This commentary piece argues that the recent Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry of 2011 remained trapped in a reactive, inquisitorial mindset that led the commissioners to produce prescriptive recommendations aimed at increased regulation and modelling. It largely ignored the parallel discourse around disaster management emphasising community resilience, which has been endorsed by governments across Australia through the Council of Australian Governments' recent national strategy. Consequently, my argument, as a former director-general of community safety in Queensland, is that the recent commission of inquiry missed a great opportunity both to reinforce the resilience policy approach and redirect funds from response and recovery endeavours to better ways of securing preparedness, prevention and mitigation.

Within Australia's federal system, responsibility for preventing, preparing for, responding to and recovering from natural disasters is shared between the three tiers of government. Intergovernmental policy and funding arrangements are premised on shared responsibility and aim to foster individual, business and community resilience. These arrangements underpin Australia's international reputation for effectiveness in its management of natural disasters. The capacity of the diverse networks that comprise the disaster management system to coordinate and deliver in the preparedness and response phases of a disaster, and to provide relief in the immediate aftermath, has been developed over time and tested and refined through the experience of frequent, severe disaster events over recent decades. Less well developed is the system's ability to support economic recovery in disaster-affected communities over the longer term. This paper presents case studies of regional communities affected by two of Australia's most expensive and deadly natural disasters-the 2009 Victorian bushfires and the cyclones and floods that struck the state of Queensland in 2010-2011. It highlights significant gaps in policy and funding arrangements to support recovery and offers lessons for aligning recovery within a resilience framework.

SUMMARYWe discuss a performance improvement over the current state-of-the-art objective speech quality assessment algorithm by means of a parameter study. The state-of-the-art algorithm computes a certain measure of disturbances surface, and applies a cognitive model to map the computed value to the scale used mean opinion score (MOS). We note that many parameters, including the used metric of L p space, do not appear to be robust enough in terms of the performance of the algorithm. First, we search for optimum L p -norms over the frequency-time domain disturbance surface. The optimum L p -norms yield the most desirable correspondence between symmetric/asymmetric disturbance terms and subjective scores. New features are added to the cognitive processing algorithm. Improvements are substantial, but still only incrementally improve the performance. Limitations and bottlenecks of the current standardised approaches, as well as emerging new ideas, are reviewed. Finally, we call for more innovative, rather than renovative, research efforts in objective speech quality measurement for fundamental enhancement of the algorithm.

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