Policy complexity - Queensland flood case study
Queensland floods and cyclones: Communicating disaster relief money in 2011
by Jade Connor
June 2011
Sometimes in government there are inefficiencies, internal miscommunications, and difficulties communicating with the public. During the 2010-11 summer of natural disasters in Queensland there certainly was. The government response was chaotic.
According to Waugh, in Living with hazards, dealing with disasters, disasters are when we really need governments. It is therefore important that governments can respond effectively. After disasters, the Queensland Government‘s priorities are threefold: first, get physical infrastructure operating again, especially roads; second, fire some short-term money at victims; thirdly, pray to god that the victims are covered by insurance.
Centrelink is responsible for most federal government grants. The role of distributing most state money for victims of disasters is undertaken by the Department of Communities. It is also responsible for the overall coordination of the ‗community recovery response‘. Money goes to victims who had either had their houses or businesses totally destroyed, or just had the electricity off for a couple days, and different stages in between.
In any disaster response, communications activities are vital. According to Liliana Montague, General Manager of Communication Services for Communities, ‗You can have the most coordinated response, but it won‘t be worth ten cents if nobody knows about it. Government needs to be seen to be functioning well.‘ Unfortunately, government was not functioning well, so there was a big communication challenge.
In the 2010-11 summer, Communities had coordination and communications problems. Politicians‘ involvement problematised how relief money was distributed.
Community Recovery Centres
The main way Communities distributes relief money is through ‗Community Recovery Centres‘. In the 2010-11 disaster season, there were 37 across the state.
The Communities webpage government-speak says that Community Recovery Centres:
offer a range of services from the one location, including registration of individuals affected by disasters, provision of financial assistance to those in need, provision of information, material goods, personal support, accommodation assistance, counselling and referrals to other services.
This is how it works. Red Cross volunteers register applicants so concerned relatives from overseas can know they are okay. Applicants then go to a state government recovery worker to determine what state government money they are entitled to. The recovery worker fills out the necessary forms themselves, then pushes forms under people‘s noses and tells them to sign. Then people speak to Centrelink staff, if they haven‘t beforehand.
Every centre is different. They are managed by different managers, who make different operational decisions. Individual agencies staff centres only when they are able; for example, Department of Health staff were at some centres but not others. Some centres, such as Jamboree Heights, processed up to 1000 applications per day; others, such as at Lowood, processed 30 per day. The Gailes centre, not far from alternative centres at Riverview, Goodna, and Jamboree Heights, should have been closed but was kept open for political reasons. It was a waste of money: taking as few as one or two applications per day between two staff and volunteers, recovery workers took books with them to pass the time.
The state government has smaller grants; the main one was a $170 per person grant. There are also grants for small businesses. The federal government has three main grants for individuals, which were in bigger amounts; the main one was $1000 per adult and $400 per child.
The Australian Government indirectly funds about three-quarters of state government disaster relief payments. The federal Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements Determination sets the parameters for Queensland‘s relief money policy, because it sets the rules for Australian Government reimbursements. If the Queensland Government has a grant of $170 per person, $127.50 is funded from Commonwealth revenue. Therefore, relief money from the Queensland Government is on terms decided by the federal government. Politically needy state governments have a lot of reasons to distribute as many different grants as possible, regardless of how complicated the system of grants might become. It is a problem created by the federal government.
Queensland is the only state that takes full advantage of this arrangement, creating a state grant for nearly every situation covered by the federal funding agreement. The money mostly comes from thesame federal government pot, so why is the state government involved at all? It would be much better if all assistance was administered by Centrelink. Consider the thousands of state government workers required (all getting paid overtime), the costs of government vehicles (and extra rental vehicles), flights, meals, accommodation, and taxi fares.
Communication activities
The Communities communication team had a big job. It produced training materials for new recovery staff (extra staff were trained early in January because of the huge number required). It had to fit-out the 37 community recovery centres; in some cases this included setting up marquees and organising toys to keep children entertained. It created a new brand to represent the whole of government. It produced new products such as staff uniforms. It managed media enquiries. It coordinated assistance information from government and non-government agencies in one newsletter product (up to 10 pages, with content changing every day, for up to seven different regions). It produced fact sheets for new grants as they were announced by politicians. It created and revised application forms. It dealt with criticism and rumours (issues management). It was responsible for marketing, including liaising with radio stations and newspapers.
