Melbourne – Attesting Across The Seams

A Victorian critical infrastructure entity can be answering to four legislative planks at once: the Asset Management Accountability Framework, the Victorian Government Risk Management Framework, Part 7A of the Emergency Management Act and the Commonwealth’s SOCI Act. Each is structurally sound on its own. None is required to agree with the others. State and federal regimes are changing at different rates, they define asset, risk and security differently, and the same asset may be registered three times, for insurable value, state criticality and national significance, in books that never reconcile.

This session argues that the material risk in a multiply regulated entity does not live inside any one regime. It lives in the seams between them: incompatible definitions, uncoordinated reporting cycles, and security attestations built on asset management foundations that are thin or untested. A director can sign off an all-hazards security program with no tested competence in the systems being guaranteed, while the same gap in safety would breach WHS due diligence.

Drawing on the paper Attesting Across the Seams and recent Australian failures such as Callide C and TT-Line, the presentation sets out what asset managers can do now: build a single crosswalk from asset register to dependency map, give the Audit and Risk Committee an express duty to own the seams, and treat unreconciled registers and untested asset management maturity as key risk indicators rather than paperwork.

Tony Ridley MSc CSyP FSyI SRMCP is Director and Principal Consultant at Ridstar Holdings and Chief Security and Risk Advisor at EMA Global. He has led enterprise risk, security and resilience governance at executive level for more than 30 years, most recently as de facto Chief Risk Officer at a state-owned critical infrastructure entity holding rail corridor land, freight terminals and telecommunications infrastructure. There he owned CIRMP delivery for a regulated freight terminal under the SOCI Act, led development of the TSRMP for the State’s rail telecommunications network, oversaw the Part 7A resilience cycle, and rewrote the enterprise risk framework on a converged State and Commonwealth baseline. His earlier career spans specialist service in the Australian Defence Force, security operations across more than 40 countries, Commonwealth EL2 operational risk leadership on a $40 billion federal scheme, AML/CTF programme governance in retail banking, and independent membership of a regional council Audit and Risk Committee. He has given expert evidence in international investment arbitration and in Supreme Court litigation on employer duty of care. Tony is a doctoral researcher on the integration of security, risk and safety sciences with resilience and governance, and the author of Attesting Across the Seams, Appointed to Attest and The Moving Term, the working papers this presentation draws on.