KEY POINTS:
Australians have been deliberately kept in the dark about their nation's inability to deal with major natural disasters, a federal Government think-tank said yesterday.
A paper by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, identifying a list of serious flaws in disaster planning, said the country's vulnerability had been kept secret to avoid a wave of fear.
The paper further warned that spending on preparations for managing a large natural disaster was only a fraction of what had been invested in counter-terrorism since the 9/11 attacks on the United States - A$500 million ($602 million), compared with counter-terrorism's A$10 billion.
It said that if Cyclone Larry, which flattened the Innisfail region of Queensland in March 2006, had instead hit Cairns in conjunction with a king tide and storm surge, the disaster would have been "Australia's Hurricane Katrina".
The impact of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1800 people, was made worse by inadequate preparations and a deeply flawed response by government and emergency services.
"[Australia] has yet to see a genuine effort by our national security leaders to engage the public to frankly and openly inform them on where we face major threats, how best the community should better protect itself, and improve risk-reduction measures, the institute's paper said.
"In fact, the reverse is true. A range of government reports relating to Australia's ability to respond to large-scale emergencies have been embargoed on the grounds that to share that information with the public would only frighten people."
The paper was written by David Templeton, former director-general of the federal government's disaster planning agency and Anthony Bergin, a former defence academic and now the institute's director of research programmes.
They argued that Canberra's present focus on counter-terrorism had obscured the potential for much greater death and destruction from extreme natural disasters - which were "not exceptional events".
Their paper said that while the nation had shown an ability to bounce back quickly from disasters, complacency threatened a capacity coming under greater strain.
"We seem to have generated a community view of 'don't worry, someone else will come and get you and fix the damage'," it said.
But the paper warned that Australia's ability to respond to a large-scale catastrophe that hammered critical infrastructure for lengthy periods, or caused massive injury or loss of life, had not been properly tested.
The nation had been lucky so far to escape "the big one" - such as a major earthquake or tsunami, a major flood or dam burst.
Such major disasters would cause extensive injuries and loss of life, displace thousands, precipitate significant business failures, and present extreme costs that would overwhelm the nation's capacity to respond.
The paper also warned that studies had shown that the health system could not cope with a disaster on the scale of the London terror bombings - more than 50 deaths and 600 injuries, including 400 needing surgery - and would probably be overwhelmed by a fast-spreading pandemic.
Further problems are appearing with population shifts to coastal and rural areas, a growing shortage of emergency volunteers, and a shift in basic assets and services from local councils to private companies.
The paper said Australia now urgently needed a "national resilience programme" that should include a single national disaster management and co-ordination framework, planning for freak storms and other impacts of climate change, a rethink of the role of the Defence Force, and the construction of robust new infrastructure.
