Australia’s new national emergency warning system, AusAlert, was put through its first nationwide test on Monday 27 July, sending a test alert to an estimated 23 million compatible mobile phones across the country at 2pm AEST. Devices vibrated and played a siren-like tone for around ten seconds before displaying a test message, allowing authorities to verify the system ahead of its use in genuine emergencies such as bushfires, floods, cyclones, severe weather and public health incidents. According to national coordination agencies, roughly 94 per cent of mobile towers successfully broadcast the alert, with the remainder to be reviewed as part of the system’s rollout.

AusAlert replaces the previous state-based emergency alert arrangements with a single national system, reflecting lessons from recent large-scale disaster responses where inconsistent alerting across jurisdictions delayed public warnings. Ahead of the test, government guidance explicitly acknowledged that the alert itself — however necessary — could affect people’s wellbeing, and advised that anyone concerned about the impact on themselves or a family member could switch their device to aeroplane mode or power it off before 2pm.

That guidance is worth employers paying attention to. A sudden, loud, unscheduled-feeling alert — even a test one — can be genuinely distressing for workers already carrying anxiety, trauma histories, or high psychosocial load, and particularly for those in front-line, emergency-adjacent or community-facing roles such as health, aged care, education and emergency services. Under the model WHS laws, psychosocial risk must be managed so far as reasonably practicable, and a national test of this kind is a low-cost opportunity to demonstrate that in practice: flagging upcoming alert tests in internal communications, giving staff the option to step away or mute devices, and folding alert-response distress into existing psychosocial risk registers rather than treating it as a one-off IT or facilities issue.