A Deep Dive into the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework (2024)

Introduction

The Australian Government’s capstone policy framing the nation’s crisis management arrangements, the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework (the Framework) overviews the Government’s approach to crisis management.

The Framework, in its most recent iteration (Version 4.0), takes an all-hazards approach to crisis management – one which we here at Noggin support. And given the rapid uptick in costly crises affecting Australia, it’s worthwhile to examine what exactly is in the Framework and what crisis and resilience practitioners (even those not involved in the Government’s arrangements) can take from it.

Introducing the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework

The Framework, simply put, outlines how exactly the Australian Government prepares for, responds to and supports recovery from crises. The multifaceted document accomplishes the following:

• Provides an overview of the Australian Government crisis management arrangements

• Outlines the Australian Government’s approach to crisis preparedness, including crisis preparedness arrangements and capabilities
• Articulates the requirements for Australian Government responses spanning near-term preparedness, response, relief, and early recovery by:
  • Designates the lead Australian Government ministers, senior officials, and agencies required to coordinate responses to identified hazards
  • Outlines the roles and responsibilities of Australian Government ministers and senior officials
  • Details the approach to coordination for extreme to catastrophic crises

The audience for the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework

The Framework, as written, is intended for Australian Government ministers and senior officials with a role in crisis management. Meanwhile, an accompanying Handbook to the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework (the Handbook) provides principles-based guidance for senior officials and their agencies on how to apply the Framework.

Although the explicit audience is limited, we believe that the Framework advances key principles that are very relevant to the broader crisis management and resilience community.

For instance, one of its guiding principles is resilience. Across the Continuum, resilience refers to the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management.

How does the Framework define crises?

The Framework also helpfully provides a sophisticated definition of crisis, a term that’s often hard to pin down in the resilience literature.

The Framework classes crises as events requiring an immediate Australian Government response, outside its business-as-usual arrangements, to manage potential or realised acute consequences and mitigate further harm.

Per the Framework, a crisis, which is associated with high levels of uncertainty, may:

• Be natural, human-induced, or technology-caused
• Cause wide-ranging harmful impacts across multiple sectors or jurisdictions within Australia, or significant impacts on any sector or jurisdiction, either immediately or over time
• Adversely impact Australian lives, property, and the environment, or national security, interests, or assets
• Significantly impact Australian Government interests or assets, such as critical infrastructure or Australian Government services
• Affect Australians or Australian interests overseas
• Affect public trust in government institutions

Crises, as noted, come in multiple shapes and sizes. For instance, a crisis requiring Tier 4 coordination on part of the Government may:

• Be caused by any hazard(s)
• Be highly complex, including concurrent, compounding, and/or consecutive crisis events, resulting in interlinked and cascading consequences requiring coordination across the full range of Australian Government and national equities and interests
• Have wide-ranging harmful impacts and consequences across multiple jurisdictions and sectors of society, and extreme to catastrophic impacts on Australians
• Have overwhelmed Australia’s technical, non-technical, and social systems and resources, and degraded or disabled governance structures and strategic and operational decision-making functions

The triggers that activate Government action

Given that the Framework defines crises as events that necessitate Government action, it’s important to lay out what precise triggers there are to activate Government crisis coordination arrangements.

Per the Framework, the triggers include:

• An event meeting the definition of a crisis above
• Formal ministerial consideration of the crisis event(s)
• Community expectations of national leadership during the crisis
• Requests for assistance from affected states, territories, or countries
• Multiple crises occurring simultaneously or compounding and escalating in complexity which require national coordination, resource prioritization, and de-confliction

Phases of the Australian Government Crisis Management Continuum

Crises, as fluid events, can’t be treated the same at the beginning as they are at the end. To this end, the Framework lays out the phases of the crisis management continuum.

To those familiar with the crisis management lifecycle, the crisis management continuum provides a handy proxy. Its phases include the following:

1. Prevention. Prevention refers to measures to eliminate or reduce the severity of a hazard or crisis, and/or the likelihood of a hazard or crisis occurring.
2. Preparedness. Preparedness refers to arrangements to ensure that, should a crisis occur, the required resources, capabilities, and services can be efficiently mobilised and deployed. Near-term preparedness recognises the need to rapidly prepare for an imminent crisis.
3. Response. Response refers to immediate actions taken to ensure that crisis impacts and consequences are minimised, and that those affected are supported as quickly as possible.
4. Relief. Relief refers to meeting the essential needs of food, water, shelter, energy, communications, and essential medical services for those affected by a crisis event.
5. Recovery. Recovery refers to early and longer-term measures to restore or improve the livelihoods, health, economic, physical, social, cultural, and environmental assets, systems and activities, of a disaster-affected community or society.
   
   Early recovery includes temporary and near-term measures to support anticipated community needs.
6. Reconstruction. Reconstruction refers to implementing longer-term strategies post-incident to “build back better” from a crisis, including identifying sustainable development approaches and mitigation measures that may be applicable beyond the directly affected community.
7. Risk reduction. Risk reduction refers to reducing future risk by identifying and enacting measures that may be taken to reduce the impacts and consequences of future crises.

The phases on which the Framework focuses

Despite their being seven distinct phases highlighted, the Framework only delves further into a few.

One of them is preparedness. Preparedness, here, refers to the activities that build the capabilities and capacity needed to efficiently manage crises and effectively transition from response to sustained recovery.

A subset of preparedness, near-term preparedness refers to a period within the preparedness phase of the Continuum that requires senior officials and agencies to rapidly prepare to respond to forecast or potential impacts and consequences of an imminent crisis. This period could be marked by a sudden shift in the crisis threat environment generating potential for significant and acute consequences to Australia or Australian interests.

The recovery phase

Recovery is another phase that the Framework explicates further.

Recovery, as defined by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), deals with the restoring or improving of livelihoods and health, as well as economic, physical, social, cultural, and environmental assets, systems, and activities, of a disaster-affected community or society, aligning with the principles of sustainable development and “build back better,” to avoid or reduce future disaster risk.

Per this logic, within the Framework, the recovery phase encompasses considerations for the built environment, the social environment, the natural environment and the economic environment.

The recovery phase further comprises early recovery and longer-term recovery. The coordination arrangements in this Framework span near-term preparedness, response, relief, and early recovery. What do they mean?

• Early recovery refers to temporary, near-term measures that support anticipated community needs, such as transitional shelter, services, and supplies. During early recovery, the restoration of critical infrastructure would also be underway. This may occur alongside operational response and relief efforts.
• Longer-term recovery refers to the transition from the temporary measures established during early recovery to more permanent, ongoing arrangements that reflect and support community priorities. This may include the reconstruction of the built environment, and the restoration of community connections, relationships, networks, and social structures.

Conclusion

Finally, Australia like many other countries is experiencing a rise in consecutive, concurrent, and compounding crises, with forecasts of worse to come.

As a result, policymakers have proposed a series of measures to ensure the country remains disaster resilient well into the next century. In this article, we’ve laid out what the Australian Government Crisis Management Framework lays out to enable crisis coordination.

The main takeaway, though, is the continued need to prioritize proactive resilience over reactive response.

What can individual organizations do to prioritize resilience, though? Not mentioned in the report, but we recommend investments in solutions like Noggin Emergency, which provides all the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through its entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

But don’t just take our word for it. Request a demonstration to see Noggin in action for yourself.