According to Montague, there were many logistical problems. Printing companies normally used were not operating, and there was difficulty getting trucks with printed materials through to centres. She says: ‗You are dealing with ―new customers‖, you have a ―new product‖, a new environment to engage them in, no tools, no people, and you have to make this happen within 24 hours.‘
Policy and political context
Public policy research often studies the ‗capacity‘ of governments to develop and implement economic policies. Usually this is focused on policy areas that are difficult, such as encouraging rapid industrialisation or the growth of the technology sector, but the concept can be applied to other areas of policy as well.
For disaster recovery payments in Australia we may be seeing the ultimate embarrassment for liberal governments. Well, it would be embarrassing if journalists were smart enough to report it. Our governments don‘t even have the capacity to do what is normally considered the simplest of policies. We are not talking about the ability to actually do anything, just the ability to slosh out money. Over the summer of 2011, the Queensland and Australian governments showed that they could not do this well. A lot of relief money was distributed—as at May 2011 the amount was more than $810 million (not including money donated by the public). However, the money didn‘t always go to the people who needed it most, there were huge logistical expenses incurred by government agencies, and there was a lot of confusion among members of the public about what financial assistance was available.
In a 2010 article in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Prosser and Peters argue that different assumptions about policy aims affect policy coherence. In this situation, there are many policy documents, ‗disaster plans‘ and other policy sources, but nowhere in these documents does it describe the purpose of disaster relief funding. Is it to help victims in the short term? Is it to help them rebuild? Is it to provide economic stimulus? It is disappointing to read so many important documents that do not delineate a clear purpose.
The politicians‘ purpose is to slosh as much money out as possible. If there is any wasteful expenditure, there aren‘t political points to be scored by criticising the government. Political imperatives compromised the effectiveness of policy, and caused a big waste of money. People were getting thousands of dollars simply because their fridge was off for a couple of days.
The biggest error was the rushed $1000 per person grant distributed by Centrelink to people ‗stranded by the floods‘. Consider this situation: people living in Gracemere, west of Rockhampton, received the grant because they could not get into Rockhampton, even though travel to Gladstone was possible. Gracemere was not flooded, and no-one even lost electricity. Two weeks after the grant was announced, Centrelink clarified to its staff that the grant was only intended for people who were flooded and could not drive out of their driveways. People who erroneously received this payment—several thousands of dollars per family—never had to pay it back. Some used the money to upgrade to bigger LCD televisions. We will all be paying a flood levy soon to cover this.
There were far less challenges for internal communication for Centrelink than for Communities. Centrelink recovery workers were mainly people whose normal jobs were in Centrelink, and all Centrelink staff had individual computers. In contrast, Communities communicated with its recovery staff by word of mouth and indirectly through a plethora of fact sheets mainly intended for the public.
Initially, victims who suffered the most and had whole houses destroyed only got a little bit extra more than ‗food destroyed in the fridge‘ or so-called ‗stranded‘ people. In fact, they often got less. So, if need is the main criteria for distributing money, there is a huge failure here.
How the governments announced new grants in stages is part of the problem. On 20 January, the Premier‘s Fund applications process was announced ($2000 per person if your home had actual flooding). It was not until 23 January that the state government ‗utilities reconnection‘ grant was announced, and many eligible people had been in the centres once or twice already, especially those in Western and Central areas who flooded in December 2010. The same effect was caused by the main $1000 grant administered by Centrelink, which was announced on 12 January. On 8 March, a second round of the Premier‘s Fund was announced (up to $100,000 per household available, although this amount was later varied). A third round was announced on 10 May ($5000 per person, plus other assistance). The complicated rules for each amount varies, and each new type of assistance had separate form. As time went on, the amounts of assistance available to victims from different sources got increasingly complicated.
From the recovery workers’ perspective
As a state government employee, I volunteered for community recovery. I was armed with my postgraduate degree in public policy, and my five years of customer service experience. It was going to be an opportunity for me to see government policies being implemented on the ground.
