What crisis comms and community engagement have in common
I remember the drive up the M1 from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. It was the afternoon. The highway was empty. A weekday M1 is never empty, but in January 2011, the few cars I passed were going the other way.
The Brisbane River had peaked at 4.46 metres a few days earlier. Three weeks later, Cyclone Yasi would cross the coast near Mission Beach as a Category 5. By early February, more than 78 per cent of Queensland had been declared a disaster zone.
I was driving towards the operation. The communications response was run out of Brisbane, so that's where I needed to be. I checked into a hotel and stayed for weeks. The colleagues who would normally have run much of this work were, quite reasonably, running their own households. Pumping water out of garages. Collecting relatives from flooded suburbs. Driving hours to reach family in the Lockyer Valley. I could do the work because I didn't have that immediate demand on me. So I did.
What I did in those weeks looked nothing like the job description. I ran situation reports to the State Disaster Coordination Centre. I briefed the media. I coordinated updates for affected residents across the impact zones. I kept a physical A1 map of Queensland on the office wall, marking closed roads and open heavy vehicle routes by hand as updates came in, because the digital systems couldn't keep up with the pace of change. A paper map and a marker. In 2011.
I also made sure colleagues who couldn't leave the office had food, water and spare clothes when they needed them. That part was not in any plan. It also turned out to be important.
I have spent the fifteen years since running communications for infrastructure programs that move slower but ask the same questions. The cyclones come up because that's where the lessons compressed hardest. They aren't where the lessons stopped.
The industry has convinced itself that community engagement is something softer, gentler and more optional than the "real" work of communications. It isn't. It's the same discipline, applied under slightly less pressure, with slightly more time to think. Everything I learnt in those weeks in 2011 has shaped how I approach infrastructure engagement ever since.
In a disaster response, nobody is pretending the stakes are low. If your sit rep to the SDCC is wrong, the emergency controller briefs the minister with bad information. If your road closure list is wrong, a truck driver heads into a washed-out bridge. If your media statement is wrong, a family in a cut-off community loses trust in the only source they have.
Every decision is consequential. Every word is weighed. Nobody asks whether the engagement is "aligned" or "robust" or any of the other words that tend to show up in peacetime engagement plans. The question is simpler. Did the people who needed the information get it? Did they get it fast enough? Did they trust it?
Infrastructure community engagement is the same question in a quieter room. Did the residents of the street being acquired get accurate information about the timeline? Did the local business understand how the detour affects their deliveries? Did the local councillor get briefed before the public meeting, or did they find out from a constituent?
The reason projects generate complaints, media escalations and ministerial letters is almost never that the engagement team didn't try. It's that somewhere in the plan, someone treated community engagement as a lighter, softer version of real communications work. It isn't. The consequences are just spread out over twelve months instead of twelve hours.
The $400 million test
For seven years I ran communications for a regional infrastructure program at the Department of Transport and Main Roads. Annual budget north of $400 million. Projects across the Gold Coast, Logan, Scenic Rim, Moreton Bay, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast. Mix of planning, design and construction, often running simultaneously on the same stretch of road.
Here is what I learnt about community engagement that is not in the textbooks.
Accurate information given quickly beats polished information given late. Every single time. The community meeting where you stand up and say "here's what we know, here's what we don't know yet, here's when we'll have more" will always outperform the glossy information pack that arrives three weeks after the construction starts. This is exactly the same lesson I learnt running SDCC sit reps in 2011. Speed and honesty are the foundation. Polish is optional.
The person delivering the information matters as much as the information. A senior engineer who shows up in work boots and answers questions directly is worth ten junior liaison officers with branded polo shirts. Community members can read the organisational chart in the room. They know when they're being fobbed off with someone who has to check with their manager.
Feedback loops that close are the single most important design element. If a resident raises a concern and it disappears into a system, they learn that the system doesn't work for them. If their concern is logged, tracked, responded to and closed, even if the answer isn't what they wanted, the relationship is different. They stop fighting the project. They start engaging with it.
None of these are soft skills. They are hard, practical, teachable disciplines. They require a practitioner who has actually done the work, has made the mistake of standing in front of a community group with the wrong document in their hand, and has come back from it.
What Queensland is about to build
Queensland is about to start building seventeen venues for Brisbane 2032, a Bruce Highway rebuild that will run for a decade, and an ongoing pipeline of reconstruction projects across multiple local government areas. Every one of these projects will have a community engagement plan. Most of those plans will be written by people who have never done the work under pressure.
I know what those plans will look like. I have read dozens of them. They will have stakeholder registers and risk matrices and communication schedules and complaint management procedures. They will meet every regulatory requirement.
The ones that work will be the ones written by practitioners who understand what community engagement actually is. Not a soft add-on to the real work of construction. The discipline that decides whether the project keeps its social licence for the next twelve months or ends up on the front page for the wrong reason.
In 2011 I learnt that the communications function is what stands between a disaster and a preventable second disaster. Every infrastructure program I have run since has tested the same discipline in slower motion. The immediate stakes are lower. But the discipline is exactly the same. And the practitioner running it should be someone who knows the difference.
