Transcript of Intervention at the High-Level Policy Dialogue on Disaster Resiliency APEC Ministerial Meeting

Honolulu, Hawaii

Transcript E&OE, proof only.

11 November 2011

FOREIGN MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: Thank you very much Hillary and thank you for that introduction. Colleagues, our simple view in Australia is that there is no more practical area than natural disaster management that our peoples expect us to cooperate. Our peoples are directly affected by this. Their lives are destroyed, their property is destroyed and with very little warning. And they expect us, as governments, to act to assist them. If a big event hits any of our countries, as we've all discovered in the last twelve months, none of us is capable of handling such a big natural disaster event on our own – that's simply the truth of it. Whether it is floods in Australia, whether its floods in China or the current floods in Thailand in and around Bangkok, or the extraordinary devastation of the tsunami in Japan and, of course, other natural disasters as well, including the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

So therefore this is a very important practical piece of work which we as APEC are considering. The figures, I think, we need to bear in mind. In the world we have the lion's share of natural disasters. We represent some 45 per cent of the disasters worldwide, in this region, over the last 35 years. That is nearly half of the world's natural disasters occur here, among our collective countries. The second is that 85 percent of the deaths from natural disasters around the world occur in our region, over the last 30 years.

The third point is if we look at the world's mega cities, there are 21 of them around the world. Twelve lie in our countries, all twelve of those mega cities are either on a fault line or they are subject to large scale flooding, or they are very exposed to coastal areas subject to typhoons and cyclones. So all twelve of our region's mega cities are directly exposed by one natural disaster risk or another. Therefore, the challenge for us is how we do it better. As Hillary said quite elegantly this morning, ‘how do we get this stuff done'?

We have been talking about it for many years, and, if you look across the various institutions of our region, there is a veritable alphabet soup of institutions which are dealing with aspects of this natural disaster challenge. And many of the efforts are very good. They are spread across APEC, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the UN disaster coordination agencies, ASEAN and its own internal arrangements, the ARF. And also, prospectively, the East Asia Summit as well. But if you look at the core elements of the work being done by each of these institutions, it boils down to, I think, two or three core principals.

One, how do we build resilience more in our communities to reduce the damage from natural disasters when they occur?

Second is when a disaster strikes, how do we respond rapidly and in a coordinated fashion to help each other as well as our arrangements within our countries?

And thirdly, how does government, business and the community work effectively together within countries? And the truth is we all have valuable experiences to share often from the direct experience of large scale disasters in our own countries.

Let me just make one personal observation as someone who has visited a number of disaster zones in my own country and around the region for the last several years. The truth is when a disaster hits we all want to help, we're all human beings and when we see innocent people in any part of our region, having their lives washed away literally or blown away or being buried in earthquakes, as human beings we want to act and act then to help. This is a good response; it's a testament to our common humanity. The problem however lies in the proper coordination and absorption of those offers of help and assistance when a disaster hits. That is the key challenge. How to ensure that the offers which come from around the world are properly prepared and rapidly deployed in order to make a real difference on the ground. And we've all been there, our experiences around this table. That, I believe, is where our work must concentrate.

The second area of concentration is, in the absence of a disaster hitting, how do we use the best meteorological advice, the best advice in terms of hydrological mapping for example, to reduce the impact of disasters in cities by better, for example, city planning laws. To give you one example with our good friends from the Philippines who are around the table here, and I see Albert at the other end of the table. I was recently in Manila and looking at some of the work we are doing together. Australia and the Philippines together are mapping all of metro Manila in terms of points of elevation so that we now know which areas historically are going to be the worst affected and those which will be partially affected and those not affected. And of what use is that? To move people physically in the most affected areas, over time, into higher ground and to better ground. Secondly, to use that information to inform planning laws so that people do not move into areas which are highly flood prone or disaster prone in the future. That's the second area of core work.

I conclude on this Hillary, by drawing the attention of all of our colleagues around the table to the work which we in Australia are also doing with our good friends in Indonesia and through Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa. We are about to release in the East Asia Summit our own proposal, agreed proposal for better natural disaster management within the EAS states. This is designed specifically to do a number of things. One, when a disaster hits, how do we make sure that everyone's equipment is compatible? That is if you've got equipment which is necessary for digging up buildings or for transporting heavy earth moving equipment from one part of the country to another. How do we, through our Heads of Disaster agencies make sure that that detailed work is done? Because there is no time to do it when a disaster hits. To make sure that all the standards for admitting even sniffer dogs into earthquake sites are being fully approved because sometimes our quarantine laws get in the road of these things.

So that detailed work about ensuring that when a disaster hits, our equipment is compatible as possible, our people have a similar training profile across the region and are highly specialists and that things like sniffer dogs don't require more than 30 seconds to fix in getting from one country to another. That is what we are seeking to do with our friends in Indonesia within the EAS initiative that we are proposing. And then finally, on the ground to make sure that we have and agreed coordination agency when a disaster hits so that everyone's offers of assistance go into a central coordination mechanism and they can be filtered for what is useful, what is very useful and what is very, very useful and prioritised accordingly. It's that level of practical work which we are doing.

So that is what we are doing in an EAS context. The work of APEC here is terrific because it directly involves the private sector and I commend those who have done this work here but to go back to that excellent contribution and thought from Serge Lebeouf in our earlier discussion, if we are a network of networks then there is a requirement across the wider region to bring all these threads together so that when the next disaster hits we don't end up having another seminar about how to do better next time that we just do it better next time.

ENDS

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