 My name is Sue Ann Ware and I'm the head of School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle. We respectably, we respect, ah, anywhere's gonna happen, we respectably acknowledge the traditional custodians. They were our buckle and the Waramai people whose traditional land the University of Newcastle and Newcastle City Council resides on. We acknowledge Aboriginal Elders and leaders past present and future and understand that sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land. This is particularly salient in the architecture in the built environment. In my school, Sabi, which we like to call it, we recognize that we work on country and that it's contested ground and that our jobs are to address possession and produce graduates and staff who will make a difference. I want to welcome and thank all of you for coming tonight. As you know, we've been in a really interesting situation with lockdowns and online learning and everything happening online. This is one of the first public face-to-face events the University has been able to hold in terms of the Looking Head lecture series. In 2020, we had a great lineup and I'm going to give you a little bit of reflection on that. We talked about, you know, communities and how we as a universe, you want to be more outward facing. We want you to have access to our expertise to bring together fantastic panels like tonight and really, what are the things that matter? So we've had lots of Looking Head lectures looking at things like climate change, looking at black lives matter still and particularly today. That's incredibly salient as well as what I would call resilience across a range of endeavors and tonight you will be hearing not just resilience in the built environment or maybe around disasters, but around psychological resilience, what it means individually, what it means in a community sense, what it means at a state level, what it might mean at a global level. So this lecture series is really, really special and it's really about the university and the city and our community coming together and sharing knowledge. So we hope we get lots of really great questions and we really hope that this idea of resilience is unpacked and sort of turned on its head and there's lots of different ways in which the panel and the audience can work through that. As always, our panels are quite diverse. I'm going to introduce now Willow Forsyth, who is currently a PhD student in the School of Architecture and Built Environment. Her research examines household flood preparedness and focuses on improving information available to emergency managers to tailor educational approaches, which is really, really important. She's an experienced consultant and technical writer for strategic reviews of resilience infrastructure. I'd like you to please welcome Willow. Thank you, everybody. I'm Willow Forsyth, as you've heard, and I am a PhD student at the University of Newcastle. My task tonight in seven minutes is threefold, so you can check if I make the seven minutes. I want to tell you why I first got interested in disaster resilience as a concept. I want to tell you a little bit about my PhD and I will not go on for 20 minutes. And I most importantly need to introduce Commissioner Fitzsimmons. So as to the first, my interest and belief in this idea of building disaster resilient communities, it actually grew out of a coincidence of roles when I was studying for my masters at the University of Newcastle. So I'm a member of my local surf club in Stockton. And as a Nippers age manager and also as the bronze trainer in the club, I actually saw first hand what is the impact of a shift in our communities that we may not have thought about. So decades ago, Nipper parents were generally local residents who really knew the surf and they were the ones who were actively teaching their children about it. Today, for those of us who are involved in this sort of volunteer activity, we've noticed that many of the parents of Nippers, they don't know the surf. They haven't grown up in it and therefore their children don't know the surf either. Consequently, most of our Nipper parents and the kids, they're just not aware that flash-wrapped rips can happen out of the blue. They have little confidence of what they might do if something slips sideways and they don't actually have the skill to either rescue themselves or others. So when you step back from all of that and you think about across all of our suburbs, people like coming to the beach. But for many of them, it's actually an incredibly unfamiliar environment. They can't read the surf conditions and so they do two things. They underestimate the risk and they overestimate their abilities. And those are the factors that contribute to accidents and to fatalities. There is no longer in our society and our communities a dominant generational passing down of surf knowledge and skills. Without the active education roles of many of our surf clubs, we actually risk losing what I'd like to call surf resilience within our communities. It's our volunteers in surf clubs today that must understand and work to address that gap. So to the second, how does that little piece relate at all to my PhD? Well, extreme floods are rare events. They seemingly happen out of the blue. Our experience or intuition tells us they're far more likely to happen to someone else other than us, protected behind levy systems, which are often designed up to what is called a 1% AP event. Multiple flood experiences that don't actually happen to test system limits will tend to reinforce for everyone in the community a false sense of security. And in research, it's come to be called the levy effect. Also quite tellingly, research shows that many people who die in floodwaters live within 45 kilometers of home. So what it says to us is for us as members living people, residents of a flood plain, we again, we underestimate the behavior and the impact of floods and of flood events in our familiar environment and we overestimate our abilities. And it's volunteers in our SES who work within our local communities to educate and to protect us. I guess my point across these two diverse environments is the social cognitive processes that we all use to think about risk will both help us and hinder us in preparing for and coping with these unfamiliar events. And the risk is massive damages and fatalities. So therefore what I'm studying is I want to study. I'm studying what motivates those of us who did live on the flood plain to take the time out of our complex and extremely busy lives to prepare for what are infrequent, low probability, but high impact extreme flood events. Until we better understand what of the many factors that are out there motivate us to take protective measures when in reality floods are a distant memory or something we don't even know about. We actually are quite limited as to how we can improve our risk education approaches. As a research and emergency management community, our goal has to be to improve community flood resilience. To reach our goal, we actually need to better understand what the most effective preparations are in different risk locations. And then what motivates different at risk communities to do those things. And then how best to communicate these types of protective measures. And last but not least, we actually need to measure how well we do all this. So I'm really feel privileged to be a person that's doing a PhD looking at that area. And my PhD is actually sponsored by the Hunder Valley Flood Mitigation Scheme Manager set within the New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. I think it's indicative of their willingness to embrace new ideas to deliver resilient outcomes beyond building and maintaining levees and physical infrastructure. Levy systems, like every other man-made structure, it has they have design limitations as well as social, economic and environmental trade-offs. Around the globe, emergency managers know we've pretty much reached the limits of physical infrastructure to give us flood protection. Extreme events will exceed those limits and resilient communities of the future will need to do things differently to prepare for those extreme flood events. In my view, it is in the time before future events. What we do, how we do it and our willingness to learn, that's going to matter most for our resilience. If there's anyone in the audience who happens to live on the Hunter Valley Flood Plains, please come and talk to me after the lecture because I've got much I want to learn and I'd love to hear your stories. So that's what I'm going to do and why with my PhD. And now, the third most important thing is my honour to introduce Commissioner Fitzsimmons tonight. As uncontrolled fires ravaged much of New South Wales from late 2019, reaching a crisis point in January 2020, one man's leadership and compassion stood out and helped us to cope with and make sense of the incredible devastation. Shane Fitzsimmons, then the New South Wales rule fire service commissioner did that. After leading New South Wales communities through some of their darkest times in that recent history, Shane Fitzsimmons announced he would head up a new government agency, Resilience New South Wales. He was welcomed into his new role with the immediate challenge of supporting New South Wales communities through the COVID-19 pandemic. And most recently, with less than a year under his belt in this position, he's actually had to assist, assisting with the response to flooding, which has hit vast areas of our state. Commissioner Fitzsimmons was appointed Resilience New South Wales inaugural commissioner and Deputy Secretary of Emergency Management in May of 2020. He chairs the State Emergency Management Committee, the State Recovery Committee and National Emergency Medal Committee. The appointment to Resilience New South Wales follows a distinguished career with the New South Wales rule fire service, as well as council and director roles across state and national emergency management authorities. Commissioner Fitzsimmons' career has been acknowledged with the New South Wales rule fire long service medal, recognizing 30 years of service, the national medal recognizing more than 35 years of service, and the Australian fire service medal. He's also a Paul Harris fellow and holds a Paul Harris fellow sapphire from the Rotary Clubs of Barara and Sydney. Please join me in welcoming Resilience New South Wales commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, to the stage. Thank you, Willow. And good evening, everybody. Thank you for the opportunity to join you on what I'm sure will be