Episode #41: Emergency Management in South Australia

Leanne Schmidt is the Manager Emergency Support at the Local Government Association South Australia.

Now, I was introduced to Leanne about a year and a half ago. So when she just started at the SALGA and we connected more when I delivered the social capital and social Infrastructure snapshot project with Professor Daniel Aldrich. Now Leanne is the epitome of a passionate, proactive, and completely approachable person in local government. And there are many of them, but she absolutely is. She doesn’t just respond to my requests, and I’ve gotta be honest, because she’s so lovely and helpful. I’ve sent her quite a few requests over the past few years, but she proactively shares information or context to help me help SA. So she goes above and beyond in terms of when she gets shared information, she just forwards onto me and I really, really, really respect and appreciate that. I think Leanne is definitely a fantastic example of our hashtag bridging tie. Leanne, so good to chat with you today.

Leanne Schmidt

Thank you. Lovely to chat with you.

Renae Hanvin

Now, I shared a short summary about your career in the intro, but there’s nothing better than hearing it from the person at firsthand.

1. So could you share some of what you, I guess, why you got into the emergency management sector and how you ended up in your role at the local Government Association of South Australia?

Leanne Schmidt

Sure. Well, I think like many people, I sort of fell into emergency management. I did, did start my career, I guess as a volunteer, firefighter with the country bioservice. And then that was appealing quite a lot. And I was studying conservation and land management, which was quite relevant to, to the CCFs. And I ended up, joining as a staff member. And I was lucky enough to, join part of what was like a graduate program. And we spent four months just spending time in each of the different parts of CFS. So, that included training and bushfire prevention and, work health safety and operations everywhere. And it just gave us a really good feel for what the organisation does and how all the bits fit together and how they’re crucial to each other. and then ended up working in different roles in training, in operational planning.

And I spent quite a lot of time on an incident management project, and I did a resource allocation project, sort of allocating, or identifying the best ways to allocate resources to brigade, like trucks and equipment, that sort of thing. And lessons management and media, so quite a variety of things, spent 18 years there and then moved to the SES, and again, that was initially in an incident management project role and then moved into planning and, and then into a regional commander role, which was fantastic. It was covering, there was only two regions in SES in South Australia, north and south, and the south region that I looked after covered the metro area, Adelaide Hills, Riverland, right down to the southeast of the state. So I spent five years in that role. and like I said, I really loved that.

I enjoyed working with the volunteers and I had a fantastic team of district offices. And sort of towards my time in that role was the River Murray flooding, which was a huge event as we know, and big impacts to the community, and we learned a lot as an organisation. There were so many new challenges that were thrown at us that we were really learning a lot, and developing new ways of working, which was really interesting. And during that time, one of my roles was to work with the chief executive officers of each of the councils that are along the River Murray and, meeting with them weekly and, with our SES CEO, and just working through some of the major challenges that they were picking up. So we had a lot to do with, councils at that point. And just coincidentally, as I was starting to think it might be time for a change at this role, came up. So, yeah, I applied and I guess the thing that really appealed was the ability to join the dots between the various emergency services and the emergency management sector and, and local government, and I think having that, there’s a bit of an alignment, I think too with, it’s sort of the volunteer organisations where it was supporting the staff and the volunteers to support the community. It’s very similar here, sort of supporting councils and their employees to support their community. So that’s how I ended up where I am.

Renae Hanvin

My gosh, do you know what I love? The best thing I love about these podcasts, apart from, you know, everyone’s great ideas about doing disasters differently is just the background and stories. Like there’s so much, I mean, gosh, your experience and your wealth of knowledge and your really holistic, you’ve had so much experience across the whole ecosystem of, you know, emergency management. And I love that, you know, you’ve, you’ve, I guess through the identification and, and connecting into the councils, it’s like, okay, well there’s more I can do and you know, there’s more people I can connect in more. I guess, policies and processes and procedures and ops can kind of be created. So I literally can’t think of anyone better to be going into a local government role in this space because councils and governments, you know, across the whole of South Australia and all of Australia are so fundamental at the core of disaster resilience and emergency management.

