By Paul Hemsley

The Australian Government funded the $14 million Crisis Coordination Centre (CCC), which monitors risks and crises 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the CCC will connect Commonwealth, state and territory agencies to centralise Australian Government actions during national emergencies.

“[Previously] operating from its temporary premises from September 2010, the CCC coordinated Australian Government assistance during the Queensland floods, Tropical Cyclone Yasi, the New Zealand earthquake and Victorian floods,” Mr McClelland said.

Emergency Management Australia director general, Campbell Darby said the centre originated from the 2008 Homeland and Border Security Review, also setting into the prime minister’s National Security Statement of 2008.

“It gives us an enhanced ability to bring together a single picture for government about what is happening, especially something cutting across two or three departments and might cut across two or three states or territories,” Mr Darby said.

He said the CCC is working to have seamless electronic information sharing between both its own systems and the systems with states and territories.

Mr Darby said the CCC does not deal directly with local government because those local bodies feed through their state representatives instead.

“Local government sits under the state and territory jurisdictions, or in the ACT it doesn’t exist at all, but in the Northern Territory it does – then we link up with the state and territory jurisdictions in terms of what is happening,” Mr Darby said.

He said the CCC is the only mechanism coordinating support to states and territories and picks up the information happening and what the crisis might be.

According to Mr Darby, all communication methods are monitored, including e-mail, telephone, websites and media and collected into a single reference log.

“We will get to a point where external agencies such as states and territories will be able to input information which would go directly into our recording and log of what is happening,” Mr Darby said.

Emergency Management Australia assistant secretary Mark Carpenter said there is not one single software connecting the different agencies.

“The CCC itself has organic systems for a number of main Australian Government agencies so they can use their systems in the CCC, which allows us to collect information to build up a combined picture which we can present,” Mr Carpenter said.

According to Mr Carpenter, the information system management used is a product called OCA from Noggin.

”We’ve renamed it IRIS for Information Resource Information Sharing and this is where we bring information in from other agencies and jurisdictions where we can collect that information and build up our incident briefs and messages,” he said.

Mr Carpenter said NSW, Queensland and the ACT also use Noggin’s OCA product, and the CCC is running a pilot project to see if it can get its systems to talk to each other as an automated information exchange.

Mr Darby said the CCC moved into the Edmund Barton Building along with the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

“It was decided it would be a strategic move building the CCC next door to the AFP’s operations centre, so we used the same contractors as the AFP,” Mr Darby said.

According to Mr Darby, the CCC and its systems allow it to deal with information at the highest classification level, with spaces dealing with top secret information it has never had before.

“It’s always an issue that there’s some resistance and concern in sharing information, so we’ve developed a principles based document that tries to allay some of those concerns in terms of the ownership of the information and how far that information will be passed,” he said.