The Hon Josh Wilson MP

AusAlert testing in Western Australia SIMON BEAUMONT (HOST): Well listeners, AusAlert is coming to Australia. It's coming to us here in Western Australia, through the city and through the regions of WA, and we know a little bit about it, but it is being trialled in Goomalling on June the 19th. Joining me on the program now is Josh Wilson – Josh is the member for Freo, he’s also the Assistant Minister for Emergency Management.

Josh, good to talk to you. How are you today? JOSH WILSON: Yeah, I'm pretty good, Simon.

As a Freo supporter, I'm living my best life. What is AusAlert? Why do we need it?

AusAlert is a new national warning system. It adds to the warning opportunities or functions that we already have by giving our emergency management teams the ability to send out a message to eligible mobile devices. It can be done quite broadly, it can be done in a geolocated way, so to a particular place or a particular community, and it can send out one of two kinds of alert: a priority alert, which is like a watch and act alert, or a critical alert, which is to inform people that they are in immediate danger and really need to take some action.

It's been developed as a form of technology by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) at the federal level in cooperation with the states and territories, and it just adds to our ability to let people know when there's something like a bushfire, or a cyclone, or another kind of event that they really need to think about and respond to for their own safety, So, it's mostly around natural disasters, is it Josh?

Could it encompass – heavens, we don't want this to happen – but if there's an active shooter in a country town, or there's a major crash on a highway, can it encompass social issues as well? It could, I mean, it covers the full spectrum of emergency management, so you know, we principally experience that in the form of natural disasters, but it could be a security threat or a biosecurity incident.

Those are obviously very rare. Yeah, sure, they are. And as I say, we don't want to see those things happening, but they do.

Josh, what does it actually look like on the phone? In talking to Goomalling a couple of weeks ago, they did say it's fairly involved in what comes to your phone. It's not an SMS, as such.

It's something different, isn't it? That's right. So, it doesn't come as a message that you might sort of see on the screen of your phone that you would then need to open.

It literally pops up on the screen itself. The phone will vibrate, there’ll be a siren-type noise or alert, and then the message will appear on the on the screen itself – so it's obviously designed to be something that you wouldn't mistake for being another kind of a message or reminder, but something that will draw your attention, and hopefully part of the concept of it within a community is that people will see it, and draw it to other people's attention as well.

Will it supersede messages we may get from local police, which are localized messages, emergency messages you might get from DFES? No, they won't supersede anything. It's an additional kind of warning.

In many cases in those circumstances, people might find that within a period of time they hear about the circumstance in a range of ways – it could be on a radio bulletin, something that interrupts a normal radio broadcast, they might get a DFES message. I'm with RAC insurance – I get text messages from RAC about storm events – so there are other ways in which people might be alerted, but it’s a new national warning system that has the ability to reach into all eligible devices, and that will occur off the back of the available mobile service – even if you're not with that service provider.

It’s got a comprehensive reach in that way, and we just think it's a valuable addition to the things that have emerged in recent times that give people the opportunity to understand that there's something that they really need to think about, particularly if we think about rural and regional Western Australia: a bushfire where the wind may have changed, and you might have heard earlier in the day that there's a bushfire somewhere, and the wind's going in that direction.

You're not overly concerned, something changes, you get that alert, and it really puts you in a position to understand that now you need to think about what you do next. Josh, you would know, being West Australian, that coverage can be patchy in parts of WA – in parts of the Wheatbelt, the Pilbara, the Gascoyne et cetera. This system is only as good as our internet and telecoms coverage, isn't it?

Yep, and we need to keep improving that. So, that's absolutely right – it depends on you being able to have some kind of mobile coverage. The good thing, as I said before, is that it will use the available mobile coverage and send it to eligible devices, even if you might be with one service provider, and the tower that you're close to isn't your service provider's tower.

It will nevertheless reach into your device, and you will get that alert – but if you're in an area where there is no mobile coverage whatsoever obviously it won't work. That puts the onus on us to keep improving and getting the telcos to keep improving the availability of those services. Josh, good idea, good concept.

And as you say, if it works as a complementary system to what we already have in place it's all good. You would know as a West Australian citizen that we are grumpy about BOM, and we’re grumpy about the Bureau not being based in Perth anymore, but only as a 12-hour service. BOM essentially comes out of Melbourne as a 24-hour service.

How can we guarantee that this information will be localised, accurate, and timely when it comes to WA events? The BOM issue is one I understand. As a Western Australian, I'm always naturally interested in and concerned about the extent to which services have a tendency in Australian life to be pulled back or centralized in the big East Coast cities – principally in Melbourne and Sydney – and I do understand that the information that is used for these kinds of alerts draws on the functionality in the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), and is also supported by the expertise and information that exists all around Australia, and that is strong here in Western Australia.

So, I'm confident that AusAlert will serve its function – drawing on the information that's related to particular emergencies. I think that broader question about the BOM, and the broader sort of weather info, and where it is located is a legitimate one. The Bureau sits with my ministerial colleague, Minister Watt, so I'm probably not the person to ask about that issue specifically.

But in terms of the kinds of issues that AusAlert will cover, I'm confident that the information that exists, and our ability to see, identify, and then warn people about them is strong enough in Western Australia to make sure that AusAlert will be a really good addition to our emergency warning system here in the West. If the trial goes well on June the 19th in Goomalling, and it's been trialled right the way around Australia, when should the rollout be in place?

When would we see AusAlert more broadly in WA? The plan is for these localised trials to occur across the nine locations around Australia in June – so as you said, the trial in Goomalling will be on Friday the 19th at 12pm. Then there will be a national test in July that will go to every single person's eligible mobile Australia-wide – then hopefully off the basis of those tests, we’ll be in a position to have AusAlert in place in time for the higher risk weather season.

So, for bushfires later in the year? Yeah, that's right. Josh, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for talking to me and the listeners here at 6PR. Appreciate it. No worries, Simon.

Great to be on.