Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, , 2:03:31 to 2:16:33
Officials review the performance of the national emergency alert test, including cell tower broadcast rates and community survey feedback on message reception.
Topics: Public safety, Infrastructure
Speakers: Mr Pat Hetherington, Senator Jana Stewart, Unknown Speaker, Senator Susan McDonald
Half of them didn't receive an alert.
But I mean, we we know on the day we declared uh ninety-four per cent of cell towers uh broadcast the message when we reviewed that technical data after the event for those towers that were available. So telcos will um sleep towers or towers will be in repair. Um, in addition to other technical data we've received from telcos, we actually did then did a survey representative survey of about 4,052 people across the country to get a better sense of of uh of the experience throughout the national test indicated strongly. I think something like 80 or 85% of people reported having received the message, uh so had compatible devices in order to do that. We know that um like jurisdictions started out much much lower than that. New Zealand started out with something like 30% uh compatibility and have grown over time. We've started at a much higher bar. And those people that received it, uh it was an incredibly high number of people who were expecting to receive that. 95% of people uh knew that it was a test, knew that they didn't take need to take action. So the comms campaign that was around that was highly successful. Um so you know, in that in addition to the community-based trials where we had the opportunity to test a wide variety of different circumstances and devices uh gave us great confidence that that we were ready to go live. Um we also received, I think it was something like 20 odd thousand submissions online of people reporting their experiences, so we've going through the process of theming some of those things. I I'd be interested in digging into the particular circumstances of your staff's phone because that doesn't gel with the rest of the data that we're seeing, um, to be perfectly honest, and and also doesn't gel with the kind of reports we've had from jurisdictions around it as well. So it'd be interesting to look into that.
Surveys are always self-selecting, aren't they? I'm out of time. If we provide that information on notice, thank you.
Thank you so much for answering all the questions for the committee this morning. Uh I expect you'll get a number of questions on notice. Yeah, uh, but thank you for your patience and staying longer on the programme than uh we had you schedule. Thank you for all the work that you do. Uh you are now released.
Thank you, Chair.
We will now take our morning tea break and return at 11am. Excellent.