Australian Government agencies maintain capabilities to operationalise their designated roles under national plans. The Australian Government also maintains a number of capabilities to support whole of Afustralian Government and national coordination. These capabilities enhance situational awareness, coordination and response during a significant crisis, and complement existing state and territory capabilities.
Situational awareness
Whole of Australian Government situational awareness supports decision-making by ministers and senior officials to prioritise resources during a crisis and provide up-to-date information to the public.
The Australian Government National Situation Room (NSR) provides 24/7 all-hazards situational awareness, impact analysis and decision support capability, through its crisis operations, anticipatory analysis and planning capabilities. Australian Government agencies, states and territories may be invited to deploy a liaison officer into the NSR to facilitate coordination, collaboration, and communication between the Australian Government and affected jurisdictions.
The National Joint Common Operating Picture (NJCOP) is managed by the NSR and provides a near real time, all-hazards platform designed to display all active significant crisis events. It provides a shared and common understanding both nationally and across borders during crisis events.
Both the NSR and the NJCOP are managed by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) on behalf of the Australian Government.
DFAT’s Australian Government Global Watch Office (GWO) operates 24/7 to support the Australian Government’s capacity to monitor and respond to emerging international events and crises that may have consequences for Australians or Australian interests overseas.
GWO reporting and analysis provides situational awareness and informs whole of Australian Government messaging on evolving events, while also supporting diplomatic posts in the event of a crisis. The GWO issues alerts and situation reports based on advice provided by Australian diplomatic posts and the insights available through aggregated consular data.
DFAT will activate its Crisis Centre (CC) for significant and ongoing international crises, embedding any agencies that have equity in the whole of government response.
Crisis Appreciation and Strategic Planning
The Crisis Appreciation and Strategic Planning (CASP)14 methodology is a structured, systematic methodology that uses strategic and critical thinking and conceptualises the big picture in crisis planning. It supports practitioners to manage challenges including concurrent events, consequences of uncertainty and complexity. It can be used by Australian, state and territory governments to conduct strategic planning and informs crisis decision-making at all levels.
Australian Government Crisis Coordination Team
An Australian Government Crisis Coordination Team (CCT) can be established by NEMA to support coordination of Australian Government actions, in line with the strategic intent set by the National Coordination Mechanism (NCM). It may bring together representatives from relevant Australian Government agencies, as well as other key stakeholders and employs the CASP methodology to support strategic planning activities and decision support products.
Crisis surge workforce
Australian Government Coordinating Agencies are responsible for maintaining a surge cohort of appropriately trained staff with appropriate security clearances to coordinate and respond to a crisis.
There will be times when there is a requirement for staff to surge across the public service to support response activity. The Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) maintains a surge reserve that mobilises Australian Public Service (APS) staff in large numbers to respond to significant crises when required. Any agency may request this capability from the APSC.
Exercising
The Australian Government regularly conducts crisis exercises to ensure the preparedness of relevant Australian Government agencies for crisis response. This Framework and the Handbook are tested as part of these exercises with a focus on coordination arrangements for extreme to catastrophic crises (p. 38), escalation pathways and related coordination mechanisms.
NEMA delivers an annual national crisis exercising program, maintains shared awareness across government agencies of national crisis exercises, and reports on insights and learnings from exercises, to inform future preparedness, policy and capability requirements.
The Department of Home Affairs, through the Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee (ANZCTC), manages the Counter-Terrorism National Tiered Exercise Program in partnership with states and territories. This program validates and strengthens Australia’s national counter-terrorism capabilities to support counter-terrorism prevention, preparedness and response.
The NEMA and ANZCTC programs deliver whole of government crisis exercising and build national exercising capability through complementary capability development programs. Agencies across the Australian Government also deliver crisis exercising and capability development for identified hazards and sectoral responses.