a very insightful and beneficial panel discussion later this evening. Just nearly 12 months into this new role, Resilience New South Wales. And if I back date a little, I need to confess that during the middle of the bushfire season, I've been in discussions with the Premier and the minister and the head of the public service for the last year or so prior to that. I'd been commissioner of the organisation for over a decade. And I've always been of the view that there's benefit in all of us determining for ourselves when it's time to do something different. And I always wanted to be one of those people that didn't outstay their welcome or their relevance in a role. And I'd actually agreed to leave the rule fire service in August of 2019. The challenge was that 2019 and 20 started shaping up as a really difficult fire season. There's a couple of phrases you won't find me using. The first is black summer and the second is social distancing. I won't use the phrase black summer because it does a remarkable disservice to the so many of communities across New South Wales that are experiencing fires, destructive and deadly fires well before summer. As a matter of fact, we were averaging over a thousand fires a month during winter, June, July and August, more than a thousand fires a month in New South Wales. So as I came back from annual leave in July, I signalled with the government that I thought it would be appropriate to stay for the season because it was shaping up to be another busy one. The forecast was very similar to the year before. We had no idea it would be as bad as what it ultimately turned out to be. But as we went through that unprecedented fire season, they approached me particularly given the scale of damage and destruction and dislocation in local communities and the extraordinary recovery effort that would be required that they were keen to set up a new organization that would lead the recovery of a scale of magnitude we'd never experienced before. But more importantly, to have a broader focus on disaster management and preparation and coordination for the state of New South Wales. And as a pretty simple firefighter growing up through the organization, having this new organization be recovery, disaster preparedness and emergency management resonated with me. So I said, yes, that would be a sort of role that would appeal to me very much, particularly with my connection with the fire service and looking after communities impacted by those fires. When we got close to announcing the new organization, this word resilience came up. And I have to confess, I had a fairly candid conversation with the Premier and the Minister and the government. And I said, where's the bloody hell is this word resilience come from? I thought we were talking about disaster preparedness, emergency management and recovery. I got that. I said, no, no, no, Shane, this is going to be a little bit broader than that. We want resilience to be the broader discussion and not just central to the traditional convention of emergency management and disaster preparedness and then the recovery. I did say that no one would understand it. And I had to, in very quick terms, eat a lot of humble pie because what I learned very quickly was that everybody's got a view on resilience. And I don't know about you, but I think 2020, just not just because I was in the job, I'm sure. I don't think I've heard the word resilience, use more in public discourse and social discussions and business discussions than I have in 2020. Now, I could be wrong, I could just be sensitive to the word, but I think the compounding effects of what we've experienced as a state and as a nation in the last 18 months to two years really brought home this word resilience. And what do I mean by that? Well, it caused me to do a deal of reading, lots of discussions, but most importantly, a lot of listening to people in community, to people in government, in business, in representative organisations and some of our tertiary institutions. And I got to thinking a lot and seeking to build my own understanding of what resilience means in this new organisation. But if we cast our mind back 18 months to two years, we're talking about a jurisdiction, the state of New South Wales that was on its knees with drought. The hottest driest period in centuries and indeed the hottest driest period on record, the worst drought in centuries that result in 100% of the geographic area of New South Wales being drought declared or drought affected. It provided the precursor, the backdrop, the landscape to what ultimately became the worst ever and unprecedented fire season for New South Wales. Fire starting in winter, burning all the way through to the other end of summer. Just under 12,000 fires, fires that went for 160 days of operational intensity, consecutive days and 200 consecutive days of declared bushfire emergencies. A damage and destruction told like we've never seen before, five and a half million hectares, hundreds of communities, damage, dislocated, destroyed and lives taken. 26 lives taken including seven fire fighters, four volunteers and three air crew that were on contract and part of the firefighting family here in the state. It amassed a response effort like we've never seen before. Six and a half thousand people came to our aid from every state and territory around Australia, including New Zealand, United States and Canada and they were all integrated into operations. The Premier agreed to issue citations to those that contributed directly to the firefighting effort. So far we've given out just over 75,000 citations to the people that were actively involved in the firefighting effort. It was an extraordinary community response. But with that with that extraordinary event that didn't let up until February of 2020 when the rains came, those rains came all right. They came all right across a very denuded landscape from drought and fire and those communities that had been through drought that had been through fires were now experiencing a number of locations, extraordinary storm damage, erosion, flooding, landslides. And then as we came out of that in February into March and April, we were well and truly into the thick of COVID-19 pandemic and all that came with the response to living and working through the implications of a COVID-19 pandemic response. And then, of course, as was mentioned in March of this year, on top of the COVID, on top of the fires, on top of the other storms, on top of the drought, we had some of the worst most significant rainfall events, particularly on the Mid-North Coast and significant flooding on the Mid-North Coast and parts of the Hawkesbury and Nepean. In the fires, we lost just under two and a half thousand homes. In the floods, we've got about 1,300 to 1,500 homes that are now uninhabitable. We've just declared 63 local government areas, natural disaster areas in the floods of March 21, and there's more that will be added to that list as the waters move through parts of New South Wales still. But what's interesting out of those 63 areas declared natural disasters is that 60 percent of them, 38 of those local government areas were also natural disaster declared areas for the bushfires on top of the drought. So when we talk about resilience, we can't go past the extraordinary and compounding effects to so many communities across New South Wales that were on their knees, impacted by drought, belted by bushfires, hit by storms and floods, the extraordinary implications of COVID and the deflating and demoralising aspects of COVID in so many of the rural and regional areas where where business was shut down and totally dislocated during the fires over over the Christmas New Year period. We were then all working together as communities with a want to get out and invest and be present in rural and regional communities to lift their spirits, to spend money, to holiday, to buy things, to access produce. But because of COVID, we shut it all down over Easter. So even when optimism was building and hope was on the horizon, another disaster impeded our ability to connect and resonate. And then, of course, working through the COVID and now more recently with with storms and floods that have affected again so many of those communities. So when I read and when I listen and when I hear what people what resilience means to people, more often than not, it's about the common definition of being affected by something and bouncing back, bouncing back to normal. I struggle with that definition. Because once you've been through something pretty significant and it takes a toll and you rebuild your repair and you heal, what's normal? Do we seriously go back to where we were beforehand? I don't think so, particularly at a personal level, at a human level, at an individual level. Because for me, the whole idea around resilience is how do we how do we contemplate as individuals, as families, as businesses, as local communities, as governments? How do we contemplate what we are susceptible or vulnerable to? How do we personalize that and comprehend that vulnerability or susceptibility and convert that into thought and action? And if we do accept our vulnerability or our susceptibility to whatever it is and it's not always the default to natural disasters, natural disasters are obvious, but it's also our vulnerability and susceptibility to our reliance on how we live, work and function as a society. So dependency on utilities, periods of outage without power, without sewer and water, without communications and connectivity. How do we operate and function? So if we personalize that vulnerability or susceptibility, what can we do to ameliorate or lessen the impact to seek to prevent or mitigate as much as we can the impact of that next event, that next disaster? And if we are confronted with it, how do we plan and contemplate the best response possible to deal with whatever we're confronted with? And then most importantly, how do we come out the other side better, stronger and improved as a result of that experience? So for me, resilience is about learning from others and learning from experiences. But most importantly, it's about learning through lived experiences. In the last 18 months or so, one of the most confronting conversations I had was late one night on the way home talking to a former colleague, reflecting on some anniversary milestones of some tragedy from the fires of 1920, particularly around the loss of life. It was an emotional conversation. There were tears at both ends of the phone. We were having a chat and reflecting on what had happened and where people were up to now. And I said to him, how