Ensuring Australia’s regions have a high capacity of disaster resilience is key to the overall sustainability and liveability of our regional communities who are almost always more adversely affected by natural disasters than Australia’s urban population.
It is why when the RAI developed the Regionalisation Ambition 2032, a set of 20 targets to guide the prosperity of regional Australia over the next decade, we included a target to have 90% or more of regional Australia with a moderate to high capacity for disaster resilience. In 2022, this was measured at 50%. We note the Treasurer’s prioritisation of increasing the Australian Disaster Resilience Index score in the recently released Wellbeing Framework.
In 2020, the Regional Australia Institute as part of the Intergovernmental Shared Inquiry Program, delivered several research reports focusing on businesses’ experiences of natural disasters, identifying the most effective local, state and Commonwealth support to reduce exposure and aid recovery.
As a result of this research, we recommend to the Review the following considerations to help better define the Commonwealth’s role in Australia’s disaster funding environment and to optimise Commonwealth investment to support a national disaster funding system.
August 2023; Response to the Independent Review of Commonwealth Disaster Funding
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