Resilient Implementation Of Safeguards - Australian Experience

Like many countries, Australia faced multiple challenges in upholding its safeguards obligations under the impacts of the COVID pandemic. The Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) as the regulatory authority responsible for Australia's State System for Accountancy and Control implemented special arrangements to achieve the collection of inventory data from licensees and worked with government agencies to ensure IAEA inspections could take place in a COVID-safe environment. The achievement of domestic regulatory and international safeguards obligations required ASNO to show organisational resilience. To obtain a measure of ASNO's organisational resilience, ASNO used a self-assessment tool to undertake a "HealthCheck" to evaluate resilience attributes and identify opportunities to improve resilience capability. These indicators are grouped under three overarching resilience attributes, namely: leadership and culture, networks and partnerships, and change readiness. This paper will outline the findings of the HealthCheck and outline key conclusions regarding organisational resilience in the face of major disruptions in the context of conducting essential safeguards activities.