The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet include in the Australian Government Crisis Management Handbook criteria for the publication of plans to appropriately inform stakeholders of crisis arrangements.

The Minister for Emergency Management should deliver an annual Statement to Parliament that:
- Defines the Commonwealth’s role in prioritising risk reduction, prevention, resilience, and mitigation against natural disasters.
- Outlines the national natural disaster risk reduction investment priorities.
- Reports against nationally agreed natural disaster risk reduction and resilience investment outcomes.
- Updates Parliament on the progress of disaster impacted communities where Commonwealth programs and investment are involved.

NEMMM agendas should ensure that discussion of urgent tactical challenges don’t crowd-out consideration of the strategic challenges.
- NEMMM should request ANZEMC, facilitated by NEMA, to conduct “stress-testing” scenario planning of the consequences (e.g., exhausted emergency workers, insufficient emergency housing and shortages of trades people) of year-on-year increases in consecutive and intensifying national-scale disasters.

Each jurisdiction should be allowed a maximum of three senior officials on ANZEMC to enable the inclusion of these jurisdictional responsibilities (see Appendix F for Summary of State and Territory responsibilities).

NEMMM should co-convene a joint Ministerial Council meeting with climate change adaptation ministers to promote greater coherence between NEMMM’s resilience work and climate adaptation—two key components of a future national resilience strategy. This should be a face-to-face meeting.

The government members of ANZEMC should be senior officials (Commissioners, Deputy Secretaries or Heads of Agencies) from agencies that have the lead jurisdictional responsibility for preparedness and response and resilience and recovery.

The ANZEMC workplan and meeting agendas should be explicitly organised under two headings: “Disaster Resilience and Recovery” and “Preparedness and Capabilities Policy”.

ANZEMC’s core mission should be narrowed to:
1) Supporting the NEMMM, particularly to identify its five priorities for action and ensuring they are implemented; and
2) Providing a forum for key senior officials to address other nationally (e.g., cross- jurisdictionally) pressing, emerging and longer-term challenges.

Given the importance of NEMMM’s work, meetings should occur quarterly and be in-person at least twice yearly, be of sufficient length to allow for issues to be properly canvassed and discussed and be preceded by an opportunity for the NEMMM members to meet informally alone together.

ANZEMC should meet four times each year, including twice face-to- face, with one of the in-person meetings devoted predominantly to “Disaster Resilience and Recovery.” The face-to-face meetings should be preceded by an opportunity for the ANZEMC members to meet informally.

State and territory governments should review their arrangements for sharing resources between their local governments during natural disasters, including whether those arrangements:
(1) provide sufficient surge capacity, and
(2) take into account all the risks that the state or territory may face during a natural disaster. 

State and territory governments should take responsibility for the capability and capacity of local governments to which they have delegated their responsibilities in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from natural disasters, to ensure local governments are able to effectively discharge the responsibilities devolved to them. 

The Committee recommends that the Australian Government request that the Centre for Excellence for Local Government ensure a particular focus on capacity building for coastal local councils. Capacity building should focus on addressing issues relating to:
- population growth pressure
- planning and design of new infrastructure
- integrated coastal zone management
- climate change impacts and adaptation

The Committee recommends that Emergency Management Australia and the Australian Communications Authority work with state and territory bush fire authorities to ensure that that district communication plans
have regard for the amount of radio traffic that may be generated under the most severe conditions.

The Committee recommends that:
- As a short term objective, the use of ‘40’ channel UHF CB equipment be adopted for coordination and interoperability of communications at fire ground level.
- As a longer term objective a national communications plan be developed and incorporate the provision of low powered VHF channel allocations for the purpose of ensuring compatible fire ground communications between all agencies on a national basis.
- That the use of UHF CB between units on the fire ground be included in communications planning for intra-state and interstate deployments.

The Committee recommends that the state and territory bushfire agencies ensure that, on a district basis, communications are addressed within the district operations plans and that the plans are capable of easy adoption to incident action plans.

The role of local government in counter—disaster affairs be clearly defined and formalised by legislation. Local government authorities would then be fully aware of their responsibilities and of their entitlement to financial and other counter—disaster resources from State Government level. [Reference paragraphs: 232 to 233]