Transcript
BILL HAMBLIN: They were significant earthquakes. But the areas where they hit are largely unpopulated and not a lot of infrastructure there. So there hasn't been the dire consequences that occurred as a result of the 7.5 earthquake (February 2018) in Southern Highlands and Hela. We've been lucky to dodge a bullet there. One of the things we're now working on feverishly is to improve our disaster capacity, for response and being prepared; putting in regional stores and supplies; pre-positioning non-perishable supplies; and having the equipment to move those supplies. We need to do that because we can't always guarantee that we're going to be lucky.
JOHNNY BLADES: It's a country which is prone to a range of different disasters. East New Britain has just had major flooding as well as a big earthquake. Of course, they're used to earthquakes, but they are all talking about the need to get more synergised in response.
BH: Yeah. It has to happen. There has been a situatio where over the years the national disaster response capacity had diminished, for various reasons over many years. So, it's now that we have a look at this, and we see the effects of climate change, we see more of these issues happening with landslips etc in the country that we've had. We've had one of those (landslide) in Tsak Valley (Enga province) recently that killed eight people - it came down the mountain and wiped out a village. We've had floods in Vanimo-Green electorate in the Green River area that's also decimated food crops and the livelihoods of people there. We've just been to Goodenough island where there was a cyclone in March. It came through and wiped out all the food crops there and knocked over a sizeable number of bush material housing. So it continues to happen and it'll probably become more prevalent with climate change, and we've got to be prepared for that and things like El Nino. We've just got to improve our response capacity.
JB: The different provinces have such different needs anyway. But a lot of them are vulnerable to these disasters. So is the government cognisant of that?
BH: Well, they will be if they're not, the new government, because we're putting up a cabinet submission on that very subject. So everybody will be aware of what the issues are and what needs to be done. So then it's a matter of... we're doing some workshops with Emergency Management Australia at the end of this month for government officials to sit down and work through these issues to see what each department and agency can bring to bear to improve the capacity between the agencies. Because we've got to have this inter-agency co-operation and to date we have a system where we have departments and agencies usually silo-driven and they don' communicate or co-operate that well. That needs to be improved.