The inefficiencies started immediately as I left for Emerald: taking a train to the airport and claiming back the expense was too difficult a process for Communities. With reluctance and guilt I caught a taxi; the $145 fare from Ipswich was wasted money that should have been going to flood victims.
I spent five days working in Emerald from 10–14 January. At that stage it was a simple operation, done well. We spent every day hearing terrible flood stories, but then after work everywhere you went had a television showing flood footage. Whereas after the Japan tsunami, two months later, the media played a constructive, informative role, coverage from Queensland‘s channels Seven and Nine was drama focused and self-serving. It didn‘t help anyone.
Despite my one day of ‗training‘ a year earlier, my real training happened on the floor of the recovery centre. I took on many different roles during my five weeks as a recovery worker, and the way it works is this: when you take on a new role, you get a quick ‗handover‘ from the person who was doing it before you. When you move on a day or two later you do the same. There were help sheets for staff, but they were not always relevant, were not easy to read, and not always available at hand. In most cases, staff were not aware that they existed. Policy information is mainly communicated by word of mouth. Centres also had regular team meetings.
There was no single, accessible point of truth about how policies should be applied. This means there was an inevitable inconsistency in how it was variously applied in centres in Cairns, Ipswich, St. George, or anywhere else. It also changed from week to week in the same location as centre managers and staff get rotated in and out of each centre. As I travelled around Queensland over the next five weeks, I found different understandings of what documentation applicants needed to provide.
The political context was the experience from Mackay and Innisfail in previous years, where the state government was criticised for applying grants policies strictly. This time, the basic ‗phase 1‘ grant ($170 per person) went to pretty much anyone that applied. This less-strict approach elicited a positive response from the community, as you might expect.
As recovery staff walked through Emerald in their work shirts, everywhere we were greeted with praise and appreciation. This was fairly embarrassing, as we were just doing our jobs. We were getting paid a lot of overtime. We also had a week away from home in Emerald in a nice motel where wewere cooked nice meals for breakfast, lunch and tea. In holiday destination Cairns, I stayed in a four-star motel on the esplanade. It was necessary to get the job done, but it was hard not to feel guilty about how much it was costing the taxpayer.
What was astounding was the spirit among staff. Everyone was doing the best they could in a difficult situation. In this regard, the Department of Communities organisation is a role model for other organisations.
After Emerald I was deployed to Jamboree Heights. Although there were a lot of flood victims in the area, most applications were from people who had only lost electricity. The centre manager arranged three extra staff members to cover an anticipated busy weekend, but when the weekend came it was not busy. It should have been known by human resource managers in the regional department office that application numbers are lower, not higher, on weekends. After all, it‘s not the first time Queensland has had a community recovery response. Another waste of resources.
At Jamboree Heights people were shunted from government worker to government worker like cattle. They often got a cheque in their hands without fully comprehending what had happened. On one occasion, I interviewed a person whom I noticed interviewed for the same grant 15 minutes later by a different person. There was no malice in this, the applicant just went where they were told and answered questions as they were fired at them. For many people, it was not clearly explained what the money was for, and I am sure a high proportion did not understand. As another contributing factor, I never heard or saw the grants explained anywhere on television, radio, or newspapers.
In the Brisbane area, an ‗outreach‘ team proactively visited residences to distribute the $170 ‗phase 1‘ grant. In the recovery centre we had no connection with this team, and only knew because members of the public mentioned it. These type of outreach teams aimed to get basic immediate assistance to people fast, but applicants had to come into a recovery centre later anyway if they were eligible for other grants. This particular process caused confusion.
More problems started on 23 January when the state government announced the ‗utilities reconnection‘ grant. Premier‘s Relief Fund applications had also just opened. It was obvious that people were confused about what they were eligible for, or had applied for already. My standard robotic question to applicants changed from ‗how were you affected by the floods?‘ to ‗what grants have you received already?‘
‗I got $680,‘ an applicant would say.
‗Ok, so that was by cheque, was it?‘ I would confirm.
‗Yes. We also got $2800.‘
‗That was paid into your bank account was it?‘ I tried to confirm.