are you traveling? You're going OK? He said, yes, I am. He said, I'm getting help. I'm getting assistance and it's making a big difference. And I said, that's fantastic. I said, what's it doing? He said, well, it's helping. It's helping with my relationship with the wife and kids. I didn't realise how much I was shutting them out and how much they wanted to connect with me. He said, it's also helping me a lot back in the workplace and connecting with my volunteers. I said, that's fantastic. I'm really proud of you. I said, you're going to keep going? He said, absolutely, it's making a difference and I'm going to keep accessing the services. Thank you very much. I said, all right, no problem. We'll catch up later. And he said, Shane, you've got to promise me something. And I said, what's that? He said, you can't tell anyone. I said, I beg your pardon? He said, you can't tell anyone. I said, can't tell anyone what? And he said, you can't tell anyone that I'm getting assistance. And of all the things that we'd been working through, that was the thing that floored me. And I did say to him, I said, you've got to be flippin' kidding, and I did not use the word flippin', but in this audience I probably should. But why do I say that? Because if we reflect and comprehend that resilience is through learned and lived experiences, then why do we still have this extraordinary stigma and this convenience of overlooking that with lived experiences and learning lessons, we gloss over the fact that more often than not, those disruptions, those emergencies, those disasters, those losses invariably have a deep and troublesome emotional and psychological toll on us all. Whether that's losing a loved one, losing the family pet, whether it's being involved in the middle of a disaster like we've been talking about in the last little while. Why is it that we gloss over and don't want to talk about the fact that we're emotionally and psychologically affected by these traumatic and difficult events? Why do we, particularly as men, and I'm going to single out men based on my experience in the fire and emergency services, but also in rural and regional New South Wales, why is it that men are expected to carry this extraordinary masculinity of BS of yesteryear that says men cope through these things and their feelings and their emotions are not impacted because they're strong? Resilience is about strength, but resilience is about building on lessons and learning and readying ourselves and positioning ourselves and our community for the next event and the next disruption so we can better cope, so we can ameliorate, we can deal with, and we can come back stronger out the other side. It's an extraordinarily frustrating set of circumstances I find. What I also found in my readings was a great bit of literature coming out of the United States. I think it's the Psychologist Association of the United States and they describe resilience like a kayaker going down a river. And going down that river from time to time, we're going to find placid, calm waters, then we're going to find some pretty turbulent waters, some rapids, some boulders, some surge in the water. In other areas, we might even get tossed out of the canoe or the kayak, we might even find our kayak gets busted up and we've got to get a new kayak, but when we get back in and we continue down the river, we'll find that there's calmer waters ahead. But based on the experience of going through those previous rapids, we've learned a great deal. So we're readying ourselves for the next one. And in theory, we continue to go down on this journey. So when I reflected enormously on what I've learned over the last 12 months in setting up this new organization, resilience is not the sole purview of any individual, it's not the sole purview of a family, no one government can resolve it, no one local government can resolve it, no business can resolve it. It requires a community effort to pull together and build resilience. Individually and collectively, if we give each other permission to talk to each other about how we're thinking, how we're feeling, what we're contemplating, pre-an event, pre-a disaster, but importantly, during and post the disaster, I have no doubt, A, the stronger and speedier we will build and come out the other side better and stronger, but also a problem shared or a problem contemplated and shared is more readily a problem solved and solutions realized. We are sailing across New South Wales with record packages and support programs for recovery and rebuilding. We are seeing locally led decisions and priorities, finding nuance and what matters in one community as the absolute priority is different to another community. So when we talk about resilience, we've got to understand that just like communities are different, you and I are all different, so we've got to make sure that our policies and our architecture of frameworks around support and assistance and investments are nuanced to the point that they're applicable and relevant and prioritized at that local level. And when I think about resilience and particularly recovery, we all default to infrastructure, we all default to the building back better of things, the repair, the reconstruction, the rebuilding, the modification, and they're all important, but the thing we've got to do more individually and collectively is realize that the critical part of that recovery journey, that recovery effort is the healing. The emotional and psychological repair, sharing and coming together as families, as businesses, as local communities goes a long way to helping with the repair and the recovery and the healing in those local communities because when they open up and talk to each other, they also seem to land much more readily on what the shared priorities are for those local communities. Absolutely, we are learning more today about not just repairing and rebuilding to the same as what was there before, it's actually about repairing and rebuilding with betterment and improvement, building on the lessons of the past, the analysis of the past, and indeed the experiences of that current event. I sincerely look forward to joining my colleagues on the panel tonight and having an open and frank discussion around what you and I think resilience might be and what it might look like going forward. I'm very pleased to be part of a new organisation that's going to take a broad look for government across all of government, industry, business, working together, local councils, local government, local communities, and indeed our jurisdictional and commonwealth partners to understand and map our vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, what our investment options might be to rebuild and improve on that, and then importantly, how do we respond and deal with and then recover and rebuild, repair and heal after those extraordinary events. Thank you for the opportunity to join you tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Shane. So it's incredibly interesting hearing someone talk about their personal stories and men talking about emotions and thinking about moving forward in transformation and learning. All things at the university and also our community as well as the next speaker and the person who's going to moderate this panel at our Lord Mayor and Neurotelia Nelms has taught me a great deal about. She was one of the first people to welcome me to our fantastic city, and I'm going to give a very personal opening about her because it was one of those days where you're really, really nervous because you've got this incredible woman coming to launch this thing which may or may not work, and we're all wearing really, I'll say bright, we'll call it fluoro pink for this event, and she came in and said, can I have a T-shirt too? Which you don't often get a deputy, you don't get a Lord Mayor who wants a T-shirt too. So it's fantastic that she's joining us here tonight. She certainly knows a lot about leading through resilience. She certainly knows about some of the challenges we face in our community, and she's incredibly open to a range of ideas that come from all parts of our communities, and I've seen her engage with incredibly marginalised and disadvantaged communities, as well as people who are incredibly eloquent. So with that, I'd like to welcome our Lord Mayor. Thank you, Sue Ann, for that lovely introduction, and it wasn't that long ago that the photos of us many years ago wearing the fluoro pink T-shirts came up as a memory on one of my social media feeds, and I thought about that very interesting evening when we first met. I thought we were very lucky to have someone of Sue Ann's calibre coming as a professor to the University of Newcastle to work with her landscaping background and teach the students coming through the city, the visitors, the international students in that profession, and at the same time also spend a lot of her time working with us at the City of Newcastle in terms of advising us in new ways of thinking about landscaping, technical components to delivering city infrastructure, but also very much about thought leadership. As a leading academic in the field, she's always very available and open to helping us look at challenges very differently, and I think that's one of the wonderful aspects of having the University of Newcastle working so closely with the City of Newcastle. When Sue Ann arrived, it wasn't long after we had secured the CIFAL, the United Nations Training Centre here in the City of Newcastle, and that was quite a large coup for the Pacific region for the University of Newcastle and the City of Newcastle to be co-hosting the CIFAL, and the importance of actually having the CIFAL located, and obviously many of you in the audience would maybe have experienced the work or the benefit of having the CIFAL located here in the City of Newcastle, and that only comes through partnership and collaboration. I also would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the panellists that I'm going to be moderating tonight, and that is wonderful to have Willow, who has a very exceptionally high career in the corporate world, and has taken her community role to the next level where she's actually doing a PhD and working on areas that intersect in our daily life at the City of Newcastle, particularly around beach safety, the resilience of our coastline, I won't go into all of that right now, and also flooding, and when I say that, and I know the Commissioner needs no introduction, and thank you Commissioner for that wonderful, very open and honest introduction about your entry into your new role, as the New South Wales person