2. So what actually do you do as the manager of emergency support? What do you actually do?

Leanne Schmidt

So my role, and, and I think probably what you were saying too, I think I’m, I know a little bit about a lot of different things and a lot of different connections and things, and I don’t, don’t propose to be an expert in anything. But I, what I really do like to do that’s been valuable in my emergency management career and, what is valuable in this role is that I know a lot of the people that know the stuff and I can get everybody in the right room together to solve different problems and to come up with different arrangements. And so that’s being…

Renae Hanvin

Because I think we’re like kindred spirits, Leanne, that’s so much of, what I do as well. It’s that social capital within us.

Leanne Schmidt

Yes. Yeah. Get the people in the room together and we can, we can do anything.

Renae Hanvin

Exactly.

Leanne Schmidt

So my role is really leading, what’s called the local government functional support groups. So the arrangements in South Australia are a little bit different, in local government compared to some of the other states. So councils don’t have a role necessarily in emergency response or management apart from sort of that liaison and, support kind of role. so the state emergency management plan here identifies the control agencies like, the country fire service for bush fire and SES for flood, that sort of thing. And then there is also what’s we called, functional support groups. So there are a number of those. And each functional support group has sort of government and or non-government agencies in it, and they provide a functional support role to control agencies. So we look after the local government association here is the lead of the local government functional support group, and each of the 68 councils in South Australia and the six regional local government associations are members of that. And so my role is to support the roles of the local government functional support group, which is two main things really. One is about making sure there’s coordinate operational support from local government during response and recovery. And the other one is supporting the preparedness of the local government sector in building their, capability and capacity to participate in emergency management.

Renae Hanvin

I was gonna say, what a great role in the sense, again, bringing in all your experience and networks and connections to really build the capacity and, you know, the capabilities I guess, across the local government area.

Leanne Schmidt

Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s been really, great so far already that just working that that building that capability and capacity is updating a lot of, training that was previously provided. So currently working with the SES on, developing that, there was a short course that was quite out of date, but developing, information so that councils when they do go into support control agencies at flooding kind of events, and that they’re safe in the way that they do so that a course specifically designed for council employees to understand risks associated with swift water and flooding and that sort of thing. And to be able to make that available. And what hasn’t been available here either in the past was online training. And when you’ve got 68 councils spread out over a very large area, it’s really hard to get around to do face-to-face delivery in all those places. So we’re doing a lot of, yeah, building online training as well as, having regular webinars. So we now have a summer, and a winter webinar where we wanna bring all the different people from the different agencies that can provide briefings and information to councils and, provide them with the information that they need as the, to build that preparedness.

Renae Hanvin

I think it’s so important too. And I guess what I see a big part of your role as I think you’ve just explained it, is really coordinating the information sharing so that those people in the councils who, and I guess not everyone has, you know, disaster resilience and emergency management in their BAU, but we need everyone to be across it. ’cause there’s so many, you know, different types of disruptions coming, as well. And it’s, it sounds like, and I’ve been obviously talking to you over the past kind of 18 months that you’re really leading a really wonderful coordinated approach to help everyone build their capabilities and capacity. you know, in a way that uniforms sort of, everyone, you know, brings together everyone’s what they do know, but also then enables them to go off and, you know, deliver it in the way that they need to in their particular area.

3. Now since you’ve been with the LGASA, have there been any big events in the, that the states faced and what were the key EM challenges?

Leanne Schmidt

Well, the last big event really I was involved in was the one at SES when, the River Murray was flooding in 20 22, 23. There have been a number of activations of the state emergency center and and zone emergency support teams, and we, LGA as lead sort of participates in those. And it’s a real variety and as we all hear, everybody’s saying, you know, more frequent events, more, yeah, more impacts, yeah, cascading and compounding events, all those sorts of things. So we’re getting all sorts of things that are a bit out of the box. So there’s sorts of things like around briefings on, on bird flu and power outages, even the Optus outage that was back in 2023. But a lot of those sort of events are a little bit unexpected, but not, not unpredictable. I think we can, there’s a lot of things that we need to be doing as a, as a sector to look at the crazy things that could potentially happen and nothing, nothing, should be not considered.

