On 27 July 2026, AusAlert’s national test reached 94% of targeted cell towers — a result the federal government rightly called a success.
Within hours, Queensland’s Fire and Disaster Recovery Minister Ann Leahy announced the state would sit this bushfire season out, sticking with its existing text-based warning system rather than adopting AusAlert, making a decision using resilience risk management.
Whether that call turns out to be the right one is something only time, and the next fire season, will tell.
The 30-second take
The interesting part of Queensland’s decision isn’t whether AusAlert works. It’s that a 94% national pass rate wasn’t the test Queensland actually applied.
The state weighed its own variables — landline dependency in fire-prone areas with patchy mobile coverage, fit with existing local protocols, its own risk profile — and made a definitive call before fire season, not during it.
That is the discipline resilience risk management is really about. Resilience management isn’t waiting for a national system, a vendor, or a regulator to declare itself finished.
It’s assessing your own specific circumstances against the variables you can already see today, and committing to a clear decision now, ahead of the event that will test it.
Why a national pass rate isn’t your test
A 94% success rate is a genuinely strong result at national scale. But no organisation experiences a national average — it experiences its own geography, its own population, its own legacy infrastructure.
Queensland’s specific factors included communities where landlines remain the primary channel, terrain where mobile coverage is inconsistent, and an existing warning system already embedded in local emergency protocols. None of that is visible in a national headline figure.
The lesson for any risk leader isn’t about alert systems specifically — it’s that aggregate performance data, however good, is not a substitute for mapping your own exposure and deciding what “fit for purpose” means for your organisation, not for the average one.
The cost of waiting for certainty
Most resilience failures aren’t caused by a lack of information.
They’re caused by indecision while waiting for more of it — another test cycle, a fuller rollout, consensus across stakeholders, proof that a new approach is unambiguously better before anyone will commit to it.
There are organisations that thrive on the focus of doing another crisis test, not on giving you the tools to self-assess your risks and make your own decisions on actions.
Queensland’s opt-out, whatever its ultimate merits, is a decision. It was made deliberately, in advance of the season it needed to hold for, based on known factors rather than hoped-for ones.
That is the opposite failure mode to the organisation that defaults into inaction and calls it “still assessing,” only to have the decision made for it by the first event that exposes the gap.
Questions for your organisation
Whatever the system, vendor or capability under review, the discipline is the same. Ask:
- Have we mapped our own specific dependencies, populations and legacy infrastructure against this decision, rather than relying on an aggregate or headline performance figure?
- Have we actually made a decision, or have we defaulted into the status quo by not deciding?
- Is our decision documented, owned, and dated — so it’s clear it was a deliberate call made with the information available at the time?
- What specific new information would cause us to revisit this decision, and who is watching for it?
- If the event this decision is meant to prepare us for happened tomorrow, would our current position hold up as reasonable and considered — or would it look like we were still waiting to decide?
- Are we prepared to be judged later on a decision made with today’s facts, rather than delaying until the facts are perfect?
Not a verdict on Queensland
To be clear: this isn’t an argument that Queensland’s opt-out was right or wrong.
Bushfire season, not this article, will be the judge of that.
What matters for risk and resilience leaders is the pattern underneath it — a jurisdiction that looked at its own specific factors, made a definitive choice ahead of the event it needed to prepare for, and can now be held to that decision. That is what mature resilience management looks like, regardless of which way any individual call eventually turns out to be judged.
Explore the Innovation of Risk for practical frameworks on decision-making under uncertainty and operational resilience, where we provide you the tools and idea to make your own decisions without the consultant.
Take our readiness snapshot to start to see how your organisation’s own governance would hold up.