of the year. I feel like a lot of us already know you, but it's wonderful to have that personal introduction to the City of Newcastle, and as I introduce those panellists, and also thank them for inviting me here this evening to be able to ask the questions, which is very different to some of my normal roles, I also reflect on what the City has been through just in the last few years since I've been Lord Mayor, but also in my lifetime, and I'm 45, I was 13 when the earthquake hit Newcastle, and I saw the impacts of that. I was in my late teens, early 20s, experiencing the closure of BHP first hand in the City of Newcastle. I'm now the Lord Mayor of the City of Newcastle that has seen East Coast lows. I was an elected councillor in 2008, a year after the Pasha Bulka, so I saw the impact and the cleanup of the Pasha Bulka, and now through the pandemic. And we have worked very closely with a task force formed last year during the pandemic to actually look at some of those more fine-grained, granular impacts of the pandemic through the City of Newcastle. So it is very multifaceted, and it's not just about the disaster and managing the disaster, or managing the risk of a disaster, and then rebuilding that infrastructure, which obviously is a very significant role in local government, but the commissioner is right. It's about people. And our roles, and my roles always, are about putting people at the centre of that decision-making process. And I think that that is really the right mindset and the right framework to be working through in terms of what the new agency in New South Wales is going to do. And I'm actually really glad they chose the name Resilience. So without further ado, I will finish, but again, thank you, and also welcome the panellists to the stage. What does it make? Am I turned on? It could be automated. Oh, there I am. Thank you very much. Before we get started, I just wanted to familiarise yourselves, and I believe there's also people potentially online with the Q&A process for this evening's panel. If you are watching online, there is a QR code in the corner of your screen, which you can scan and then submit questions to. For those here in this room, so that's all of you here, you can scan the QR code on the big screen or see the staff in the wings if you're having any trouble. And we'll be able to answer those questions that you're uploading. I have been given an iPad, so I will get those questions sent through to me. So any burning questions, you have of our wonderful panellists here this evening. And I can also take questions from the floor if time permits. So just to kick off this evening, I thought while the questions are still coming through, I would ask the commissioner, our guest here this evening, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing the building of resilience for our communities here in the Hunter and the Greater Newcastle area? Look, I think like so many areas, it is, if I default back to the 19-20 fire season, it was an unprecedented fire season. 5.5 million hectares of countryside burnt over the most protracted period of time ever recorded in the state of New South Wales. 5.5 million hectares is enormous. And the dryness in the landscape meant that we were seeing some of the worst fire behaviour and fire spread at 2.3 and 4 a.m., which is contrary to convention where you would normally see that at 2.3 and 4 p.m. in the afternoon, when conditions are typically hotter and windier and drier. It was unprecedented during 1920. It is no longer unprecedented. And whilst 5.5 million hectares burnt, the state of New South Wales is 80 million hectares. So only 6% or 7% of the state was burnt, but if we look at the forested country, the great dividing range, closer to 20 to 25% of the forest burnt. There's still 75% of those forests left and more than 90% of the state that's susceptible to fire. There are large tracks of the Greater Hunter, Greater Newcastle region, Central Coast, Greater Sydney that didn't get significantly impacted by fire last season. So ironically, as experience will also back me in here, after any large fire, the communities that are most prepared for the next five years in so many ways are the least that need to be because they're completely burnt out. It's fresh in their mind. They're doing things around their property. They're rebuilding their home with an absolute focus on prevention and mitigation to better withstand the next fire. The absurdity is that they're the ones that least need to do all that effort there and then. It's everybody else who wasn't impacted by fires during 1920 that should be heeding those extraordinary lessons and actually doing their part in and around their property for the next big event. What I would also say is because it was unprecedented and it no longer is, whilst I'm not suggesting the 1925 season is something that will be replicated every season, what it does signal to us in concert with the forecast and the prediction for some time now of more frequent, more intense, more difficult fire weather, sorry, extreme weather events and fire seasons and those sorts of things, we need to recast our thinking that the 1925 season is now the new extreme and we need to start getting our head around that and what that means in preparing communities, our infrastructure, our people and all in between. So fire is just one example and as Willow, I'm sure we'll talk about more pertinently from here, if I look at the events of March with the flooding event and the rain event, we're still got the season between now and the middle of the year where east coast lows and big weather events are still very likely. I remember very vividly the June long weekend with the Pasha bulk and things like that and so we can't rule out another big weather event coming in the next couple of months. So how do we build that preparedness and that readiness? And similarly, I think what has happened out of 2020 is that COVID, if I can say there's a silver lining in it, what I mean is invariably in history sense a disaster happened somewhere, people generally got this extraordinary remarkable outpouring of love and care and compassion and generosity for those that are being impacted, but it happened somewhere and it's usually geographically quite limited and then once the immediate supports done, people move on and get on with their busy lives and you get this natural complacency or apathy that it's not happening to me but it's happening to somebody else. I think COVID has been the leveler and I think it's reminded us all that we are vulnerable and susceptible to things. So what is the next thing that we are vulnerable and susceptible to and how do we get social discourse? How do we get the dialogue going to start getting people to think about what they're vulnerable and susceptible to, particularly in an environment going forward where we can expect more extreme and frequent weather events when we've got a growing dependency on the interconnectedness and the high availability and performance of infrastructure, of utilities, of telecommunications. The more we do, the more we rely on those things and if you pick up not just a teenager, you pick up an adult today who can't use their phone, they're buggered, because our life revolves around these devices for everything around business, banking, shopping, communicating. If we can't charge and run these devices, we'll have anarchy. So what happens if the communications networks go out, if the ability to charge these things go out? So there's so much more than just the natural disaster environment that we've got to think about going forward. That's a wonderful insight and probably a good lesson for our local communities that weren't as impacted as some of our neighbours during the bushfire season in particular and also to some degree for the flooding. In Newcastle, just in this area alone, it was touch and go if we had have had, it was spread out over a longer period. So it allowed the infrastructure to cope. We're watching it and watching it and going, we can cope with that volume of rainfall, but we just can't cope with it in a shorter amount of time. But it was on the edge. So it's very likely, as living on a flood plain, that it would happen. And I think that would lead me to asking Willow around your thoughts on how individuals can actually contribute because there's so much in our lives. How do we as individuals contribute to building resilience? That is a really big question. I have another two years to go on my PhD in New Italy. I think this is one of the things I just want to reflect on that is the difficulty with what we do in talking about resilience. We're asking people to contemplate disaster. We're asking people to contemplate stuff that can be emotionally very uncomfortable. And for some people, that's emotionally unprotective. I think we have to be nuanced in what we ask of people in doing this. And I guess I come from the perspective of thinking that most people are doing their best. And we need to be very careful in how we do our risk communication to acknowledge that for some people, one of the ways they prepare is to make sure they're emotionally protected. So I think I just wanted to put that first because I think that's a really important thing that we need to take into account when we're talking about people's mental health. But above and beyond that, a bunch of the research after a year of reading and awful lot of really good stuff by some really talented people from around the world, there's an acknowledgement that we're not motivated necessarily to prepare by talking about the risk itself. And so in the past, a bunch of what we've done has maybe focused too much on that. But equally, we haven't necessarily done the level of research to test exactly what works yet. So we can't just, we shouldn't just follow our intuition. There is some research that says sometimes we get it wrong. We actually do need to do the work on it. I think the areas that people are looking at now is to say some of the more effective ways to communicate is to think about what you're asking someone to do. Let's say whether you're saying to them you want them to do the fire break or whatever around the house. And in the flood sense, it might be to prepare yourself for some sort of a slight inundation is to talk about how you can do that task. So explain so that people can lift their own sense of ability to do it. And also to explain the costs and benefits of doing that both in dollars and in sense terms as well as emotionally. What are the positive experience of doing it and what are the negative experience of doing it? I was actually mentioning