Address to Parliament - Emergency Response Fund Amendment (Disaster Ready Fund) Bill 2022

I concur with the concerns of the member for Page about this particular bill, the Emergency Response Fund Amendment (Disaster Ready Fund) Bill 2022. The member for Page has been to hell and back and arrived there again with the floods in Lismore. He has led magnificently in trying times. But it's not just the member for Page who has led; it's particularly the first responders in his community and the ordinary, average, everyday Australians in that community who have risen magnificently to the challenges that they've confronted to do what they can to save lives and livelihoods. They have been a wonderful exemplar of what being a true Australian is in times of hardship.

Lismore has been absolutely smashed by floodwaters and, as we speak, is confronting the grim reality of rising waters again. But it's not just in the Northern Rivers and, indeed, that area of Australia. Inland New South Wales and the eastern states are currently very concerned about not just the flooding occurring at the moment but also what the weather could hold in coming days, weeks and months.

I'm concerned that this particular bill is a little bit like a skit, in one sense, out of the 1979 classic Monty Python's Life Of Brian. What we're doing is changing the Emergency Response Fund to the Disaster Ready Fund. It reminds me of the change of the popular people's front to the people's popular front, and poor old Graham Chapman, acting as Brian, didn't know which group to join or which group not to join—he certainly didn't want to be a splitter. People who are sandbagging their house or preparing their business to be as resilient as it can be to protect themselves against rising floodwaters don't care whether it's the ERF or the DRF. They just want to know that this government, this parliament and this nation have their backs. I'm not quite sure whether changing an acronym, changing a name, is something that they are really all that concerned about.

As we speak, people in my electorate are very, very worried, particularly in the northern part of the electorate in and around Forbes, where the Lachlan River is once again causing hurt and hardship to those central-western New South Wales communities of Forbes and West Wyalong. The rising Lachlan has broken its banks on all too many occasions in recent years—indeed, six times in the last 12 years: 2010, 2012, 2016, last year and twice this year. We had then Prime Minister Scott Morrison and New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet there in November last year. We had the current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, Premier Perrottet, the New South Wales emergency services minister—she's also the flood recovery minister—Steph Cooke, who's from the neighbouring electorate of Cootamundra and the federal emergency management minister, Senator Murray Watt, there last Monday. I very much appreciated their visit and, most importantly, so did the locals. The state of the roads in and around Forbes and the Riverina and in and around New South Wales and Victoria is just shocking at the moment. I'm sure Tasmania is pretty bad too, with potholes brought about by relentless rain. When you're a council with a low rate base and not much ability to increase due to rate pegging in New South Wales, it is tough to get the funds to provide not just a bit of asphalt thrown in a pothole but the maintenance, the upkeep, the improvement, the betterment of those roads, completely rebuilding the roads in some cases. It used to be $1 million a kilometre. I'm sure it will be even more than that with the current state of the roads.

Whilst I appreciate that the New South Wales government has provided a $50 million package to do just that, I can remember the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program that I put in place when I was Deputy Prime Minister. Although it could have gone to community infrastructure and some councils chose to do just that, it was around $55 million for my electorate alone, so $50 million is a great start but is not going to patch every hole in the flood-affected areas of New South Wales by any stretch. But it is a good start.

This particular bill does change the name, which when you are up to your knees in water doesn't really make much difference. It is former coalition government policy with a new name. No additional money is being directed to natural disaster events. There are no new projects until after July 2023. The difficulty there is that people generally have a cynicism about politics and politicians, and this bill doesn't help that, particularly when our people, particularly our country people, have been smashed so badly by so many natural disasters and particularly now with the floods. There's no transparency about how the funds will be distributed. Indeed, there's no definition of what constitutes a mitigation or disaster prevention project. The minister refers to activities, with river gauges and rain modelling and examples, but these are activities of government agencies such as the Bureau of Meteorology.

