CHAIR – Minister, in August 2025, the National Climate Risk Assessment, released by the federal government, identified major challenges to the health system, including a risk of heatwaves, bushfires, flooding, and bushfire smoke, all of which reduce people’s capacity for good health and wellbeing. The Premier was asked similar things about this this morning. There’s also the increased risk of death or serious disease. These changes are not far away either. We have already seen the impacts of bushfire smoke and people moving to Tasmania to get away from fires and floods or heatwaves on the mainland.
How is the Tasmanian health system planning to cope with these changes and what has been included in the 2025‑26 Budget to help plan for these risks and set Tasmania up for a strong climate future and prevent poor health outcomes?
Mrs ARCHER – Thank you and I will acknowledge that there are impacts right across both in terms of health, the health system, preventative health and, of course, all of those whole‑of‑government approaches that I talked about earlier, including whether that is a mitigation strategy and those sorts of things as well. I will ask the Secretary whether he would like to give specific advice in relation to the Department of Health and their preparedness or strategy for dealing with that.
Mr WEBSTER – Through you, minister. The department has a long‑term Emergency Planning and Response Unit, whose core role is to plan for how we respond in emergency situations and ongoing and they are constantly updating our plans.
In addition to that, we have actually just undertaken a full round of training of all of our people that may be involved in the management of emergencies across the Department of Health have gone through extensive training to make sure they have the skill set during an emergency response units, like a bushfire, et cetera. In addition to that, one of the things that we learnt from the COVID-19 emergency was the need for us to actually undertake regular exercises so that we actually are prepared when something like that happens, in addition to just having the plan sitting on the shelf. Those exercises have commenced and both exercises where people are in a room doing the planning, but also desktop exercises, et cetera, and added to by the level of training and, of course, we are members of the State Emergency Management Framework as well and we contribute to that. There’s a number of things across that.
Most recently we’ve reinstated roles in our three regional spaces to make sure we actually have emergency planning at the regional level as well as the state level.
CHAIR – Further to that, in regard and we’ve heard from Professor Bowman who talks about fire and the risk of catastrophic fire, in the event of a catastrophic fire in Hobart, would the emergency services of the Royal and the department be able to cope with that?
Mr WEBSTER – Through you, minister. In fact, one of the exercises that’s been done in the last few years is a catastrophic fire around the surrounding areas of Hobart. It obviously means that you close down other services that you’re delivering on a day-to-day basis to switch over into an emergency situation and that’s why we need to exercise. We need to exercise how do you actually move from business as usual to emergency command and control situations so that you can actually respond to something like a catastrophic fire at the Hobart level that indeed be closing services.
Say fire surrounds New Norfolk. What impacts would that have in terms of aged care and health delivery in in there? The idea of it is our plans are statewide as well as regional, but also, we practice to make sure that we can put them into place should that occur, so we plan to that level.
CHAIR – We have a plan, good. Prof Razay.
