Minister: We need to be ready for the worst

The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC was launched with much fanfare in front of Parliament House in Canberra in December 2013, by the Minister for Justice, Hon Micheal Keenan.

This is what the Minister said at the launch:

I was here in 2003 during those enormous fires, and if we think back to that time it’s a reminder to us as Australians that we live in a country that can be the subject of very fierce natural disasters, whether they be fire, flood, cyclones, even tsunamis, nature here can respond ferociously, and as a country we need to make sure we are prepared for that. We need to be prepared by making sure we are as resilient as possible to the natural disasters that can befall us in Australia. The launch of the CRC here today is going to help us to do that.

The Commonwealth government is injecting $47 million, there is going to be support from state and territory colleagues, and non-government players as well, so the CRC will have $130 million in funding over the next eight years. They will be looking at the sorts of things we can do as a community to best protect ourselves when nature does her worst here in Australia. I am looking forward to seeing the kind of research that they do commit to over the next eight years to see what this research can suggest to us about how we can respond appropriately to the very difficult natural environment that we find ourselves in sometimes.

I have spent some time with Commissioner Fitzsimmons and I saw the response of the NSW Rural Fire Service to the recent fires in the Blue Mountains - and what a magnificent response they do when faced with a fire of that magnitude - and the response that other emergency service personnel do when faced with other natural disasters of that magnitude.

In Australia we do need to be ready for the worst, and I’m certainly hoping that the Cooperative Research Centre that I have the privilege of launching here today will help to do that.

If I may then declare that in response to the investment of the Commonwealth and the Federal Government, the very hard work of a lot of people here today, I am very pleased to declare the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC open from today.

Validation and challenge

At the launch, the Commissioner for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Shane Fitzsimmons, spoke of the importance of research:

There are some real challenges, and we have been key partner in the Bushfire CRC and a key partner in this ongoing research.

Research does a number of things. It validates and challenges what we’re doing today. It also looks at what are the challenges and options going forward, how can we best prepare now in terms of policy and governance, but also practices in terms of communicating with the community.

Much of what is in place today would not be allowed to be built if it was complying to more recent planning, construction and design standards hasn’t been in place in NSW since 2002. They’re the sorts of things we’re keen on understanding. Such as fire in the landscape, how to better prepare communities in a built environment sense. But also through our work with the social sciences, seeking to understand human attitudes and behaviours, and how we can best tailor our messages, our integrated approach to fire management planning, which is about prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.

Research plays a critical role in helping us review, and develop and influence governance in setting policy and legislation to make communities more resilient and better able to withstand the effects of fire and other hazards.

Team Australia

Tony Peacock, the CEO of the CRC Association, stressed the importance of public good research:

Public good CRCs are really important in that they enable the states to play together in the research space so fire authorities who are limited in their ability to do research at a state level, but this sort of CRC enables us to play as a Team Australia and learn from each other’s experiences, get a critical mass of researchers working in the area, that’s terribly important, and they can actually make significant progress by working together.