Certainly we’ve got, at the moment, there’s the outback in land river flooding where we’ve got borders moving from Queensland into South Australia and currently isolating the town of in Innamincka. And I literally just got off a, briefing, for that. And there was some talk about the, the activities that the community is doing there in that they are doing a lot of self-organising and, and organising community led events while SES is there providing the leadership and, and protection from the floods. The community is still in there talking and working out a meeting with the progress association and how they can support each other and what, what can happen if you, if they end up with some tourists up there, you know, what are the options. So, you know, really relying on each other, particularly in those really small and isolated community is even more important than, in metro areas.

Renae Hanvin

Yeah, you’re so right. And going back to the different types of impacts, I’ve actually, started adding a slide of a zombie apocalypse into, a lot of my presentations now because the slides that I have about all the different types of impacts, like there’s so many on them and it’s like, there’s too many to kind of get your head around. So I’m like, you know, there’s other things we haven’t even thought about coming. So I guess, you know, being ready for all types of disasters and disruptions is really key and, and no doubt is a big part of your role.

4. So why are councils or local governments so important when it comes to emergency management?

Leanne Schmidt

The councils have just got that really critical role, very much enabling and, helping, supporting control agencies, I guess. they’ve got those well established relationships within their community networks and they’ve got the local knowledge and resources, they understand their own council area and the people within them, their strengths and weaknesses, their vulnerabilities. so one of the things that we are working really hard to do is to make sure that we do provide liaison roles, at incident management teams and zone emergency support teams, which is, which has been sort of happening in a bit more of an ad hoc way. There are arrangements but has been a little bit ad hoc over the years. And that’s one thing that we’re working really closely with the control agencies and say Police as a control, as a coordinating agency to say the most important thing is to get council in the room as quickly as you can so that they can provide that valuable information they’ve got, you know. They know their communities, but they also know, their area, the geography, the access, so they can provide all that operational, support they’ve got the local resources and that it’s important to access those locally before you, we branch out further into what we do, where we can help coordinate any council to support any other council, but we really wanna do make sure that that local, knowledge is being tapped into first.

Renae Hanvin

Oh, a thousand percent. And for anyone listening who’s a funder, oh my gosh. Local councils and governments absolutely need more funding and more focus because they are so central to community preparedness, but also, recovery and rebuilding. afterwards. Now Leanne, as you know, clearly, you know, because I can’t stop talking about it half the time, I’m really passionate about social capital and social infrastructure, and as we record this pod podcast, my team and I are delivering a pilot project in South Australia with Professor Daniel Aldridge. After our snapshot project, we are creating a national social capital and social infrastructure measurement framework and pilot testing Professor Aldrich’s data in three communities in SA from a local government association lens, what excites you about social capital and social infrastructure, getting some more airtime in the emergency management and disaster resilience ecosystem.

Leanne Schmidt

I did pick up that you’re a little bit passionate.

Renae Hanvin

Can you tell?

Leanne Schmidt

Yeah.

Renae Hanvin

After all the 50 million emails I send you about, oh my gosh, what about this, what about this…

Leanne Schmidt

I’m also very passionate about it and certainly councils can really offer so much in terms of social capital and social infrastructure, and I think getting that air time will really highlight the value of that, as well as being able to hopefully identify where we can build and increase social capital, guess the, the local government, sector really has a lot of ownership in terms of the social capital through community groups and networks, sports clubs, parks, all those sorts of things that councils, provide and support, as well as the networks within communities through different, you know, community groups and in libraries and all those sorts of things. And I think it’s super important that we can see where that capital is strong, but also to see, you know, where do we need to provide support and help uplift and build that community capacity.

One of the things that, and you mentioned about that, building that resilience and that ability to work through the different phases of emergencies and, we know that where communities have got that strong social capital, that they can work to be prepared together. And there’s lots of projects out there like Bushfire Ready and Fiery Women and Red Cross Emergency Ready workshops where, communities can come together and work together to identify, what they need to prepare for in emergency, how they can support, each other. And that builds that resilience through the different, parts of, or the different phases of emergencies. And, yeah, certainly through into the relief and and recovery. And we’ve still seen that through the River Murray flooding that relief and recovery process. And a lot of the things like, the community barbecues and things like that that are happening afterwards where people get to have those conversations about how they’re going through things and just to, to hear each other out and to be able to provide support in on an ongoing basis and check in with each other.

