CONTRACT No. T000078 – REGISTER OF PRE-QUALIFIED SUPPLIERS FOR PROVISION OF FIRETECH SERVICES {REFRESH}

Nicola Wilson1:07

Thank you. Welcome everyone to the SMO committee meeting today. We'll move straight to the first item of business which is the confirmation of minutes from the last meeting. I'll move it. You, Councillor Wilkie. Thank you Councillor Phillips. I'll move that to the vote. Carried unanimously, thank you. Item number three, we have no presentations today. And number four, no deputations. So this brings us to item five on the agenda, which is under the Reports for consideration of the Committee. Contract number T, lots of 078, register pre-qualified suppliers for provision of Firetech Services.

Thank you very I've been Councillors for a while. Apologies for the lateness. I was just running a HUB member function and I missed it by a couple of minutes. Would you like to give us a summary of the report? Yes. Perhaps just a bit of context and certainly we have some briefings coming up over the next few weeks and I hope we will have the chance to really dive deep into the underlying thrust behind this report. But the digital hub runs a program called FireTech Connect which was born out the 2019 bush of bushfires that ravaged the town, almost burnt down the digital hub and severely affected Peregian initially the beachside suburbs and then subsequently Tewantin, Cooroy, Doonan, etc. We resolved that the digital hub could play an important role in how technology could be used to improve the bushfire resilience of not only our town but other towns like ours that are faced with bushfire as a significant threat. It's amazing, sort of five lots of brain in between, sort of forget the fact that the number one threat that we have really existentially is a massive bushfire. Those of us that were around for that I think really did have a shock at, you know, if we don't do enough on the bushfire resilience front, all the other things we do are somewhat moot, so was the reason that we made it a priority to think about how the digital hub could be an asset in that particular objective of building resilience. Over the last five years, we've created a program that's become very well known around the country and indeed has some global prominence, have where we have sought to identify promising technologies across four different categories and provide a platform to allow those technologies to be trialed with the objective of accelerating their adoption both at the local Council level but also by the state's emergency authorities and others that are in the business of protecting communities. The areas of focus are bushfire detection so using technology to detect bushfire very very early on when it starts bushfires have got to the point where once they begin they're very difficult to bring under control beyond things like that burning so the only way to really deal with a major bushfire is to deal with it very early when it's small so detecting early is a critical initiative and there are some fantastic technologies that we've been trying that can assist with that we then sort of have technologies that assist with understanding how fires might evolve and behave so that we can better predict what actions we should take to ameliorate their effects we then have technologies these fires grow bigger and more dangerous and if you remember the fire in Peregian in particular you know we were talking about hundred foot high flames and firefighters standing with hoses incredibly dangerous situation so how can you technology to help use bring those first responders further away from points of extreme danger by using things like robotics and other technology that can reduce the risk factor there and the fourth category is how do we use drones which are an increasingly powerful technology that gives us eyes in the sky and another dimension for fighting these fires and one of the frustrations of the bushfire in 2019 was that we weren't able to use drones. The Peregian community and others went for four days with no idea what was happening on the ground because we just weren't able to get intel. It was too dangerous to go in and see what was going on. Drones flying overhead would easily have been able to tell us that information and we could have saved a lot of pain and heartache when people who thought they'd lost their homes, pets, airrooms, etc. for four days went through massive psychological trauma weren't able to do that because the regulations prevent drones from being used during the bushfire, so we have been trying to prove that specially qualified pilot, specially equipped drone, special set of operating procedures can indeed allow for the orchestration of drones and crewed aircraft safely in an airspace. So those are the four areas of trials. The we do this is that we typically have attracted funding from NEMA, which is the national emergency management authority, Federal authority, and more recently we've attracted some grant funding from the State government that has allowed us to fund a series of trials across those four categories where we use what we call the living lab in our Noosa hinterland in combination with the Peregian digital hub's AI Lab to prove that these technologies can indeed be used safely and that they can make a difference and in so doing help give emergency authorities and other councils the confidence to adopt them more rapidly and build resilience in those times the report before Council today is we've worked very closely with our procurement team over the years to develop a mechanism where we can work with these kinds of third parties in a very collaborative and exploratory way this is unlike a typical sort of tender where we have a specific job that needs to be done we go out to market we pick a winning vendor and we assign a contract in this particular instance what done is we've built a Register of Prequalified Suppliers a panel if you like that gives us a sort of wide array of potential collaborators and as we sort of attract funding and develop specific hypotheses around trials to conduct we then engage with folks on that panel that have been pre-qualified and gone through our procurement process we've done this a number of times and this particular report is if you like the refresh of that panel which allows us to add additional suppliers that we have vetted through an ITQ process a procurement process so that through the next phase of trials we have additional vendors we can work with and collaborate with so that in a very large nutshell is the report before us there are eight technology companies on that list to be added to an existing list of 14 and the eight companies there span a wide variety of capabilities across those four areas that I've talked about.

Nicola Wilson13:44

I'll speak it's a great news story. On this, returning a small profit really helps our community in terms of reducing the burden on ratepayers but also, of course, providing a lower cost accommodation for the community and visitors as well. So thank you for that. I shall put it to the vote. And that is carried unanimously. Thank you. Much, I'm glad you could come. We'll return to item 5 from the agenda. Another report for consideration of the committee. The Register of Prequalified Suppliers for provision of Firetech Services.