Whilst I'm on the Bureau of Meteorology, could you imagine the condemnation that would have been rained down—pun not intended—upon the then Coalition government had, at the time of a flood, the bureau decided to change its messaging as far as wanting to be called the Bureau rather than the BoM? The minister would have been hauled before Senate estimates. They would have been pilloried in the public. There would have been a rush of condemnation by the media. Labor would have been calling for the minister's head. But we move on.

Minister Watt refers to consultation guidelines to be held with stakeholders. Who are those stakeholders? It's a fair enough question. What are the guidelines? It's a reasonable request. Now, the bill doesn't come into effect until 1 July 2023, so any potential inquiry probably needs to and should go into this. I appreciate that the bill has been referred to the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee for inquiry. That won't delay its implementation. I appreciate that the reporting date has been set as 16 November and submissions have closed. I get all that. But we do need to query the intent. We do need to query the provisions within this bill, and that's what the member for Page rightly does with the amendment that he quite reasonably has put forward.

I want to talk a little about some things that have been said in relation to the politicisation of some of these natural disasters, which has been unfortunate. Minister Watt claimed on Twitter in March:

The level of denial about the Lismore floods among Morrison's Ministers is astounding. None of them are here and they have no idea how absent their Govt is.

The then emergency management minister, Senator Bridget McKenzie, had visited several times. I will pay credit to her and give her her due. She had been there. She had been working, not just with the local member, Kevin Hogan, but with local stakeholders. She met local people. Then Prime Minister Morrison visited, and he made a national emergency declaration on March 11. As I said before, the member for Page stood up when it counted—he always does, but particularly so in this crisis. I wouldn't want to, as Minister Watt did, politicise that situation. He shouldn't have done it. It wasn't true, and that's unfortunate.

The Emergency Response Fund Amendment (Disaster Ready Fund) Bill 2022 doesn't—

Audio for the segment from 12:50:42 to 12:51:48 was unavailable at the time of publication .

The project would raise the Wyangala Dam wall by 10 metres to 95 metres. That would add 650 gigalitres of extra capacity to help flood mitigation. Six-hundred and fifty gigalitres is a lot of water. It's more than what's in Sydney Harbour. Not only would it help flood mitigation; it would also help agriculture. If it's good enough for the New South Wales state government to raise the Warragamba Dam wall by 14 metres to help those people in the shadow of that huge piece of water infrastructure, then it's good enough for them to also to do the costings and the business plan for Wyangala Dam. They need to get on with that quick smart.

I know that the member for Cootamundra, Steph Cooke, is very much an advocate for it. I know that the local mayors, whether it's Phyllis Miller at Forbes, Bill West at Cowra, certainly Brian Monaghan at West Wyalong—I mean, West Wyalong had the Newell Highway cut off for six weeks in the 2016 flood. That's six weeks where one of the greatest arterial corridors of commerce in New South Wales was cut off by the Lachlan River's waters. I drove to Forbes only the other day, and the water was lapping up either side of the Newell Highway. It's quite a sight to see, but it could be avoided, potentially, if Wyangala Dam were to be increased.

I know the state government wanted a $325 million loan, as part of $650 million towards that projects. Well, they got it. Then they wanted a grant, and we gave them a grant. Then they came back to the then federal government and said it's going to cost a lot more. We said: 'Okay. So be it. Let's do the costings.' Whether it cost $1 billion or $2 billion, let's get the costings and let's work out what this is going to save. Forbes used to be flooded once every seven years, and those figures go back to 1887. They've been flooded six times in 12 years. Do the maths. Do the figures. They don't deserve to have their town sandbagged all the time in readiness for the next flood, which, potentially, could be next week, next year, the year after—probably all of those. And here we are talking about changing an acronym. It's Life Of Brian stuff; it really is.

The member for Page has genuine concerns. He's made an amendment. I concur with what he has put forward. We need to be disaster ready—yes, we do need to be ready. We were, as the coalition government. We put in place plans for funding and priorities. Does this build on those? Not really. It just changes the name. It doesn't provide any new funding. We need genuine action. We need legislation that's going to have meaningful actions so that people who are sandbagging their homes and those genuine heroes, such as those in the SES and other first-responder organisations, the volunteers, don't get too cynical about politics and politicians.