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

Welcoming address
The Honourable Bruce Billson MP
Parliamentary Secretary, Foreign Affairs and Trade

Dr John Zillman, distinguished colleagues, dear friend and inspiration Tim Fischer, all of you that have organised what is a remarkable program for today: my only regret is that I will not be able to attend the sessions today, but I look forward very much to the outcomes from your work and your deliberations.

Some of you have travelled a long way to be here, and we are very grateful for that effort. But it also reflects the fact that the tsunami and the consequences – Boxing Day and the more recent episode – have really activated the collective awareness, imagination and faculty of so many Australians and so many people around the world.

As we meet here today to discuss what we can do to enhance our disaster response capability and our recovery strategies, we are all too aware of the realities of natural disasters and the challenges that our own region faces. We saw on Boxing Day that a region of our world blessed by Nature felt its full fury . That will leave a scar on those communities and those citizens for years to come, but it also acts to activate and stimulate our own thinking about what we can do in the face of those challenges..

Just three months after the Boxing Day tsunami and the casualties in Sumatra, Indonesia has been shaken again, and our consciousness and our commitment to do better – to do better in the face of these massive natural disasters – has again been activated, and I commend you all for the effort you are putting in, both in attending today and in your own fields of endeavour.

The consequences are profound, and not only in terms of loss of life. A number of you may be aware of my natural systems interest, and what this has done to the marine ecology will take years to recover from. Our friends in ACIAR, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, are doing very important work trying to ground-truth, as I think is the jargon, what has gone on in those areas that are affected, to try and understand that the soil structures aren’t going to be what they used to be for generations of farming activity in areas where species selection and farming practice have delivered the bounty of food and better fortune for communities. That has now all been turned on its head after that gunk that has come from the ocean and caked on, six to eight inches across the surface. Once that has cleared, we are going to have higher sodium loads and it will take many years to change the soil structures or to recover them. What do we do in the meantime, if that is the source of people’s livelihoods?

We look out into the riparian environments and the lagoon systems, where shrimp farmers have pursued a living for generations, and that has all changed as well. And some of the landforms aren’t the way they used to be.

So there is work to be done, understanding the consequences. And there is an enormous amount of work to be done to understand the risk. I won’t use the ‘p’ word – and I commend those of you who have been talking about earthquake prediction, trying not to use the ‘p’ word, but understanding the factors that precipitate those kinds of seismic activity. I commend you on your work as we learn more about our own neighbourhood and our own region.

Can I extend the government’s condolences to those who have lost loved ones. Our thoughts are with those people. Something that is probably not uppermost in your mind but was vividly conveyed to me by the President of the Seychelles is that your work in your deliberations is a remarkable tonic. It is a tonic for communities for whom the first sound that they hear when they are born is the sound of the ocean – their cultures, their stories, their whole life perspective is born out of the sea. When they mature and become adults and look for livelihoods, they look to the ocean again. And the President of the Seychelles was shaking as he told me that many of his citizens are now frightened about the very thing that gives the essence to their character and their culture, their national identity. Your work, and our work as a nation and the support we provide, is a remarkable tonic to help people through that.

Efforts in areas of early warning systems might seem poor effort on benefit-cost ratios, and you in this room would know, more than most, that our nation has been arguing the case since 1997 for a tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean, but in a country where feeding citizens and getting medicines to families is a difficult challenge, some saw that not to have the priority we did. The Indian Ocean gets about 3½ per cent of the globe’s earthquakes. That is not a high proportion. So they also look at that and maybe rationally thought, ‘This is not a wise use of resources when there is poverty, and other challenges, to face.’ Today, though, your work is building confidence. It adds to that enhancement of welfare and the confidence of people to re-engage in their lives.

So not only are your efforts a tonic but also a remedy for the fears that are holding back those countries. I would just like to leave with you those thoughts from leaders of countries that have felt the impact of the tsunami very directly.

Within hours of the events, Australia had mobilised itself. We had officials travelling to affected areas to see what we could do, how we could help, just as we are doing now with the more recent events. To gauge the full effect of the disaster we needed to get people in there to survey and assess the damage to life, to communities, to infrastructure, to natural systems, and that work continues. There is still much to be learned, and today the reflections from your forum will help us in that learning process.

The tsunami is a natural disaster of enormous magnitude that is difficult to comprehend. It has touched many people in many ways, many thinking that tsunamis were a Hollywood creation, something that happened somewhere else. Well, we know it happens in our own neighbourhood.

And in my role I was informed of the developments upon the hour as they unfolded. The horrific scenes on the television captivated many people’s minds and moved many of us, and our nation responded magnificently. No other country in the world has made the contribution ours has made. At a government level, our contribution is about $50 per capita of taxpayer resources, but on top of that, private citizens and companies have also brought forward $300 million. And something that you might not be aware of is that 75 per cent of those private donors were donating for the first time, so moved were they by those events – a little bit different from things they may have seen in other parts of the world.

There was no despot that had brought grief to countries. It wasn’t like Zimbabwe, where a breadbasket of a country is now a basket case through actions of governments. This could have happened to anybody. It was nobody’s fault. And Australians responded magnificently to the grief and the hardship that we saw unfolding around us.

Within hours we had people there from AusAID, Foreign Affairs, Police, Defence, and I’m delighted that Emergency Management Australia will also be here today. They are a remarkable organisation that provided very direct, timely assistance. You are right, we didn’t wait for the UN to say work was required. We just got on with it. When your neighbour’s house is burning, you don’t wait for the council to tell you it is okay to use the hose; you get amongst it. And that is what Australians did.

The AusAssist Plan that is our standing overseas disaster plan supported by AusAID was activated on 27 December. We drew in expertise from Commonwealth and state governments, professional associations and organisations, voluntary agencies and academia, and Australia mobilised that horsepower and that talent pool very quickly and had skilled professionals on the ground doing important work within days. This was not a matter of chance or good luck; it was a result of well-established partnerships between governments, agencies, institutions and organisations, and a very well-defined process, one that stands us in good stead and, sadly, is tested too frequently, even in the Pacific, as we have just come through another cyclone season when the Cook Islands alone had four cyclones to contend with this summer.

Our assistance in Indonesia, though, is