And so I guess from a local government perspective the stronger those, social capital, that cohesion is, and the more that councils can provide that social infrastructure that’s, that supports the social capital, I think that the better and more resilient you’re gonna have as a community. And it obviously, it’s something that councils want to be able to do with to provide that support, but also there’s so many benefits to be gained from that in, in that there it will potentially save costs and save lives and all those sorts of things if that, that social capital is strong.

Renae Hanvin

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I’m, I mean, you were at the presentations and, forums and sessions we had with Daniel, and I think it was, it was, what really came out for me was that, that it’s kind of the missing piece of the puzzle. And I’m, I’m really personally hoping that by doing this pilot project and demonstrating the value, that absolutely we can identify what the great things are in communities and what the communities want to support them to foster and build greater connections. And even those connections, again, the bonding, bridging, linking ties, like I think, Professor Aldrich always mentions that the hardest ties, but the most important ones are bridging ones where you’re building connections with people, you know, not like you, they have different norms and also also those linking ties. So being able to identify and measure and then, you know, work to strengthening ties between communities and those in roles of power or authority.

So like local councils or emergency services. To me that’s just a no-brainer. If you can measure and then strengthen, you know, and then enhance those ties, then that’s, you know, that’s every stakeholder group getting more prepared and being able to recover, and, you know, have resilience that’s better than anything, you know, that we could have thought about. In saying that there are communities that are really strong at the moment as well. So we also want to recognise those communities that are strong as well. Now I always finish with the same two questions.

Leanne Schmidt

I think, certainly from observations that I’ve had in our state emergency center and things, I think that sometimes the emergency services can be very focused on addressing the, the problem, like the whatever it is the impact. So if, if it’s a power outage, it’s about getting the power back on, which of course is particularly is really important. But some of the, the gaps that I see is that, that while that focus on resolving the cause or the problem, the flow on effects and the impacts that are happening in the community are not always quickly picked up on, I’d like to see that happening a lot more quickly where, we’re understanding who’s being impacted, what does it mean for them in the next 1224 hours or a week down the track if, if they don’t have power or if they don’t, if they, if they’re isolated from flood waters, what does that, what does that mean? And I think we can be even more proactive, than we are now. It’s certainly improving over the years and I think we, we could still do better.

Renae Hanvin

Love it. And the second thing,

Leanne Schmidt

I think continuing to build relationships within, and it’s a different sort of tie I guess that we’ve got really strong, connections between each other in emergency services and across the sector, and the emergency management sector, we’ve got great, connections between each other because we are quite a small state and there are a small number of players. And so when you almost for us, we, that social capital in that we go into the state emergency center and it’s all like a bit of a reunion, it’s, oh yeah, I haven’t seen you for a couple of months, <laugh> and the catching up. And I think, that’s fantastic and I think we’ve, we can still continue to, improve those connections as well as streamline some of the things that keep coming up as problems like providing funding and things for councils that are providing support, ways to make sure that we streamline that. And we are also also working very closely, with other agencies where we’re developing joint operating guidelines. So between the local government functional support group and the country fire service about how do we actually work together, how does the request happen and when they’re on the fire ground and what support are they providing each other and what are the expectations? So we’re just clarifying I guess some of those expectations that continues to make that, more, more clear as we go along.

Renae Hanvin

I really like those two questions and I think, again, just my analysis of them, they’re kind of connected in a sense that if we do more collaborative kind of planning or again build our social capital, more in those bridging ties, then we better understand each other, consider the consequences. So it’s not just that command and control, it actually has I guess a more holistic approaches to, you know, what are the impacts direct or indirect. And then, you know, yes, we have to turn the power back on or put out the fire, but what are the other things that the community needs us to do, as well. Yeah. Awesome. So thank you so much to Leanne Schmidt from the Manager of Emergency Support at the Local Government Association of South Australia. And we’ve been talking about EM in SA. Thanks so much, Leanne. Really awesome to talk with you again.

Leanne Schmidt

Thank you so much.