Disaster resilience and recovery conversations are filled with mentions of “community”, but collapsing various groups together this way fails to acknowledge that people experience disasters differently.
For Indigenous peoples whose experiences are shaped by vastly different historical and cultural contexts to non-Indigenous Australians the lack of understanding or cultural safety demonstrated by government agencies and non-government organisations created additional trauma during the Black Summer bushfires.
The final report of the NSW bushfire inquiry found:
In some communities Aboriginal people felt unwelcome at evacuation centres and in some cases support services were reluctant to provide immediate relief… These experiences compounded the trauma they had already experienced as a result of the bush fires.
A new book edited by Dr Natasha Pauli from The University of Western Australia and Professor Andreas Neef from the University of Auckland investigates.
A HUGE weight of responsibility sits on the shoulders of the federal government, which holds the most power to enact strategies to fix North Queensland s broken insurance market. It commissioned the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to undertake a three-year investigation to help address concerns about insurance affordability and availability in northern Australia and consider how to promote more informed and competitive insurance markets. Since the start of the year, the ACCC s detailed final report suggesting a range of measures to fix our insurance woes has sat with the state and federal governments, with the ball in their court on charting a fairer course forward.