THE person in charge of co-ordinating the state\u2019s response before, during and after a major emergency stressed the importance of good communication at an event in Geelong on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley was the featured speaker at the lunch seminar organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), held at City Hall.<\/p>\n
Mr Lapsley said his first action upon being appointed Emergency Management Commissioner in 2010 was issuing six principles about how to manage incidents, with primacy of life and issuing information to communities the two most important.<\/p>\n
As an emergency such as a bushfire is a highly dynamic environment, Mr Lapsley said controllers now had the licence to release information in a \u201ctimely, relevant and tailored\u201d way.<\/p>\n
\u201cGo and tell people that you haven\u2019t got the whole story, but tell them what you\u2019ve got, and keep building it up\u2026 to allow people to make decisions about their safety, that was a game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2014 Hazelwood mine fire was also a major influence on changes to communication policy, Mr Lapsley said, including breaking the assumption that websites were the best way to share information with people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a couple of community meetings and not many people came, and a community meeting where those that came were extremely angry \u2013 it told us the information we believed we were putting out there, they weren\u2019t getting.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a further look, and 47 per cent of people in Morwell are not connected to the internet at home.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the emergency management industry was experiencing change through a number of factors, with population growth being one of the most significant.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s 100,000 new people to Victoria every year for the next 40 years, and it\u2019s on track \u2013 the Geelong district is part of that, we\u2019re on a trajectory that\u2019s very important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting in the audience, City of Greater Geelong chief executive officer Kelvin Spiller noted that this represented 120 new people a week to his municipality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE person in charge of co-ordinating the state\u2019s response before, during and after a major emergency stressed the importance of good communication at an event in Geelong on Tuesday. Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley was the featured speaker at the lunch seminar organised by the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), held at City Hall. […]<\/p>\n