‗No.‘
‗Oh. Was it from Centrelink?‘
‗Yes, I think so. We rang up a few days ago.‘
‗It probably hasn‘t got into your account yet. Has anyone been to visit your house yet?‘
Jade Connor WRIT7040 7
‗Yes.‘
‗Did they inspect your house or ask about damage? Did they ask what your income was?‘
‗Yes. Someone was there the other day.‘
‗No, Mum, that was the insurance assessor,‘ their son or daughter might say.
The conversation would proceed until I deduced what payments had been applied for already and what others they might still be eligible for. It was difficult because there were no central computer records being kept contemporaneously, only paper records that went into a big pile for data entry at a later date.
The basic communication about grants to the public failed. What was crucial in this situation was recovery workers‘ skill and knowledge of the different grants and charity monies available. Without a central policy database, recovery workers relied on their memories, word-of-mouth, and seas of fact sheets.
Victims whose homes were flooded early in the summer may not have known about assistance that was announced later. I remember, on 19 January, talking to 50-year-old single teacher Mary, who had lost everything and was not insured. She was entitled to $170 plus the $1000 federal grant—and that was all. She was in tears, and I considered grabbing a fistful of cash from my own wallet. Imagine telling someone they are only entitled to the same as someone who merely lost electricity for two days. In fact, if that other person had a spouse and three children they would have received $4050, compared to Mary‘s $1170. All around the state, recovery workers faced ethical issues they found distressing.
A day after Mary‘s visit, applications started for the Premier‘s Disaster Recovery Fund. This made me feel bad. In retrospect, it was obvious that this money would be made available, but in a pressure environment this didn‘t occur to me at the time, and no recovery staff had been informaed about this until the details were announced by the Premier at a press conference.
The media’s role
In a separate 2010 article in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Anne Leadbetter discusses the importance of typical, conventional lines of communication that the public are used to. For the month from late December 2010 onwards, I never saw any information on TV about the grants available. The mainstream media was more focused on sensational news stories. The main available outlet to Communities was ABC radio, but there was a lot of competition for that airtime.
According to Tanner in Slideshow: Dumbing down democracy, ‗the two key rules that now govern the practice of Australian politics are: (1) Look like you‘re doing something; and (2) don‘t offend anyone that matters.‘
In the disaster situation, the ability of political parties to criticise the government‘s response was limited. For months, the federal opposition had been criticising the Labor government‘s waste of money on ‗school hall‘ building programs, but there was no criticising the waste of resources on disaster victims. They couldn‘t risk offending victims.
There have been disasters before, and Australia already had disaster funding arrangements in place. However, politicians were determined to look like they were doing something. As Tanner argues, saying ‗things are under control‘ is too bland for the media, and not a simple enough message. What the media is really looking for is the magical ‗announceable‘.
The state or federal governments, or the Brisbane City Council, continually announced more. On 6 January, the federal government announced victims could have tax repayments deferred. On 14 January, it met with banks to negotiate a freeze on ATM fees. It announced it had worked with RACQ, which was donating $10 million to the Premier‘s relief disaster fund and $10 million to an RACQ-managed charity. On 21 January, it announced that relief payments to business would be tax exempt. On the same day, a $10 million package for the tourism industry. On 7 January, the state government announced car registration exemptions. On 14 March, it announced $1 million for mental health support. This is just a sample. Add to this grants from councils, assistance from charities, and measures from companies such as banks, insurers, utilities providers, and others.
New things were being announced by different organisations constantly. People would receive one grant, only to hear from neighbours about some other new grant, and this caused a lot of confusion.
Communities did well. Its ‗Community Recovery News‘ brochure, which started on 14 January, aimed to consolidate the key information. For community recovery workers it became a valuable resource. It was a major improvement over the situation in previous disasters like The Gap storms, where individual departments communicated independently. The brochure was reprinted about every two days. For victims, these 8-page brochures must have been unreadable, with so much text on each page. It was also lost among a sea of other fact sheets. For example, a fact sheet titled ‗Disaster relief financial assistance‘ on the Communities letterhead was usually placed alongside the Community Recovery News.
