Quarterly series

Spotlight Series webinars

Name: Spotlight Series
Start: 2025-06-25
End: 2025-06-25
Location: National

The Spotlight Series webinars is a new quarterly series showcasing emerging knowledge, research and issues in the areas of disaster risk reduction and resilience

The purpose of this series is to provide an informative, welcoming and inclusive forum for conversations about emerging issues in disaster risk reduction and disaster resilience. We hope these webinars will support practitioners to be informed, build knowledge and skills, and to identify sound evidence to support effective planning and practice.

This series also provides a platform for AIDR and NEMA to respond to feedback from stakeholders, particularly suggestions for topics and content participants would like to see.

Webinars will be one hour long, with a feature topic and time for discussion and questions at the end. Look out for new webinars as they are developed and added to the events calendar.

Webinar 2 - Do governments trust communities? How to build and maintain trust in the age of grievance and disinformation

1pm-2pm AEDT, Tuesday 28 October 2025

This presentation explores the evolving dynamics of trust between governments and communities, drawing on two key reports from the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies. The 2024 report Do Governments Trust Communities reveals that trust is not a static attribute but a relational flow—shaped by behaviours such as openness, accountability, and reciprocity. It highlights the under-examined question of whether governments trust communities, and how this affects co-design and policy legitimacy.

Building on these insights, the 2025 Removing Barriers to Trust Building report proposes four actionable strategies: simplifying access to government systems, investing in community capability, training officials in trust-building, and establishing a Trust Lab to embed innovation. Together, these findings underscore the urgent need for governments to move beyond transactional engagement and foster sustained, respectful partnerships—especially in an era marked by grievance narratives and disinformation.

The presentation will offer practical guidance for policymakers and practitioners seeking to rebuild trust through inclusive processes and resilient relationships. It invites reflection on how trust can be mobilised as a form of social capital to counter fragmentation and strengthen democratic cohesion.

Guest Speaker:

Mark Duckworth PSM FIPAA (Vic)
Co-Director of the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies (CRIS), Senior Research Fellow at the Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, and Senior Political Advisor to the Faculty of Health at Deakin University.

Mark's current research focus is on building resilience to social harms, disaster resilience, co-design and strategies for trust-building between government and communities.

Before joining Deakin University in 2019 he had more than 30 years’ experience in the Victorian and New South Wales public sectors leading significant policy and legislative reform initiatives on intergovernmental relations, multicultural affairs, veterans’ affairs, public administration, countering violent extremism, counter terrorism, emergency management and community resilience.

Mark is currently a Member of the Victorian Government Expert Advisory Committee on Countering Violent Extremism. He was a Member of the 2025 Victorian Government’s Multicultural Review which drafted the recently released Report “Rebuilding Trust for a Multicultural Victoria”.

Mark has held many senior executive roles in government including as Executive Director of Governance, Security, and Intergovernmental Relations and as Chief Resilience Officer in the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. He was Chair of Victoria’s State Crisis and Resilience Council’s Risk and Resilience subcommittee (2013-19); Chair, Victorian Government Expert Reference Group for the Research Institute on Social Cohesion (2015-18); and a Member of Victoria’s Social Cohesion and Community Resilience Taskforce (2016-2018).

He previously worked at the NSW Cabinet Office, the Sydney University Law School and the Victorian Law Reform Commission. In 2022 he was appointed as a Victorian Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA).

Host:

Dr Mayeda Rashid
Manager Capability Development and Engagement,
Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR)

Previous webinars

Webinar 1 - Disinformation in disasters

1pm-2pm, Wednesday 25 June 2025

This webinar will focus on the rapidly evolving area of disinformation response as it relates to disasters

Disinformation has rapidly become a defining challenge of this era. Increasingly, disasters are being used as lighting rods for disinformation, with significant implications for immediate response efforts, individual safety, and collective recovery. This webinar will present practical learnings from the 2024 Disinformation in the City Response Playbook, applied to the context of disasters.

Guest Speaker:

Ika Trijsburg
Director Urban Analytics, ANU Institute for Infrastructure in Society

Ika Trijsburg draws on diverse sector expertise to address complex challenges to democracy. She leads the Disinformation in the City project across five Australian universities, and was lead author of the world first Disinformation in the City Response Playbook in 2024.

Ika is Director of Urban Analytics at the ANU Institute for Infrastructure in Society in the Crawford School for Public Policy and Head of Democracy and Diplomacy at Municipal Association of Victoria. She also holds positions with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Initiative for Peacebuilding at the University of Melbourne. She has provided policy guidance to key actors globally including cities, national governments, G7 RRM, Council of Europe and UN-HABITAT.

Host:

John Richardson
Executive Director, Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience

Webinar recording:

Webinar slides

Summary from the webinar chat

Further resources