to someone else earlier that I hoped knew more about it than me. One of the things I stumbled across in the American stuff is that on a flood to stop all the horrible sewer and other stuff coming into your house, you can go and get a cheap one-way valve from Bunnings. You know, it's $11. But I couldn't find anywhere telling me how to do it. So those sorts of things are maybe, once you figure out those are the important things to do, it may not just be about risk. It might be about how do we work together? And the other component that they talk about in the research is what are our social norms? And that's looking around and seeing who else, who, what is the important people in my life think about me doing these things? Would they encourage it? And then I'm more likely to do it. Who are the role models that I look around and see? And are they doing it? And that will encourage us to do it. And another theme is around the sort of the moral responsibility that we feel. And there's some really interesting research around that about when we take it on and when we don't. So I actually think we have a lot to learn. And as long as we, as researchers, an emergency management community are open to it, I think will influence and support the rest of us who are householders better in the future. I think that's excellent advice, even with two years to go. There are roles for all of us as individuals, but there are also roles for us as community leaders, as experts in our fields. And I've had a question come through from Slido, thank you, and the audience, around the role that architecture plays in building resilience. And even just to broaden that out around a government and community leaders, their roles in building community resilience. I might take that from a few different ways or approach it from a few different ways. So I guess I'm the head of a school built environment and architecture. And so we deal a lot with the physical world and things that are very tangible, very technical and very governed. And often that's about safety and risk adversity and really thinking about community health and wellbeing and occupational health and wellbeing. And I take that very seriously and so do our students and staff, but and so do practitioners. But I also think some of the things that are underlying the conversation we're having tonight are around what I would call everyday aspects of resilience. And what does it mean to live in a flood plain and accept that it's going to flood? And how do you, as an architect, as a person who lives there, who might work with an architect or a landscape architect or a construction manager, how do you learn to live with being in a flood plain? How do you learn to live with being in an area that might have a devastating or a difficult fire condition? We have seven different fire ecologies, it's going to happen. And so one of the things that I like, students in the built environment and my staff to do, and they do it incredibly well, is one, look at indigenous people. Okay, we're talking about serious resilience, over 60,000 years of all sorts of social environment all the challenges you can throw at that knowledge and the way that they've maintained and that knowledge continues and transforms and grows and offers up different perspectives to perhaps where I was educated in the US, which is a very Western way of learning. So one is thinking about it through another set of lenses. I think it's also that for years and years and years and I happen to work quite closely with engineers and we'll have a very exciting closing statement by an engineer that there was this thing about fixing the problem, finding the one answer. And there's nothing wrong with engineers and that aspect of some of what they do, but we need lots of answers and lots of options and there's never one single answer. There's lots of different ways of approaching it. So one of the things that I think architecture, construction management, landscape architecture bring to this is they offer a range of ways of living with and living in and thinking about a range of ways to approach different problems, which comes back to something Shane talked about in terms of it's really specific to the locale. It's really specific to context. Now they might have similar challenges, but that community might have different values, might have different aspects that they need to deal with. So I think that what the environment professions bring to this collectively is that ability to sort of give you multiple answers, multiple ways forwards, but also to think about a very particular context at a particular time. I think that gives us some good insight. Just in terms of a follow up question, in terms of built environments, we obviously live in a metropolitan area in a built environment here that is in a flood plain. We're all bracing for our next round of East Coast Lowe's here in Newcastle. There must be some ways that we can maybe do urban planning better, mixed with better architecture. I know we had a lot of lessons learned from the earthquake here in terms of construction methodology. Is there a way, is there one single way or is there many different ways that can actually be implemented? I think it's interesting because I often get on those design review panels, right? And there's policy and levers that are trying to govern things like a development approval where you're trying to get the very best, but there's lots of different ways of going around that and that's a whole another panel I suspect. But there's never a single answer, but I think about things every day here in Newcastle like urban heat island effect, which we've worked on with the smart cities team and it's not just about the fact that we need more shade and because it's getting hotter and we have less water, but we also need to think about our public realm in a way where we have human thermal comfort, which means it's comfortable to be outside when it's hot out. And you can say, well, just plant better trees or trees that are more resilient to climate change and things like that, but it's not just about trees, it's about the materials we select on the ground, the materials we select for benches. And so there's a whole litany of ways of approaching it. And I think for me it's having sort of a series of complex ways of unpacking it, but also a series of options that people can choose from based on budget, based on how quick they want it to happen, how long they have. And coming back to the kind of, I think there are some basic principles that we tend to get through policy and legislation, which I think we learn from experience and policy makers and planners in particular understand that realm, but how they're translated and how they help us do better design, how they help us engage better with our communities and help communities understand why it's important when just even communicating things like urban heat island effect to normal people who don't read heat maps is a really interesting, challenging endeavor. But also just understanding that if it's a 50 degree day, maybe taking the baby out and waiting for a bus at Wallsend is a difficult prospect. So that, and I'm using Wallsend because I know that there's some shade issues there, but if you have to take public transport, what do you do? And so that's a city partnership with a community partnership to think about, and I know you guys are working on it, doing a really great job. But it is that thing where just even recognizing to that person that that might be dangerous. That's not something that you're taught in school or that you're gonna learn on television or even social media. And so part of I think the role that we all play as individuals and as people who are engaged in this and certainly as a city or a state is really thinking about how do we work with the nuances and how do we get people to understand that this is a really complex set of things, but how do we just make your lives better and make you safer? Thank you. I could see the commissioner probably had something to add on that, so I'll hand it over to you. So a couple of things, just picking up on that conversation with Willow and Sue Ann. I think it's Einstein that said the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Words are those effect. And what's interesting is if we look at where we have settled as white folk particularly in the last couple of hundred years, what we know now, if we had the opportunity to rethink where we built and how we laid out, we simply wouldn't do it. Even trying to apply the policy constructs of today to settlement of yesteryear just simply don't apply. So we've got to understand that A, we've got this extraordinary legacy design and development which is really problematic. So we still need to address that. And then ultimately going forward, we've got to build those lessons in and seek to prevent or learn the lessons of the past, not to repeat the same thing again. I particularly pick up on Willow's point as well and I agree with what she said and leveraging my own experience in the fire space. After big fires impact areas and there's considerable property loss, historically we would get researchers out through the natural, the bushfire and natural hazard CRC and they would go in and they would meet with impacted communities and seek to understand what they did, why they did it, so on and so forth. And what we found was was some pretty compelling data sets. Generally speaking it was over 70% of people recognized they lived in some of the highest risk areas in the state, if not the world. But that same 70 odd percent of people also conceded, they knew they should have, could have, and if only they would have, done more to prepare themselves and their property, then the result might be a little bit different. So what we found through that research was and when we started pulling the social scientists together, is people, if they do get a general sense of being in an at risk area, they don't personalize it, they don't individualize it, and therefore trying to convert that into action is really problematic, because we've got some great Aussie-isms, some great cultural traits, you know, and this relaxed casual nature, she'll be right mate, is good most of the time, but it ain't that good when it comes to preparing for and dealing with risks and disasters and what have you. And the other compelling statistic that I came to learn at the end of last year in my new role and the prospect of La Nina dominating this season and impacting areas like the Hawkesbury and Napaian catchment, the February massive rainfall event of 2020 took our Warragamba dam from 40 something percent to 80 something percent from memory. A massive amount of water fell through the catchment, but the dam had a capacity to absorb so much of the water. We had that recent, sorry, and then so what we did was, we said, well, if the dam's full and we get another big rainfall event through La Nina, we're not going to have the same absorption capacity, there's gonna be pretty significant flooding. We identified some research through the high risk flood areas of the Hawkesbury and Napaian. 