DISASTER RESPONSECoordinating Australia’s Response to Natural Disasters and National Crises
Australia’s comprehensive national crisis coordination process — the National Coordination Mechanism, or NCM — works well, and its continued use—and evolution—points the way to even more comprehensively coordinated resilience building, crisis planning, response and recovery. Extrapolation of the NCM will prove critical if national mobilization is required to deal with crises other than natural disasters and pandemics.
Australia has a relatively new but well-proven adjunct to its crisis and disaster management tools. While previous frameworks focused on intra-governmental planning and response, the National Coordination Mechanism (NCM) embraces the capabilities of the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
This comprehensive national crisis coordination process is underpinned by complex systems and network theory and provides a governance framework to facilitate integrated and coherent planning, clarify problems, reveal escalation triggers, identify and agree on actions and responsibilities, and establish oversight and communication arrangements. It works well, and its continued use—and evolution—points the way to even more comprehensively coordinated resilience building, crisis planning, response and recovery. Extrapolation of the NCM will prove critical if national mobilization is required to deal with crises other than natural disasters and pandemics.
The NCM was first employed in the early stages of Covid-19 to manage the pandemic’s non-health consequences, but it originated in the preceding two years from a series of discussions based on natural hazard scenarios with catastrophic, nationally distributed impacts. These were conducted by Emergency Management Australia, which was then a division of the Department of Home Affairs. Participants included federal government departments, state and territory emergency management agencies, major corporations (including logistics, energy, food and grocery companies), non-government organizations, and disaster recovery agencies.
The exercises demonstrated that the existing processes and governance structures were inherently limited and couldn’t be scaled to the degree required to deal with the sectoral interdependence of contemporary Australia. Participants identified that an adaptive national mechanism to coordinate responses was critical to prepare for, respond to and recover from anthropogenic and natural crises.
The NCM played a central role in the national coordination of non-medical aspects of the pandemic, including identifying issues, deconfliction, resolution, allocation of responsibility and providing whole-of-response advice—and options—to government. More than 100 meetings were held to ensure shared understanding and rapid stabilization of problems as they emerged. This allowed a supply-chain taskforce to work with road transport companies and their peak bodies, shipping and freight companies, food and grocery suppliers, agricultural peak bodies and cooperatives, state and territory government agencies, and local governments.
