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 not just about the initial relief phase. There have been 15 AusAID staff deployed to Banda Aceh, Penang and Medan, to help coordinate relief efforts. Transportation was fundamentally significant as basic infrastructure collapsed, either as a result of the earthquake or through the subsequent inundation. Services of one of our 707 aircraft to seven Defence Force planes and aircrews were there. HMAS Kanimbla, including 250 sailors, 150 engineers, Sea King helicopters, two landing craft and other equipment, was part of that relief effort.

What was needed also was communications capability, which sent over technicians and equipment to make sure all of those resources could be connected and could be coordinated.

In disaster management and logistics, we provided funding for logisticians from RedR to be deployed with international organisations. Funding from Australian disaster specialists were deployed through the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination Team. The United Nations World Food Programme used our aircraft to get food in to those areas where only an air drop could make the results have a difference on the ground.

In health there was a 90-bed ADF field hospital in Banda Aceh, and funding for five medical teams of doctors, nurses and specialist medical staff to provide emergency medical assistance. Equipment and medical supplies went in to the main hospitals in Banda Aceh, and health assessment teams were in there early.

May I say to those of you that are in the health field that the unwritten story is how the still water didn’t cause a loss of life like the moving water. That is an unspoken and not well-reported achievement. The prospects for cholera and other water-borne diseases right around this vast area of activity were immense, yet thankfully that was contained and managed through public health expertise, much of it from Australia. I commend those individuals for the still water not causing the hardship that the moving water played out in front of us.

We have sent psychosocial support specialists in, with child protection workers, infectious disease people, pharmaceuticals and medical supply experts. Tetanus injections and preventative disease inoculations were implemented throughout the affected regions.

With regard to water, we provided water purification equipment in Banda Aceh – 130,000 containers, each holding 20 litres of water, were distributed in Banda Aceh. Assistance to clear the debris in the drainage system around the hospitals, to rebuild the public infrastructure, to fund the water and sanitation specialists needed to achieve that outcome that I mentioned, was all part of our response.

In the area of food, I mentioned the World Food Programme relying on our aircraft to get that food where it was needed so that lack of food was not a further burden that these communities had to carry.

In education, the UNICEF school-in-a-box was a program that we supported, targeting primary schools at both a state and an Islamic level so that some normality could be returned to those young people’s lives.

And that was just the emergency relief phase. Our expertise, though, was something that was hard to price but made a remarkable contribution.

I have stood alongside our police forensic teams working with quite significantly decomposed human remains on the task of disaster victim identification. There is no fun in that. Yet, as international experts came from around the world, what did they not bring with them? The hardware, the equipment and the consumables. Well, our nation provided that. So as experts came to support that effort that was largely managed and overseen by Australia they would log on to CrimTrac, the software that is developed here and used by our own police services to correlate fingerprint information, to capture DNA and dental records and to help with that gruesome task of trying to identify who those people were that had not only lost their lives but had lost limbs and other normal identification features as part of this event.

Food, shelter, water, sanitation and public health were part of the response in Sri Lanka. In the Maldives, our engineers have checked schools for structural damage, and we have got volunteer teachers there to bolster the education system and to provide for the child welfare needs of those children.

I mentioned our marine scientists, who have been sent not only to the Maldives but also to the Seychelles and to Thailand to check on the condition of the coral reefs and the fish population, and to help shape up a response plan in those areas. Particularly in Phuket, where we had that early warning system conference, the Hilton Hotel was our embassy – 9 per cent occupancy rates. Imagine the economic hardship in an area where the only damage to that complex was one dirty pool: 9 per cent. So there is a need to help recover livelihoods by making sure the marine ecosystem and the things that people travel to those regions to enjoy are recovered and are as healthy as they can be to support the welfare of those communities and the wider economy.

The expertise has been remarkable and the professionalism has been outstanding. This work has been difficult and emotionally draining for everybody involved, and I pay tribute to everybody for their unswerving professionalism and perseverance. These have been very difficult times for our people deployed in the field, for those that have volunteered their energy and their expertise – a remarkable job under very difficult circumstances.

