The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements highlighted the urgent importance for all telecommunications network operators to share key asset information with governments, emergency services and utility providers. This data helps emergency responders to make critical decisions. However, existing processes for sharing information with emergency responders and other relevant organisations could be improved.
Sharing of basic data assets already occurs. NBN Co has real-time data-sharing agreements in place with all state and territory emergency services; telecommunications providers have their own data-sharing agreements with them. Separately, mobile telecommunications infrastructure asset locations are already available online.
Further enhancements are possible, including making the exchange of data two-way and providing information on the status of outages in real time.
In April 2021, the Australian Government agreed that jurisdictions should work more closely together to develop an intergovernmental data-sharing agreement. The Communications Alliance has developed a set of industry guidelines to standardise the sharing of information with emergency service providers.46 The industry should be mandated to implement the guidelines as soon as practically possible.
Other improvements that are being progressed include:
• The National Data Commission and other organisations are working to facilitate data-sharing across jurisdictions.
• The Resilience Data Collective has formed an advisory board to identify, map and connect members to create data-driven insights and bring together platforms and an evidence base to inform investment in resilience projects.
• The Emergency Management Spatial Information Network Australia is building a platform to begin data collection across the ecosystem.
• The Australian Research Data Commons is building bushfire data intelligence infrastructure. This should be adopted, sponsored and developed with open application programming interfaces to provide maximum benefit.