The Australian Government regularly conducts crisis exercises to ensure the preparedness of relevant Australian Government agencies for crisis response. This Framework and the Handbook are tested as part of these exercises with a focus on coordination arrangements for extreme to catastrophic crises, escalation pathways and related coordination mechanisms.
NEMA delivers an annual national crisis exercising program, maintains shared awareness across government agencies of national crisis exercises, and reports on insights and learnings from exercises, to inform future preparedness, policy and capability requirements.
The Department of Home Affairs, through the Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee (ANZCTC), manages the Counter-Terrorism National Tiered Exercise Program in partnership with states and territories. This program validates and strengthens Australia’s national counter-terrorism capabilities to support counter-terrorism prevention, preparedness and response.
The NEMA and ANZCTC programs deliver whole of government crisis exercising and build national exercising capability through complementary capability development programs. Agencies across the Australian Government also deliver crisis exercising and capability development for identified hazards and sectoral responses. Agencies determine the design and conduct of exercises, which may include government agencies, the private sector or international partners as appropriate. Agencies with crisis management responsibilities under the Framework are required to regularly exercise their national plans and arrangements. Agencies identified as owners of national plans and arrangements under the AGCMF (see Appendix A and B) will, where appropriate, notify the Australian Government Planning Group (AGPG) and the Crisis Arrangements Committee (CAC) of their intent to exercise.
Following the exercise, the exercising agency will, where appropriate, share outcomes through the AGPG with Australian Government agencies, including key lessons identified, shared efficiencies and identified gaps where relevant to arrangements and mechanisms outlined in the Framework. This information will also be communicated through the CAC via agencies’ CAC representatives to support coordinated capability uplift, enhanced national preparedness and drive continuous improvement across the crisis management system.