‗I just want to check what is available and if there is anything else I don‘t know about,‘ I remember one man saying. There were fact sheets on health information, business grants, council clean-ups, how to clean your pool, and all manner of other things. Afterwards, my research folder of materials got to two folders before I stopped adding more.
Liliana Montague, General Manager of Communication Services, Queensland Department of Communities
In June, Liliana Montague reflected on the communications response at a presentation to the Queensland Society of Business Communicators. Before this, I had a negative pre-judgement of the response, considering the amount of confusion I witnessed from the public. However, Montague changed my mind. Communities‘ task was difficult: brand development and responding to policy changes ‗on the run‘, and the scale of communications materials required. According to Montague:
There were designers working around the clock, logistics coordinators working around the clock. All the comms disciplines came together under a really tight tent. We had a full-time person employed just … to manage rosters in the communications team.
Montague discussed the lessons to be learned:
I can‘t emphasise how important it is to plan. If you plan, it shrinks your response time.
[…]
Your command and control channels need to be efficient … It‘s essential that you establish a short, strong, approved approval chain. Your staff need to be empowered to act within predetermined boundaries.
[…]
I have to tell you, you are shaving close to the wind when … doing policy on the run, creating new products on the run. Communication mistakes like missing zeros are easy to make … but it‘s not the mistake that brings you undone, it‘s the cover-up afterwards, so don‘t do it.
Judgements
The communications team did a fantastic job. There were copious amounts of material developed in short periods of time, and most information was findable, if you had good detective skills. However, corporate writers always need to make careful decisions about when to write, who the best audience is, and what format or medium to use. Communities could have done a few things differently.
The main problem was the message. In this case, the political and media sideshow created a complex array of policies, and there were too many different agencies involved. Communities should be taken out of the grants distribution process. Most funding comes from the federal government, and
Centrelink staff that are already engaged could easily be trained in any additional grants available. Where Communities added value was in coordinating the response: setting up recovery centres, doorknocking neighbourhoods to check on people‘s welfare, and providing information services.
Given the political sideshow and media pack demands, Communities will most likely still have to distribute the grants in future. In that case, the Communities communication team should focus on simple messaging to get victims to call the government phone hotline or go to a recovery centre. This was the approach taken by New Zealand following the Canterbury earthquake on 22 February. There was no endless series of New Zealand government press releases or announcements.
The more complicated written information should be communicated to internal recovery staff. The new army knows the policies well now, and can cope with a changing policy environment.
Ideally, Communities would have an electronic policy database modelled on the ‗Docbase‘ database of the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads. This department is good at administering complex policies in decentralised service centres all over Queensland.
Docbase has an editor, the ability to be updated with new policy and process information, and can list relevant contact information. It can post daily communications messages to staff. If each recovery team had a communications and policy advisor, they could act as a policy advice resource for the team, and communicate important issues at team meetings. There should also be a centralised ‗help desk‘ where a small number of policy officers provide coordinated guidance to officers all around the state. This would promote consistency in how policies should be implemented and prevent confusion among staff.
From a communication perspective, all of the various government application forms should be simplified and consolidated.
Another solution is to reduce the number of grants. If someone‘s home has been flooded, give them a single amount, based on a categorisation of the amount of damage. There should not be grants for merely losing electricity. How much food damage can you really have? The number of people that this would take out of the applications process would be huge. If people want to be covered for this sort of damage, they should take out private insurance for it. The number of barely affected people attending recovery centres and putting out their fat hands for wads of cash was disgusting. The recovery effort should focus on those who genuinely need help.
Being fair
Judging the Department of Communities, we should be fair. There were so many different types of relief money, and policies were being announced by politicians on the run. The information, or message, was complicated, and inherently hard to communicate. The problem was the message, and Communities should have devised simpler ones. If we are lucky, next time there is a disaster Liliana
Montague will still be working at Communities. On this occasion, the real problem was bad leadership from politicians. As Tanner says, politics is now a media sideshow where politicians do their best to look like they are doing something, and avoid offending anyone. This is why the disaster money payments process is so complicated, and why so much extra distress is inflicted on victims as they try to negotiate the red tape. Hopefully, the large number of workers who have now been involved in community recovery will mean there are lots of people keen to help plan for a better response next time.