There were other, less visible but nonetheless substantial, contributions in shaping the disaster reduction response in the UN world conference in Kobe, earlier in the year, forging a consensus and some guiding principles for a warning centre, a system which is a network of networks, trying to work with what we have and with what individual countries are planning to deploy to make sure we have a system that meets the needs of the vast array of countries in the Indian Ocean. Before I was invited in here, I was talking to some of your colleagues and saying that the French were arguing that Alcatel should provide an early warning system where everyone had a mobile phone and it sent a message saying, ‘Time to move very quickly, absolutement.’ That was an interesting idea, but some of the countries that are part of this system have about one phone to two and a half thousand people. So the technology and the systems need to be fit-for-purpose, and that work continues today.

The Australia–Indonesia initiative to work through the science to monitor the eastern Indian Ocean, the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea is a contribution towards the establishment of a warning system beyond our shores, and one that serves the region in general. The highly relevant skills and experience of Australia’s scientists and technical community have been brought to bear on that task, as we learn from what we have had in place in the Pacific and our own expertise to shape an appropriate, cost-effective system for the Indian Ocean.

The recovery and reconstruction work is well under way, and that is happening in all of the affected countries. The focus of our work, though, is very much in Indonesia and the five-year, $1 billion Australian-Indonesian Partnership for Reconstruction and Development, announced earlier this year, represents a significant opportunity for our expertise to be utilised in Aceh and across Indonesia more generally.

At the inaugural meeting of the commission that oversees that program, Australian and Indonesian Ministers outlined some of the initial elements of that partnership, and I would like to just take a moment to share that with you. One element is the renovation of the two main hospitals in Banda Aceh. It will also include assistance to rebuild the health workforce. It is a difficult reality that many people have had to contend with, that half the population of Banda Aceh lost their lives. There was actually a need for a stocktake of who is left standing, to work out what human resources were needed to service a health and an education system. Rebuilding the hardware is one thing; having the systems and the people in place to deliver effective health and education services is another task again. That work is continuing, and will be supported by that billion-dollar commitment.

Educational equipment, teacher training, an opportunity to restore government services in devastated provinces – Australian professionals are providing a significant role in undertaking that work; $50 million has been provided to assist Indonesia in economic, financial and public sector management, and also building up their emergency response and disaster management capabilities.

Of course, we will all be drawing from the vast expertise across Australian business, academic and community sectors to assist in that reconstruction task. It is part of our whole-of-government approach, and Austrade will be conducting a series of seminars and workshops around the country to identify what opportunities are there, and to profile some of the expertise to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and also AusAID itself. Workshops begin in Sydney this week, and I would encourage those of you, or your organisations, with an interest in being more involved in that reconstruction and redevelopment work to associate yourself with those workshops and to gain some of the advice that is available about how your expertise could be best used.

In closing, ladies and gentlemen: we live in a country that has invested heavily for generations in the building up of knowledge and know-how. With this high level of expertise in many varied areas and our comparative good fortune within our region, it is right and proper that Australia plays a leading role in disaster management and response, not only for our immediate neighbourhood but beyond. That expertise has been put to good effect in the past, especially in the Pacific – I mentioned the Cook Islands, in the cyclone season this summer. But we have well-established procedures which allow us to initiate a rapid response to these disasters. The tsunami was the biggest natural disaster in my lifetime, and it would have tested any country’s capabilities. Our skills in partnering with those developing countries that were directly affected deserve a note of positive acclamation for the capability in not only our know-how but the way we go about making that contribution.

We can do better, though, and we are looking at developing better ways of operating and of learning from our experience. I heard stories from doctors that fortunately a US aircraft carrier was off the coast when oxygen bottles from one country wouldn’t fit to medical equipment that came from another. It is one good thing about an aircraft carrier: if you need something, they make it themselves. And that was an important contribution, but we can learn from that to make sure that we document and understand what equipment is available, where it is to be obtained, how it will assist field operations, and that we avoid some of the bring-one-of-everything that we saw other countries deploy during this difficult time.

We are more resourceful than many countries, and we are skilled in disaster coordination and response. Today’s discussion will make a valuable contribution to that ongoing debate.