do something; we need to bear in mind and acknowledge the fact that we will have to be asked to assist if we are going to provide that support.

We have a lot to offer. We have a lot of things to do in our own community and a lot of issues to address, and specifically a lot of the issues addressed are in recovery arrangements and recovery management. We have seen that in this country when we have had to deal with impacts post-Bali, post the Jakarta bombings on 9 September last year, post the Beslan school crisis – impacts that have occurred in the community where you have seen increases of 30 per cent in calls to centres like Lifeline and Red Cross from the likes of people who are affected in some way or another by these disasters. There are kids ringing centres along the lines of, ‘Should I go to school today?’ and those sorts of issues. There are very critical issues that we should not necessarily lose sight of in terms of our community. I will cover some of these shortly.

So my main message to you today is also going to be about what we need to do with our community and in the community, as far as further and greater levels of preparedness and understanding and acceptance in our community are concerned.

[SLIDE: Build on Lessons]

John Zillman mentioned in his introduction, and we have seen, significant changes in thinking, and a change in thinking about emergency management in Australia and in the region in recent times. We have been very fortunate, as I have indicated on that slide: there has been an understanding, there has been an acknowledgment, that $3 billion impact on this country each year is something that we really need to do something about. The Council of Australian Governments in Australia has started and has acknowledged some of those issues very critically. You have seen two major reports on natural disaster relief and mitigation arrangements issued at the end of 2003, and national bushfire inquiry arrangements which are coming up with very similar themes – embraced by the Council of Australian Governments – that there are some critical issues that we need to address, primarily at the community level.

We have seen COAG say that we do need to have things in place about a five-year disaster risk assessment program within this country. We need to establish nationally consistent databases on disasters, and also to develop a national natural disaster mitigation strategy. All governments have embraced that initiative.

We need to have things like more effective land use planning, things that some of these countries that have been affected in the region don’t have. But we still have problems in this country, where land use planners still let people build in flood-prone areas and in fire-prone areas, and there are issues that have got to be taken into account to prevent those sorts of things from happening.

More importantly, we have got to also ensure that we support the 500,000 people who work in support of emergency management arrangements in this country in a voluntary capacity. A lot of those things are not understood and generally brought to awareness by the organisations themselves, because most of the time they are too busy doing things, so that too many people think that the people who we see around in orange overalls and other things are paid employees. They are not; they are long-term, in most cases, and with the age profile of Australia as it is at the moment, the average age of most of our volunteers in emergency management is in the 47–50 plus. We are not getting replacements coming through.

We are running a summit next week in Canberra, the second national summit on volunteering in emergency management, which will tackle some of these issues about protection, about retention, about recruitment, about retaining some of the importance that we have in the community from volunteers.

In addition to this, from an emergency management perspective, we need to see that there is far greater community self-reliance, more ownership at the community level, in terms of the risks that we live in. People need to have an appreciation of those risks and to plan and take action accordingly. Hence there needs to be more community awareness, there needs to be more community education. We have a culture of complacency, in my assessment. People don’t necessarily think about these issues until it affects them. It is the NIMBY approach – not in my backyard, this attitude. We have got to shift that culture, shift it from one of reaction to a culture of preparedness, and at the same time we have got to have a much higher level of acceptance of the significance of the human and environmental costs of all of this. Of that $3 billion figure that I put up there as an indication, $1.5 billion is the infrastructure damage, the other half is the social costs that we experience – schools get closed down, and other things like that have a huge impact on our society when floods and cyclones and those sorts of things happen. Just think of the issue of that when we are talking about the tsunami impact in our region.

We have got to build and strengthen the partnerships that I think we have already got very well established; as I have already indicated, there is more work to be done. And above all we have got to apply the lessons and address the gaps. We have already conducted, at the strategic level, the debrief of all those people Tim Fischer mentioned who were brought together on Boxing Day and worked for that first three weeks, to get out on the table what were the critical lessons – what worked well, what didn’t work well. And today at Mount Macedon I have got 50 people who were involved on the operational response to the tsunami, going through the same process of addressing the gaps, or addressing the issues of what worked well, what didn’t work well, what are the things that we need to put in place.

We are also going to bring people like the medical teams together, so we debrief everybody in this whole process – not only their own personal debriefing but collectively, so that we can put on the table a thorough, detailed report to government about the key lessons. Government needs to know what are the key lessons from the response to the tsunami.

