INQ328

The National Cabinet should take a leadership role in coordinating resilience initatives across the Federation

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.

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).

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.

The Commonwealth should allocate a significant budget to ANZEMC to support implementation of the NEMMM’s five priorities for action.

ANZEMC should establish time-limited, flexible task forces, reporting directly to ANZEMC, to implement NEMMM’s five priorities for action and essential other initiatives, comprised of diverse membership (e.g., government, private sector, academia, civil society), determined by the requirements of

The current ANZEMC Sub-committees and other subsidiary bodies should be reconceptualised as “communities of practice” and important sources of expert advice, rather than as national governance bodies.

ANZEMC should map out the many existing time-limited working groups and reference and advisory groups and the communities of practice, to identify which are no longer required and should be discontinued, which should continue and be officially sanctioned by ANZEMC, which should continue as inform

ANZEMC’s Terms of Reference should be amended to reflect the recommendations above.

NEMA with CCOSC should investigate ways to better integrate and align CCOSC and the NRSC with the national coordination capacity.

The Commonwealth should identify the longer-term resourcing and organisational requirements to build coordination capacity for relief and early recovery.

In light of the fact that NEMA is a small agency with far fewer options than much larger government departments to reallocate resources for their Ministerial Council Secretariats, the Commonwealth should consider supplementing NEMA’s funding for this purpose.

The Commonwealth should allocate a significant program budget to the Ministerial Council to enable effective implementation of its five national priorities for action.

Jurisdictions should also contribute resourcing to implement the priorities for action, such as contributions in-kind and other funding, proportionate to the size of the jurisdiction.

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

The National Cabinet should task Ministerial Councils to include resilience activities in their annual reporting, with the NEMMM contribution focussing on natural hazards.

The First Secretaries, on behalf of the National Cabinet, should oversee (via a subordinate Deputy Secretaries Group) the development of an annual Australian National Resilience Report (ANRR) that combines the Ministerial Council resilience reporting, existing resilience strategies in jurisdictio

The ANRR should be a National Cabinet product focused on climate and disaster risk as well as other key resilience risks agreed by the Commonwealth and the jurisdictions.

The Commonwealth together with the States and Territories should identify their shared high-level resilience objectives and develop indicators to monitor national progress in achieving them. The ANRR should also provide annual updates on progress in achieving the objectives.

At least once each year, coinciding with the production of the ANRR, the National Cabinet should evaluate progress in bolstering national resilience.

The Commonwealth Government should direct the Secretaries Board to ensure the overall coherence and efficiency of the Government’s resilience efforts, spanning both the climate adaptation/disaster risk reduction and the national security domains.

The next iteration of NEMMM’s Five Priorities for Action should be explicit and measurable, bold but achievable and focused on national outcomes, rather than outputs. They should:
- Be formulated in terms such as “By 2026 we will have established…which will have reduced…”, etc.

NEMMM’s leading role in the wider national resilience effort should focus on disaster risk reduction, and it should engage as a core stakeholder in a wider range of other resilience issues. It should further elaborate this focus with respect to:

Each NEMMM agenda should have a standing item on disaster risk reduction/resilience and at least one full meeting each year should be devoted to Disaster Resilience and Recovery.

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.

NEMMM agendas should ensure that discussion of urgent tactical challenges don’t crowd-out consideration of the strategic 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.

NEMMM’s Terms of Reference should be amended to reflect the recommendations above.

It is appropriate that NEMA should be able to draw on its administered funding to support implementation across jurisdictions of projects associated with delivering the five national priorities for action. NEMA should explore this option.