In conjunction with the University of Melbourne Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety (CDMPS), the Australasian Critical Communications Forum (ACCF), the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and the Australian Control Room Network Association (ACRNA) ARCIA contributed to a joint submission to the Royal Commission into the natural disasters of this past summer, more commonly known as the Bushfires Royal Commission. Download the submission.
Out of the submission there are three important points to take away –
- Out of many enquiries by the various Governments over the past decade there are very few submissions from either First Responders or their representative bodies. How are our policy-makers supposed to understand the real needs of the emergency workers on the front line if they aren’t being advised in this manner?
- Again over the past decade there have been multiple enquiries from various levels of Government and in too many cases the findings and recommendations reported from these enquiries have not been actioned or followed up, a failure by Government to fully accept the responsibility to action important findings; and
- That in a modern world all communications platforms are now interrelated and so must be considered as one overall eco-system, the trend from past years of treating various communications platforms as individual segments can no longer be acceptable. In our modern world our emergency services deserve to have modern communications options and the information available to the frontline workers must encompass data from all resources as a total eco-system.
ARCIA will continue to promote the information contained within the submission and it is important that our members and the first-responder communities also read and outline the real needs that will come out of the Royal Commission.
Thank you to Geoff Spring (ARCIA Projects Officer and Senior Researcher for CDMPS) in compiling the submission.