82% of people that lived and worked in that area that were surveyed had no knowledge that they were in high flood risk area. That's frightening. So accordingly, of the 82%, 80% had done nothing about it. Hadn't given thought to what would happen, what would they do and how would they do it in the event that a flood occurred. When we started doing some targeted awareness programs, we raised that profile and I think 70% of people conceded that they'd done something or given some thought to it. The other thing we learned through the fires and picking up on Willow's point is that when we ask people why they didn't have a plan or why they didn't do preparatory work or think through some things around their home, around their property or have a plan of what they'll do, the default position was that they thought it was too onerous, too hard and too costly. So with the old Einstein definition of stupidity, we thought to rewrite things like survival plans. We thought to rewrite what it means to actually be prepared because we knew in fires that more than 90% of all properties that are destroyed by fire don't burn through the fire front, they burn through Ember attack. So the more we can shift people's thinking to preparing the home is actually about the increased survivability of the property in the home, it helps firefighters get there and do things, blah, blah, blah. So distilling it down into bite-sized chunks that are low cost or no cost that are really simple and easy to do can actually make all the difference. And when it comes to raising awareness, I don't know how many of you travel to places like Lismore, but when I was out in the Hawkesbury and Napoleon recently in the homes with some people that were inundated with the flood, you sit at their veranda and the river level on a normal day is probably 10 or 15 meters below where you're standing. But in that same house during this flood, which wasn't a big one, it was a one in 20, one in 10 year flood, it was above their roof line. So how do people comprehend that that river can be higher than the roof in the house that they're standing on the back veranda of? And when you go to places like Lismore, you check into motels, you go into businesses, you go into pubs and things, and they've got these pretty confronting depictions on their walls. You go into the reception of a motel and you'll see these lines. It'll say, you know, X year flood got to here and X year flood got to here and you're thinking crikey's on. If I stood here now, my head would be underwater. So the things that we can do to let people know that this stuff is real, if we had the answer to that, it would help enormously without frightening them unnecessarily, but we have to get in and get people to understand what the risk really is, even though it might be infrequent and low probabilities you say, but the consequence can be rather significant or very high, you know? So there are some real challenges in that space, in my view, and I think I'm echoing your comments. Willow there, it's massive. To follow up on that, and slightly broader topic, we've had one from the audience and that has basically said, resilience should be a national priority. And has there been any signal from the Australian government that you know of around establishing a similar agency to the one established with you here in New South Wales? There sure is, and as a matter of fact, I met with the new head of the national body and his name happens to be Shane as well. So heaven help all of us when someone Shane from resilience said this was okay. If it's good, it was me. If it wasn't, it's Shane Stone from the feds. But no, I caught up with Shane recently and we've been able to have some conversation with the minister and the PM over the last 12 months, particularly, but they have formally established a new national agency called Recovery and Resilience. Resilience and Recovery. It was gonna be called Resilience Australia, but they thought that was too cute to be close to resilience in South Wales. So we're going to Recovery and Resilience, but fundamentally the correlation is extremely strong and the original plan was to set up that agency on the 1st of July, but given the extraordinary flood events of March, they've brought it into effect earlier and they'll be working through the standing up and the formation and the structure of the organisation over the coming months. The benefit around that is is that how do we map a national, a national architecture framework around resilience strategy, resilience investment, resilience narrative and comprehension and then actually make sure that from the jurisdictional and local areas that we're feeding up into that and then that can help us understand vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, what the investments are in terms of no cost, low cost, significant investments in a material sense or in a policy or strategy sense and having that leverage off the national disaster risk reduction framework and those sorts of things will actually tie in very nicely. So yes, albeit it's in its infancy, we are already starting to work very closely together and there are similar Res New South Wales bodies in some of the other jurisdictions, even though there's still a bit of a division between EM Coordination and Recovery and we're all talking with each other about what resilience in New South Wales and what recovery in resilience Australia looks like and how that might be emulated in its own way in other jurisdictions. So we'll end up with a national framework of sorts to do that if that answers the question. I think that answers the question. I won't go on to a side topic of mine around the structure of government and the three levels of government but we'll leave that maybe for another day. Although, Lord Mayor, is particularly in our remit as an organisation and particularly coming out of some of the most recent inquiries, the Independent Bushfire Inquiry and the Royal Commission into the fires, one of the big arms of my new structure, one of the big directorates is around local engagement and coordination and we find as would be not unexpected but the disparity of capability and capacity across local governments around New South Wales and furthermore, I can only speak for New South Wales is quite different and that was really certainly shown up during the recent disasters of the fires and what have you. In some areas, for example, councils will have their local emergency management officer as part of the executive, in other areas they're the part time, the weeds inspector or dog catcher so how do we make sure we're investing in and partnering more closely with local councils, local communities to build that local capability and capacity because in my view, the best lead anything is that which is locally led but facilitated and enabled, sponsored and supported by other layers of government and local government are core to and key to that planning, that design and ultimately the execution, whether it is the response effort or the recovery effort, yes you're supported by the EM fraternity but ultimately embedded in the local EOCs and then ultimately leading the recovery effort, local government is the key and unfortunately, we've never even required a consistent standard simple template on what that looks like across the state and councils that seem to perform better and certainly through the 1925 season were those councils that unfortunately had a recency of a similar major disaster in their area so there was a mental capability based on recent experience about what worked and what didn't work and how we would seek to emulate that again so there is a significant chapter not just in the Commonwealth but certainly through local government, local business, local not for profits and other bodies that we're focusing on as a new organisation as well. It sounds like it has a new focus and a new remit. I have two questions that are very similarly related both based on that discussion but for Sue-Wan and for Willow and that is around how resilience is being taught and delivered at university but the other one I'll ask at the same time because it's very related was do you believe that education in disaster risk reduction will become a bigger priority in the national discord or will the priority remain recovery and reconstruction? As in my Masters which was called, this mouthful was called the Masters of Disaster Resilience and Sustainable Development. I have to say as a student of that and some of my lecturers and professors who I dearly love are here but aside from that I'll tell the truth anyway. I learnt so much. Like here I am, you know, many, many decades as corporate strategist and thought I kind of knew it all. I had no idea. So how important is education was absolutely critical. The right type of education and the way it was made incredibly practical. I can't talk about every other thing in the country but I can talk about the one that I did. We have people online doing it from all over Australia I think we had a couple of people from overseas. Without that grounding I wasn't able to recognise the gaps. I wasn't able to understand what the governance structures and restructures were available to the country, to the globe, to state government, local government. I've had the privilege in the last year or so of reading and writing, helping look at all of the information around the Hunter Valley flood mitigation scheme and to understand what has been done over a 200-year history and to be able to put that in context. You can then start to see what we need to do differently and what we can build on. But without the frameworks that I learnt it makes it too hard to know, to identify the gaps and then figure out what are the criteria by which you can assess. Well, actually before I get to that it is to say what is the nature of the problem. You have to be able to understand the problem from multiple perspectives. You can't just look at it from the perspective of government or the perspective of the SES. In the sense of, for instance, when we ask people households to prepare we need to make sure we're asking households to do tasks