Russell Buzby

In January 2026, fire damaged the Mt Alexander transmission site near Bendigo and knocked several ABC and commercial radio stations off air across central Victoria. Services were not fully restored until 21 January. During the gap, the people who actually kept affected communities informed were local ABC staff working around the broken transmission and drawing on institutional knowledge built up over years of covering the region. None of that work was visible in any procurement document, or in any of the national emergency warning dashboards, because the infrastructure that was carrying it was a combination of local networks and accumulated habit rather than any technology the Commonwealth had paid for directly. This is the part of the emergency broadcasting picture that is currently being missed.

In October 2026, Australia will launch AusAlert, a $132 million cell-broadcast warning system that replaces the older SMS-based Emergency Alert platform. It is a genuine step forward. AusAlert is geotargeted to 160 metres, works on phones that are on silent, and is unaffected by network congestion because of how cell broadcasting addresses devices (National Emergency Management Agency, 2026). It directly addresses the 2020 Royal Commission finding that Australia’s warning systems were fragmented and inconsistent (Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, 2020). On the narrow question of “how do we ping every phone in a defined area with a warning”, AusAlert is a reasonable answer to a real problem.

The trouble is that pinging phones and sustained emergency broadcasting are fundamentally different functions, and AusAlert is only solving one of them. An alert tells you something is happening and that you should pay attention. Sustained broadcasting tells you what it means, what to do next, where the fire front is, whether the evacuation route is still open, whether your Uncle Ron in the next valley is likely to be safe, and it keeps doing that for hours or days while conditions shift. The Royal Commission was clear that both functions were part of what failed during Black Summer, and that the alerting failure and the broadcasting capacity problem were separable. AusAlert closes one gap and leaves the other open.

A study by Backhaus and Foxwell-Norton (2026), which appeared in the March 2026 research digest, gives the broadcasting-capacity side of this picture a useful empirical spine. Examining ABC Canberra media practitioners through the Black Summer period, they traced how crisis communication capacity was actually produced on the ground. Their finding is that it ran on what they call institutional capital: training, professional networks, local knowledge, long-term relationships with emergency services and affected communities, and the accumulated craft of knowing how to read a fire situation and translate it into something a listener can act on. Institutional capital takes years to build and is almost invisible on a balance sheet. It also cannot be retrofitted in an emergency. When it is present, emergency broadcasting works. When it has been eroded, no amount of transmitter hardware will compensate.

The context for that erosion is the ABC’s funding trajectory. The Corporation does not have a dedicated emergency broadcasting allocation. Its emergency coverage is funded from base funding that has been cut in real terms over a long period: on its own accounting, the ABC’s real-terms budget is around $150 million below its 2013 level (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2026). Every hour of Black Summer emergency coverage was produced by staff whose positions were funded against other priorities, working on equipment paid for out of a budget envelope designed for a different purpose. The extraordinary effort that characterised that period is well-documented and widely praised, including in the Royal Commission’s final report. What is less often discussed is that the effort was produced by a workforce that had been getting steadily smaller and more stretched for most of the previous decade.

Earlier work at Deakin University by Freeman and colleagues made the same point about regional radio during earlier disaster events (Freeman et al., 2018). Their research documented that during sustained crises, particularly across regional and rural Australia, battery-powered radios and word of mouth were the information channels people actually relied on when power and telecommunications failed. The Ruby Cha Cha (2020) survey of Black Summer media usage found that 59 per cent of people in affected areas acted on ABC information for personal safety decisions during the event, and that social media was the least trusted source for the same decisions. These are older findings, but their underlying mechanism has not changed. When digital infrastructure fails (and during extreme fire weather it tends to fail more often than the resilience plans assume), people fall back to broadcast radio and to people they trust. AusAlert works on phones, and phones need cell towers, and cell towers need power.

This is where the two investment decisions sitting side by side look increasingly difficult to reconcile. Australia is investing $132 million in the digital alert layer while continuing to erode the analogue broadcasting backbone that communities actually depend on when the digital layer cannot deliver. The justification for that split is usually that emergency broadcasting is the ABC’s job, and the ABC has its own funding process, and national emergency management policy is not the right place to prop up the public broadcaster. There is some merit to that argument as an accounting line. There is much less merit to it as a policy design, because the two layers are in practice a single capability, and funding one while quietly starving the other produces a system that performs worse than a cheaper, more balanced investment would have.

A related signal is visible in the recent reporting on the National Emergency Management Agency’s own operating budget. In February 2026, a Senate hearing was told that NEMA staff had to buy mugs from an op shop because there were no funds for office supplies (Government News, 2026). It is a small detail. It is also a small detail that indicates a broader pattern: the institutional machinery of emergency management is being asked to do more, over more complex risk environments, with funding that has not been adjusted to match either the expanded remit or the cost base. AusAlert is the visible part of the investment. The invisible part is whether the broadcasters and coordinating institutions behind the alert actually have what they need to make the warning useful to the person receiving it.

There is an argument that the problem here is one of institutional design as well as funding. A dedicated emergency broadcasting allocation inside the ABC’s base funding (ring-fenced and indexed against the actual cost of sustained coverage) would force the Commonwealth to have a conversation that it currently avoids by pretending that emergency broadcasting is a general ABC function. It would also let the ABC plan its regional newsroom presence against an explicit crisis communication capability rather than against the more fragile baseline of residual headcount. The Backhaus and Foxwell-Norton paper’s implicit policy recommendation is exactly this: treat the public broadcaster as critical infrastructure within disaster preparedness and fund it accordingly.

The fire weather attribution and resourcing article I wrote separately described how the climate science has settled and the bill for the resourcing is now due. Emergency broadcasting is one of the places where that bill is most clearly visible and least well understood. AusAlert is good, and it was overdue. Paying for it while allowing the analogue backbone behind it to corrode is not modernisation. It is a narrower set of things that will work on the day that matters, and the corners that get cut in the middle of a bad fire season are the ones that decide whether a warning gets translated into action or is just another notification on a phone that is already out of battery.

References

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2026). Annual report and parliamentary submission. ABC.

Backhaus, B. and Foxwell-Norton, K. (2026, March 18). ABC Canberra emergency broadcasters and Black Summer: Institutional capital in crisis communication. Journal of Australian Media Studies.

Freeman, J., Hess, K. and Waller, L. (2018). Local radio and regional emergencies. Deakin University.

Government News. (2026, February 10). Emergency management agency under budget pressure. Government News.

National Emergency Management Agency. (2026). AusAlert launch announcement. Commonwealth of Australia.

Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. (2020). Final report. Commonwealth of Australia.

Ruby Cha Cha. (2020). Black Summer media usage survey. Ruby Cha Cha Consulting.