The Office of the commissioner for environmental sustainability  has a broad charter to report on the state of the Victorian environment.  

Over the last three years my Office has consulted really broadly  with the Victorian community, including Indigenous people, after  flood events.  We also met and listened to school communities and farming women who dealt with the 2009 bushfires.

We have, in particular, considered the responses and needs of women in the regions across the farming, health and the education sectors.

Emergency service organisations and reporting agencies such as my Office need to reassess the way we work with the public to ensure

·  that we maintain a productive and ongoing dialogue about these sort of events and
·  that local issues and concerns find expression in our reporting and  the programs which are established.  

In this paper I discuss the methods we have used in considering the potential for collaborative responses to extreme events, having particular regard to the fact that my office is a reporting agency and not a service or program provider.   I discuss the ways in which the work of a reporter can be highly responsive, useful and potentially provide leverage for specific groups.

The paper will touch on the uses which can be made of new media, not simply as a method of alerting communities to extreme events and their outfall but also as a communication mechanism with greater longevity.