Incident Management Approaches above the Incident Management Team Level in Australia

This paper discusses incident management strategies widely used above the incident management team (IMT) level in the four Australian States namely, Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland. It begins with an overview of how incident management approaches above the IMT might differ from the local IMT level. By exploring this difference, this paper provides an insight into how emergency management personnel working above or beyond the local IMT level often deal with large scale multiple emergency events and require an understanding of broader problems that they might confront in the future. Then, it provides an outline of how strategic emergency management objectives are addressed in the state level arrangements in aforementioned jurisdictions. Specifically, this includes response orientations, state level emergency management facilities, long term thinking, the management of stakeholder relationships, leadership, and organisational adaptation and capacity building. Later, some of the challenges associated with incident management above the IMT level are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing the implications of this study to the emergency management sector.