Despite decades of effort, research and reform, drowning rates remain stubbornly high. The Australian Water Safety Strategy (AWSS 2030) set an aspirational goal of halving drowning deaths; yet midway through the decade, rates are rising, particularly along Australia’s beaches, where drownings have increased by around 60 per cent per capita in the past five years.

This presentation applies the Cynefin framework, a widely used sense-making model for decision-making in complex systems, to explore how drowning prevention challenges may be mischaracterised and why some interventions fail to deliver consistent results.

Applying this framework to drowning prevention suggests that many existing approaches implicitly treat the problem as clear or complicated, emphasising standardised “best practice” solutions. However, the persistence of drowning and the variation in outcomes across locations and populations suggest the system operates largely within the complex domain, where outcomes emerge from interactions between people, environments, governance and behaviour, and cannot be fully predicted in advance.

Understanding drowning as a complex system has important implications for policy and practice. Complex systems prioritise experimentation, collaboration and learning. In this context, effective approaches emerge through cycles of trying new interventions, sensing results, sharing lessons (both successes and failures), and responding adaptively.

Reframing drowning prevention through the Cynefin framework highlights the importance of coordinated learning systems and stronger collaboration across organisations, aligning with the Australian Water Safety Strategy’s focus on improved evidence, policy alignment and partnerships for change.

This session will present the preliminary results from the first phase of Dan's PhD research into drowning prevention in Australian local government policy. Policy documents from nine local water safety partnerships have been analysed using the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach developed by Carol Bacchi. The WPR approach argues that policies inherently imply representations of the problems they aim to address. These representations shape the definition and nature of problems, thereby playing a fundamental role in governance. The goal of the WPR approach is to critically examine these problem representations, and to expose the underlying assumptions and implications.

The presentation will explore the gaps and silences in the drowning prevention discourse in Australia.

The most transformative insight is that drowning prevention in Australia has been constructed as an individual and technical problem when it may be more accurately understood as a structural and political one, shaped by inequality, colonial history, failures in environmental governance, and the political economy of public safety.

The most significant finding of this analysis is the tension between the policies' explicit commitment to shared responsibility and systems thinking, and the implicit primacy given to individual-level and environmental-level interventions. While every strategy invokes collaboration, partnership, and collective action, the action plans overwhelmingly specify
education campaigns, signage installations, risk assessments, and access controls. These are interventions that modify individual behaviour or physical environments rather than addressing the structural conditions that produce differential drowning risk

Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee has approved this study HREC2026-0003.

Background:
Water-based adventurous activities present unique safety challenges due to changing environments, variable participant capability, and the need for leader judgement in dynamic conditions. The updated Australian Adventure Activity Standard (AAAS) provides contemporary guidance to support organisations delivering led adventurous water activities, with a particular focus on dependent participants and the policies, systems and practices required to keep them safe.

Description:
This presentation outlines the updated AAAS as it relates to water-based adventurous activities and explains its role as a best-practice framework for provider-led safety. The presentation will highlight how the revised approach strengthens the connection between organisational policy, activity planning, leader competence, supervision, equipment, emergency preparedness and continuous risk management. Particular attention will be given to the concept of dependent participants, recognising that safety in led activities is shaped not only by individual behaviour, but by the design and delivery of the activity, the capability of leaders, and the effectiveness of organisational systems.

Lessons learned:
A key lesson from the update process is the importance of moving beyond narrow activity rules toward clearer, systems-based guidance that reflects real-world practice. The revised AAAS helps organisations better understand their duty of care, improve consistency across programs, and align operational decisions with documented policies and risk controls. It also provides a clearer foundation for reviewing internal procedures for aquatic and water-adjacent adventurous activities.

Conclusions:
The updated AAAS offers a practical and nationally relevant framework to strengthen safety leadership in adventurous water activities. Its emphasis on dependent participant safety, organisational responsibility and policy-supported practice can contribute to improved risk management and support broader drowning prevention outcomes.

The Northern Territory (NT) has the highest drowning rate per capita in Australia, with Territorians three times more likely to drown than other Australians. Established in 2002, the NT Water Safety Advisory Council (NTWSAC) was created to provide coordinated leadership and oversee implementation of the NT Water Safety Strategy, aligning with the Australian Water Safety Strategy 2030 through partnerships, advocacy and localised action plans.
This presentation explores how the NTWSAC has sustained a whole-of-community drowning prevention approach across six NT Water Safety Strategies, despite changing governments, evolving risks and the unique challenges of remote and regional communities. Key initiatives include the NT Water Safety Awareness Program, Water Safety Week engagement activities, annual NT Drowning Reports and targeted education campaigns such as Pipes and Drains, collectively engaging tens of thousands of Territorians.
Lessons learned highlight the importance of long-term leadership, Ministerial support, cross-sector collaboration and consistent public messaging in maintaining momentum for drowning prevention. While outcomes include increased community engagement and strengthened water safety awareness, the NT continues to experience disproportionately high drowning rates, particularly among males, young children and people in remote areas.
The presentation demonstrates that sustained collaboration, evidence-based policy, and locally driven strategies remain essential to building water safe communities and progressing toward a Territory free from drowning.

Meaningfully integrating water safety and drowning risk into regional and municipal emergency risk assessments in Victoria has been an ongoing challenge for policy makers and emergency management practitioners. Traditional methodologies in the sector often excluding water safety considerations altogether, or under-rate them significantly due to methodological and geographical constraints, leading to misalignment at local and regional tiers, and significant challenges in governance, funding, and inter-agency collaboration that should be driving mitigation activities.
In partnership with Life Saving Victoria, Bass Coast Shire has pursued a program of advocacy and methodological change, leading to water safety and drowning risk being evaluated at the 2025 Regional Emergency Risk Assessment process across Victoria for the first time. Building on the success form the RERA, Bass Coast Municipal Emergency Management Planning Committee has collaborated with Emergency Management Victoria to pilot a sector-first Municipal Emergency Risk Assessment (MERA) framework for delivery in early July 2026, replacing the traditional CERA model.
This approach has informed collaboration with Life Saving Victoria’s research team to develop risk statements and analysis – leading to the first appearance of drowning risk on a municipal level risk assessment in Victoria.
This presentation will provide insight into that process, the future directions and collaboration it has unlocked, and implications more broadly fr strengthened and integrated risk assessment. Victoria, where the drowning prevention work is strongly embedded in Emergency Management sector, perhaps holds an important place in driving this innovation, and strengthening integration of beach and water safety structures into multi-hazard risk management practices across tiers of government.