Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak in the grievance debate. There are two matters I wish to grieve about. My electorate of Hinkler and, to a lesser extent, the seats of Flynn, Wide Bay and Capricornia were the focus of the Australia Day tornadoes, followed by the floods that ensued as Cyclone Oswald turned into a rain depression. That rain depression was quite hard to predict. It moved inland into the headwaters of many of many of our rivers and caused a flood circumstance of a magnitude we have not seen before. Just to give the Federation Chamber some scale, in 1890 we had 9.05 metres, in 1942 we had 8.5 and in 2011 we had 7.9. But this time we went up to 5.4 metres—in other words, 1.6 metres over the last flood circumstance and half a metre from the all-time high. It was uncharted territory.

What I want to grieve about is this: we saw in the last floods in 2011, especially at Grantham, the first murmurings of 'We have to do something different.' We do this in parts of Australia endlessly over and over again. We race to the aid of our fellow Australians, as well we should. We go through the torture of evacuating people, of cleaning out houses, of mourning the dead and of rebuilding, but we do not do a heck of a lot about reconstruction and relocation. We should. You really have to ask yourself when you go back over nearly 100 years of well-documented floods, what are we really doing to stop this happening? There are always plenty of us around, including our ministers and shadow ministers, and again it is appropriate that they should be there and they should support people. We certainly go through the traumas of the flood, the evacuation centres, the people who work endless hours in emergency services, the people who shift rubbish, the mud armies—all this kind of thing. They are all appropriate and I am not in any way detracting from them one iota. But you really have to ask yourself, after every one of these floods what is the way up between what we spent and what we achieved the next time?

I think we should have a commission of inquiry into that and that we should have some sort of restoration commission and that both sides of politics perhaps should come together and have a bipartisan horizon of 10 years in which we take a totally new look at this thing. I do not know what the right figure is and that is what the commission could find out, but it could be perhaps $200 million a year for 10 years, $2 billion over 10 years, to start a whole series of things. One is to put certain houses on high stumps, the old Queenslander, quite common in Queensland and northern New South Wales. Providing the house is sound and aesthetically pleasing, why wouldn't you? If you do get a flood and it washes through the bottom, it is not the end of the world. Another is that all councils have land banks of one sort or another. Why not develop some of those, create a new suburb and start moving houses. Again, the house has got to have aesthetic and construction integrity. We are not suggesting that you put all the run-down houses in all the run-down suburbs that get wet and put them all into one estate to create some sort of slum. I am not suggesting that for a minute. But where they are aesthetically pleasing and can be restored you put them there. You would have an incentive program for people to move to those places. Finally, with the ones that are just not worth moving but need to be knocked down, you have some program with a public housing component to it where a person could get a nice three-bedroom cottage on condition they moved to this new site. If we did this over a 10-year period, we would not solve all of them and some people would be slow to move and there would be lots of problems, but we will not solve it by standing back and pretending it is not happening. It is happening and if we are moving into a period of more extreme weather conditions—I am not going into the pros and cons of climate change, I am talking broadly—we are going into a period of more violent weather conditions then perhaps we should be looking at it fairly soon.

The other thing I want to grieve about is insurance. I am just not convinced that we are getting a good deal from our insurance companies. I am going to be radical tonight—it is not like me, a member of the coalition and a member of the National Party, to say this—because I think we have come to a point where we should reconsider the State Government Insurance Offices. You might say 'shock, horror, it has all got to be done by free enterprise'. Well, yes and no. With communications, if we cannot get telecommunications providers to go to a certain area, the provider of last resort is Telstra. We accept that; all Australians accept that. I think that if we had an SGIO in each state that took responsibility for a certain area of insurance—and we have very good SGIOs in Queensland and New South Wales, and I am sure in other states, and I am told the SGIO in the Northern Territory which is still in practice is effective—that would provide us with an insurer of last resort. I am not suggesting for a minute that this insurer would take unreasonable risks.

Equally, we would not have situations like the case of one of our members here in this parliament—who shall remain nameless but is from a western Queensland town—whose insurance was $1,500 a year and after the recent floods it was put up to $10,000 a year. He objected to that and had it changed but the point was that he lived at one end of the street which was up high and the flood area was down low, yet the insurance company just said that he was in such-and-such a street and would have to pay the higher premium. It did not accord with what the real flood risk was. As if that is not bad enough, there are people in high-rises that are paying incredible figures now. People who are buying units for their retirement just cannot afford to live in them. Something is radically wrong.

At other times, insurance companies work on the basis of postcodes—postcodes! For God's sake, in any town there are hills, there are valleys and there are low-lying areas, and there are some places that have not experienced a flood since Australia was settled. And, yet, that postcode cops this insurance rates premium. This has happened to me personally. I am nowhere near a flood area in Bundaberg, and yet my premium was—until I objected very strongly—to go up radically. I think we have got to get to a new point. All councils today have contour lines on the maps. In fact, most councils now can deliver that information for every house in a town or suburb. It is not beyond the capacity of insurance companies to come to terms with that, and to set their premiums on what the basis of insurance used to be—controlling risk. It is a matter of assessing risk, looking over a broad horizon of so many years, looking at what it might cost in a bad eventuality and taking into account other things, and then setting the premium. We have to get back to that.

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