We did this post September 11, we have done it also in response to Bali and the like, and we put it out in a detailed report. And fortunately some of those lessons have been applied. The magnificence of the response in terms of disaster victim identification, the repatriation of the remains from Thailand, is one absolutely outstanding classic in relation to how we have applied the lessons and used those lessons to improve our procedures. We had a significant problem post-Bali with community unrest, community concerns about a whole range of circumstances, and the new procedures and the arrangements we put in place eliminated a lot of the problems that we had in the response to Bali.

[SLIDE: Attitudinal issues]

In the last five years we have also seen the public perception of hazards shift quite dramatically. I have mentioned complacency. Our community understanding, I believe, about disasters and the risks that some people face is quite low – as I said before, unless you get affected. Those 250,000 people who get affected in Australia certainly know about it, or the people who are affected by Cyclone Ingrid certainly know about it.

Individuals have to take greater concern for their safety. They need to have an appreciation of risk and, related to that, community resilience. There has to be a far better acceptance of that. And we must also ask questions continually as to how we will cope.

I put the Madrid train bombing thing up there. If you want to look at a study in relation to the magnificence in terms of response to the Madrid train bombings, have a look at it. Look at a situation where you see an integration of 38 hospitals conducting 150 procedures from 10.30 in the morning to 8.30 that night, and hospitals back to normality. Look at a situation of 1,600 people moved off scene within one and a half hours of those 10 bombs going off. Look at a situation whereby those trains, the three lines and other things, the whole railway network, were back up and running at 6.30 that night.

I don’t know if we could do that in Australia. But I just put it to people that we also need to make sure that we understand and address some of these issues – take account of looking at how we would handle a Beslan school crisis in this country. I have mentioned some of the psychological sorts of issues that we have had to deal with in the community post some of these events.

We also have to manage the forensic media that we have in this country and provide them with better education improvement.

[SLIDE: Improvements in community preparedness]

I have put up an indication that we have seen very significant improvements – two examples there. One is the Thredbo landslide. In the aftermath of that, the coroner’s report indicated low community awareness of the risks of buildings on steep hillsides in an area renowned for slips. On the other hand, Tim [Fischer] mentioned the handling and the response and the community relationship in the way it dealt with [Cyclone] Ingrid. We had far better awareness, far better education, better organisation, better understanding of the risks as this category-5 cyclone flip-flopped around, as he mentioned, but why? Key lessons were that there had been already significant investment in mitigation and training and, at the same time, preparation and understanding of the levels of risk.

[SLIDE: To understand the phenomenon of disasters]

I just want to leave you with a few messages. In understanding the phenomenon of disasters, just a brief message: we really do need, in Australia, to make a number of significant improvements and build on the improvements that we have already made, both within and in our various communities. We have to accept the enormity of social and demographic change, the tsunami of change, which we are all experiencing in this country. We have to understand issues about the impacts of age profile and the like. We have to accept the inevitability of disasters and incidents; the fact of climate change and those sorts of issues need to be acknowledged and understood here. We have a concerned community, particularly around security arrangements at the moment – government’s priority also is in relation to addressing and maintaining that national security agenda.

We have to accept the unpredictability of sudden-onset disasters. We haven’t really experienced a catastrophic one of those in this country. We have not experienced a catastrophic event. [Cyclone] Tracy was not a catastrophic event which overwhelmed the total capability of this country to respond.

We need to build on our community responsibility so that the community takes greater responsibility for its decisions, and to increase our efforts in mitigation activity. That is a significant investment, but it is proven that the investment pays. We need to also understand and improve our preparedness levels. We can’t prevent things happening, but greater levels of preparation will also involve costs and shifting of priorities. And there are, as I have already indicated, improvements that we need to apply in the recovery area.

Just finally, we have an opportunity here through the messages that I have indicated to you, coming from COAG, where we have upgunned the understanding and the thinking about emergency management now. We do have frameworks through the Australian Emergency Management Committee reporting to ministerial councils, and the opportunity to bring those to the Council of Australian Governments to get those issues addressed at the high level.

So I think there has been a lot of improvement and a lot of opportunities that we need to take into account. There is a lot more to be done at the community level. At the same time, we have a hell of a lot to offer, but we have also got to be asked to make that offer.