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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-11-01 Daily Xml
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Alert SA Mobile App

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (14:18): My question is to the Minister for Emergency Services. Has the minister received a response in relation to the failure of the Alert SA app that happened on Sunday?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety, Minister Assisting the Minister for Health, Minister Assisting the Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse) (14:18): I thank the member for his question. As members may have seen from the media reporting, certainly my view of this matter is that it was unacceptable that we did have an outage of the app over the weekend. I am advised that what happened was on Sunday, which was a day of significant bushfire risk, and that a number of the elements of data that went into the Alert SA app caused the app to overload, for lack of a better word, and caused the functionality of it on the app version to no longer be providing updates to people, which was clearly not acceptable.

I have asked SAFECOM, who look after the provision of the app, to undertake urgent work to rectify that and to investigate what happened and how we can go about fixing it for the future to make sure that this is something that people can rely on in the future. They have been undertaking that work with the company that provides that app to the government, which is called RIPE Intelligence. It's a company that provides similar architecture and apps to the Victorian government and they also run national programs for emergency apps.

I understand that an initial report has been provided to SAFECOM, and I look forward to reading that. I am meeting with the SAFECOM chief executive after question time today to get an update on that work. We will need to make sure that, firstly, work has been done to ensure that the app is functioning, which I understand has been done on an interim basis and, secondly, that work happens in terms of addressing the issues that happened on the weekend, from a data perspective of the information going into the app, about which I understand there is also a meeting today with all the emergency services chiefs and all the agencies that provide data into that app. Obviously, it is not just bushfire information, but there are a huge number of agencies that have a consultative committee who work on that.

They are meeting today, I understand, to address that issue, but also to address the system architecture to make sure that is fixed in the future. I have also asked them to make sure that there is some independent looking and testing of this app after that work has been done so the community can be reassured.

I am also advised that the Alert SA website, which has the same information, did not go down during that process. That information was still available on the Alert SA website, alert.sa.gov.au. So people can go to that website if there is ever an issue with the app. They can also look at the CFS website, which obviously had all the bushfire information as well. We also encourage people, if there is a particular bushfire danger in their area, to look at multiple sources of information to ensure they get the most up-to-date and readily available information. That, of course, includes our emergency services broadcasters, including ABC local radio. There is also a huge amount of information that goes out on social media networks through the CFS, SES and MFS, so we ask people to keep up to date with them.

In terms of the outage, it was clearly unacceptable and I have asked SAFECOM and, through them, the vendor to make sure that this is rectified and we can be assured that these issues are not going to reoccur in the future.

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