that are in their own best interests, not just going to make it easier for emergency services. I'm not saying we shouldn't. Naturally we've got scarce emergency services but defining the nature of the problem really matters and it's only when you get educated in the area that you start to say what's the nature of the problem? How do we all decide collectively what it should be, who should be involved? What's the multi-criteria analysis? What are the criteria we're going to use to actually solve it? What's the weighting of each of those criteria and we need to have a discussion and the answer is different for different communities and ultimately who gets to decide what are the important criteria and that gets to the heart of what I think you've been talking about, Shane. I think there's a sea change happening under this resilience in New South Wales. At least I'm hopeful and it's more like risk governance than risk management and that means we're actually recognising that there's not a one-size-fits-all and we have to have some difficult conversations but the sooner we have it, the sooner we'll move on and for anybody anywhere having to be able to have an education and there's a bunch of different ways in which you can get it whether it's a graduate or a master's or something else. I think we really need to rely heavily on our universities and I would hope that every undergraduate gets an opportunity because unfortunately I think we're going to be facing way more disasters than we want to in the next couple of decades. Did you want to add to that, Sue-Anne? I agree. I mean, there's lots of... It's funny, I was thinking about in primary school how you learn and in kindergarten how you learn resilience and it's usually about some sort of personal experience where you get really challenged. I'm left-handed and they tried to teach me how to write with my right hand. I just can't do... I can dribble basketball to lots of great things with my right hand but my left hand loves to write and draw and I remember, you know... And I'm one of those people with the paper like that and that kind of very first memory of just insisting on just doing it the way I did it which I was very stubborn, you can imagine that. That's what it takes to be ahead of school these days and I must admit that that kind of resilience to stick with the fact that I could do this but I might not look like the other kids and it's funny because you learn it intuitively, you learn it through your siblings and all sorts of things but it starts there and often when we deal with communities, particularly in university life, we deal a lot with... We're very forward-facing and we work a lot with communities that are marginalised and often when we're working with young people and kids, the resilience that they show is something we learn from and I'm always astounded, you have this kid in front of you and we're talking about... So how was it to learn online and how did you go with COVID? I got really good at this game but by the way, I can now spell everything backwards and forwards because that's what... That was their way of being incredibly resilient during a really... I'm sure their parents found the challenge more interesting and so there is something really important about that aspect but it's also thinking about how do you deal with resilience at a range of educational levels and so I think there's things that are already there inbuilt and implicit, maybe we need to make them more explicit. I think in universities we're finding more and more that unfortunately we're not running out of material to study for our case studies, we've probably got way more case studies than I'd like us to have so that means that more and more people are sort of saying, well, I want to make a difference and I want to understand it from a range of perspectives and so I'm going to embed that into my university education and it doesn't matter whether it's built environment, business, law, humanities, I have to say that resilience and resilience, thinking and ways of engaging with extreme issues to do with climate change or issues to do with socioeconomic challenges, we're facing one in the hunter with changes in essentially what our economic status and how we earn a living is going to be and so all I think parts of education can engage with it and it's just the lens, it's kind of the lenses at which you interrogate it and learn how to utilize it. I think the nice thing about the very long name of your master's degree is that it combines resilience, it combines sustainability because that's the other aspect of this that sort of pre, and it's all lingo from ecology, things that you learn when you learn ecology but the sustainable development aspect of your degree and where we're heading with you and SDGs is really important, incredibly lofty goals but how do you actually achieve them and how you do that locally, how you do that at a statewide and that sustainability, resilience and that relationship between the two is really important and it doesn't matter what discipline, I think it's across all disciplines. It does lend itself to a very multi-disciplinary approach I think as you discussed before, I think we only have about five minutes left so I'm not going to get to every single question so I'm trying to bundle them up. I do have a question here around government working with indigenous communities and it's probably for Shane and it's around assisting them in using traditional practices such as cool burning. Yeah, look, I'll be careful what I say here but the focus on indigenous burning, particularly out of the last fire season, we've got to be careful that it just doesn't become a new woke phrase and having been involved in the fire management space now for a few decades, my very first introduction, particularly through national parks, there's always been a strong correlation with our First Nations people and indigenous burning practices and often there is a very strong correlation with cool burning for environmental and ecological and cultural benefits but also they correlate with prescribed burning and prescription burning but there's also examples where the prescription may be more about asset protection than it is about traditional burning. What's also important to understand and we do do a lot of cultural burning and there's a lot of investment going on across Australia and around New South Wales and has been for quite some time, indigenous people through land, counties and what have you are big landholders in the state of New South Wales so I think you'll find at the moment there's a focus on building greater capacity to enable local indigenous to partner with other organisations to do more burning but there's a big difference between burning to reduce fuel loads and cultural burning because a lot of the cultural burning is actually about connections with country, sacred practices, men's and women's spaces, cultural sensitive sites and locations and we already factor a lot of that into our planning for prescribed burns and deliberate burning as well as for fire suppression and firefighting strategy. Simple answer to your question is yes it's absolutely a part of the framework, has been and will continue to be and I think there will be a growth and a focus in profiling that but we've just got to be careful not to get too carried away with, in my view, suggestion that it's going to make or likely to prevent an event like the 2019-25 season. So it's not the panacea that sometimes people, well people come up with all sorts of different personal theories. Correct. So indigenous burning practices are not the panacea to fire risk nor is prescribed burning, the panacea to fire risk nor is planning and development, building and construction standards the panacea nor is it adequate fire services spread across a broad geographic area. If fire management was easy, it would have been solved centuries ago. It's very complex, it's very challenging and it drives a lot of emotion. Absolutely. With probably only one question left and just acknowledging the expertise we have in this room and in the city of Newcastle and as I mentioned, one of the reasons why the UN located their disaster risk reduction and preparedness centre here in the city of Newcastle could be a really good way to partner in the future with both resilience, New South Wales and the future recovery and resilience nationally. Having said that, there is a couple of questions and people, I'm a moderator. They came in and said, question for the Lord Mayor. So if you can't be the moderator of the panel then take all the questions, that's not fair. But I did get a couple in here also, as did the three panellists, around the interplay with climate change policy and the role of resilience, New South Wales and the role of climate change in coastal management practices. So to finish off, I'll just ask each of the panellists maybe to discuss resilience and their view on resilience as well as addressing climate change. OK, well, I wish I was Greta. So what I really love about Greta is this kind of idea of radical hope and a kind of, I'll call it, climate activism. In the sense that if we're talking about a generation that's going to make other generations shift our practices, I have to say that they seem to be pushing us harder than perhaps my generation did. And I love that. Thinking about resilience, I mean, we talked a lot about different scales, different individual, city, state, national, international. And I think it's about this idea of multi-valent and incredibly contextualized approaches. And it is quite an interesting place where bottom-up and community-driven meets sort of top-down in experts. And that's the space of it that I think is probably the thing that's going to bear the most fruit, but also offer up a range of ways of rethinking how we do things. And for me, as an educator and a really good day of landscape architect, I like that. I like the fact that it's that everyone comes to the table with some knowledge and some expertise and that you work out how to leverage that to find better ways of building resilience. Thank you. For me, resilience is about learning from the past locally and abroad, constructing the evidence base using science and education and technology, looking ahead and seeking to get the best forecast around what might be what is likely and what that then means for adaptation. And I think it's the old Darwinian proverb or narrative that says, you know, survival of the species is not about the biggest or the smartest. It's about the one that's most able to anticipate and adapt to its changing environment. And whatever