Australia 'needs natural disaster inquiry'

Sydney Morning Herald: Australia needs to conduct a major national inquiry into natural disaster management and implement a campaign encouraging people to help themselves, a new study says. In a paper released on Thursday, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) research director Dr Peter Bergin said Australia was a land of natural disasters and needed to be prepared for when it was king hit again.

He said there were now six inquiries under way following a summer of disasters. That includes investigations of Queensland and Victorian floods, West Australian bushfires, disaster insurance and federal parliamentary inquiries into communication networks and the insurance industry.

Dr Bergin said a call for national reform came from Suncorp insurance chief executive Patrick Snowball who said the current patchwork approach would not do the job. Mr Snowball said Australian leaders recognised in the 1980s that the Australian economy was vulnerable to the impact of globalisation and needed reform.

Those reforms were preceded by the Wallis inquiry. Mr Snowball said Australia should have the equivalent of a Wallis Inquiry into disaster management because it deserved to be a much higher government reform priority…..

Flood in East Brisbane, Brisbane, Queensland, 1893, from the State Library of Queensland