that is, built environment, demography, climate change, they are all fundamental to how we build and shape resilience going forward. Oh, dear. I think I haven't... The last one. For me, resilience is not an individual endeavour. It's a community endeavour. And I think it was very, very smart man, Daniel Kahneman. Some of you might have just read his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. I think he might be the person that points out that a lot of our thinking isn't good for us as individuals, but it's good for us as a species. And I think in terms of resilience, coming together as community and acknowledging, we'll have to give a little to get a lot collectively, is probably what we have to think a bit more about. I think that's very well said. And what a wonderful way to wrap up our panel discussion. Please thank our panellists. To conclude the event tonight, I would like to introduce the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mark Hoffman, who is going to give a vote of thanks to our guest here this evening, the commissioner. As probably everyone in this room knows, Professor Hoffman is a University of Newcastle's Deputy Vice-Chancellor, academic, and joined us just last year in the middle of a pandemic. And he's a leading materials scientist and engineer, specialising in the structural integrity of composites and biologic materials. Welcome. So it's my pleasure to give a vote of thanks firstly to the audience for participating in great questions, but also very much to our panellists. Lord Mayor, Councillor Neua Tully-Williams, thank you very much for your leadership. Thank you, of course, for your engagement with this event. You engage very much with the university and we really appreciate it. And we had about 400 community members here tonight who've benefited from tonight's discussion, both here and online. Well, I've foresighted what a great advertisement for the university as a PhD student. Thank you very much. Your insights, both from your professional career and also from your study, bring that partnership piece together really nicely. And thank you very much. Of course, I'd also like to acknowledge my colleague, Professor Sue Ann Ware, who was very complimentary to me and said there's nothing wrong with engineers. But for curating an event such as the Building Resilience exhibition, which is now in its fifth year and just down the road, upon which this lecture was built, I think we're very proud of the work that's done in curating that exhibition, but also your work at the university. This is... I've got the task of summing up. I always find this quite interesting. People talk for an hour and a half and I get a couple of minutes to sum up right at the end of it. The first thing that struck me is sort of... The topic was building resilience. So I thought, well, I'd better just sort of work out. And I couldn't quite work out if it was essentially about the resilience of buildings. We had an architect and built environment person working on it, or about the building of resilience overall. And what came out of today, this evening's discussion, I think, was the intention was to actually do both. So it wasn't to confuse me or you, it was to basically try and cover both. And then we start thinking, well, what's resilience? And Shane said that when he started this role, he made the observation that everybody has a view on resilience. I have to say, Shane, that when you're in a university environment, everybody has a view on everything. And they're very willing to express it and talk about it for a long time. So after you've had that experience, maybe you should think about moving to a university. It was great preparation for that. The interesting part about it then is I came down that there were essentially three themes that came out of building resilience. The first part is to prepare. Now, that's not easily done. Because, and I think Willow pointed it out, that we really need to educate people around something they've never seen nor felt in large part. And that's very much the role of universities. And we try to do that a lot at the university. We put the content into courses, and Willow took one of those courses, which I think was a part of what motivated to continue on in this work. But it's a core priority to actually provide, of the university, to provide access to learning which most impacts our region and where we can have an area of influence. So this idea of educating resilience is something that's particularly important in what we do. And I think we have to do it through partnership. And I think what's wonderful about these events is the partnership that's actually, we're here in City Hall. It shows a wonderful partnership between the university and the whole city of Newcastle. But also we have people such as Shane, who I think is, and I'll talk more about this, is essentially providing such a star and a sort of a light to move forward in what actually partnership is all about. Because that comes to the next part of building resilience and how do we educate people. Because the point was made that people, you can talk about people, talk about resilience. And I think you gave some interesting examples of sort of educating people that you've got housing and floodplains. But it doesn't actually seem to work until you can actually get them to personalize it. And there was a wonderful example mentioned a couple of times that if you go to a community that has just had personal experience of a disaster, then they're quite prepared for it. But you go to a community in a similar area that hasn't had the personal experience and they're far less prepared for it. And that essentially means that this whole partnering piece becomes so important because we then have to have essentially the lived experience. And we need to then engage more and more people with the lived experience to actually achieve this. Now, Willow made the point, and I'll have to paraphrase because I don't know if I got every word down, but she said that sort of the talking about risk can actually be very uncomfortable for people who've lived the experience. And Shane alluded to this as well. People sort of struggle to talk about it. But we've also got to talk about it in a way which is not excessive, not emotional, which means that it needs to be very evidence-based. And that sort of brings us back around to what universities are all about. And that's actually essentially putting together evidence-based discourse. And that's why I think events such as the Looking Ahead series are so good because what we've had here this evening is an evidence-based discourse on a really important issue. But of course, to actually create this, I suppose, lived experience, it actually shows that it's a community effort. You can't, to build this, I suppose, this lived experience, the community needs to come together. And I've often taken a view sort of in leadership so roles that I've had that you don't worry too much about everything else. It's people, people, people to make things work. But I think what tonight has also done is it's added an extra word to that because it's people, people, people, partnership. And I think that's sort of the message that we need to get out of today's, this evening's lecture, is building resilience is all about the people. We can do the infrastructure, but the people need to really feel it and understand it. And that comes through partnership. Now, the person I think who's given us the best example and essentially leading us in this is Commissioner Fitzsimmons, Shane from Resilience, I think you called yourself. You, over many years, not just in your current role, but over many years, essentially typify community leadership and your dedication to the betterment of our state and particularly our regions. And we really feel that here in Newcastle. It's about building our resilience in local regional on local regional and ultimately around global challenges. Now, we're really pleased to see you here tonight, Commissioner, because your presence at the University Series events provides us with the reassurance that we have a strong voice in the state government, that his acts and leads on issues, that not only building resilience, but are strengthening our communities. Now, Commissioner alluded to this because there was a reason that the agency was titled Resilience, New South Wales, obviously one that the Commissioner had a fast learning curve on, rather than disaster in New South Wales or something similar, because it's our capacity as communities to look ahead, pick ourselves up when we get knocked down and be grateful for what we have. We've had the 219 bushfires, the 2020 global pandemic, and the recent New South Wales floods. And the point was made that people come out of these with this learned experience and improved. And this is sort of, that reminded me of a presentation I gave to recently graduating students last Friday. And I said to them, you've actually had to study through incredible change in the middle of a pandemic, to move to home, having had a face-to-face learning experience. And for some of you, that has been, or for most of us, most of you, that has been very challenging. But just think that there is no other graduating class, and this is what I said to them, that has built the resilience that you have through that experience. And that has actually placed you in a better position than any graduates ever before you. Because this is something that I think is so much important, is building this experience and this resilience. And Shane really alluded us to this. I just want to say thank you. You've led us as a state through a lot in three years. And I just want to say for your guidance and presence in all of these events, and of course your time tonight, thank you very much. We now have a gift for you, Shane. So if you would mind coming up on stage. I was going to leap down, but I didn't want to test the resilience of the platform there below. So let's, so thank you very much, Shane. We have a piece of Indigenous art, from our gallery, which is one of Australia's most prestigious Indigenous galleries. And thank you very much for your work. Thank you. As a good New South Wales public servant, this will be on my gift and benefits register. I don't need to be channeled to iCAC. Thank you very much. We just wanted on your office wall next time you're interviewed behind you. With the University of Newcastle written in front of it, please. Listen, thank you very much, everyone, for participating in tonight's event, for your questions, for your attendance, and I hope you had an enjoyable evening. Thank you very much.