Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the Prime Minister and, I might add, the Leader of the Opposition for their statements to the House. Natural disasters occur in many parts of the world, but more particularly in the Asian zone relating to earthquake activity, and tsunamis are an outcome of that. For many years, more particularly during the Howard government—although upon the election of the Rudd government, I corresponded with the Minister for Foreign Affairs in similar manner—I have questioned the fact that our response is typically, with the exception of some private donations, ‘Send the money.’ While it might be argued by some worldwide funds to be the best way to deliver assistance, I am not convinced about that. Furthermore, I think Australia misses a great opportunity to do better and to promote items of construction—for instance, water purification units. Even though it is an emergency, I think we should not ignore the opportunity to bring to the attention of the world Australian products which would be of great assistance in these circumstances and have a long-term benefit.

I have corresponded with many within Western Australia particularly. I assume in other parts of Australia there are simple manufacturing techniques that produce robust plastic shelter tunnels—the type of plastic you see on the sides of trucks. They were designed originally for livestock and are commonly used at agricultural shows and things of that nature as shelter for humans. They could be lived in for a long period by humans and made very comfortable for that purpose. They can be erected in less than an hour to accommodate 100 people. More particularly, if there is an aftershock in an earthquake zone, they will not fall down.

At the time of the North Pakistan earthquakes I had phone conversations with the ambassador, who was extremely interested in my argument that we should—as we could do—get a couple of Hercules transporters and take a stack of this stuff up there. They are simply just 50-millimetre pipes, curved and they can be slotted—you do not have to carry them as a full curve. When they are assembled the plastic is then sheeted over them and ratcheted down in the same way that you would on the side of a truck. They are very tight, very strong, very weatherproof, and they can be prepared in many different fashions. They can be as long as you wish and quite wide, certainly as wide as the room in which we now stand. They can be made big enough to put large harvesting equipment in, if you wanted one that big.

In my discussion with the Pakistani ambassador I asked him about the sizes of houses that people reside in in that area and he mentioned that they were quite large houses for what appeared to be people of low economic ability. I asked why they were that big, and he said that in the winter the people have to put all the animals inside too. Suddenly it occurred to me that these buildings, if they were put up as temporary accommodation for people, would double very adequately for their original purpose here in Australia, which is the protection of livestock. Maybe someone over there, after all the tragedy, would say, ‘What a good idea these things are. Where do I buy them?’

In Popanyinning in my electorate—getting down south towards Albany—there is a group called Bird’s company that have been making these things expertly for years. There is another group in Kondinin that make them for the agricultural sector and which was very interested in gearing up to supply them. My view in the first instance was that we erect one on the front lawn of our embassy in Pakistan for others to view. Then I ran into the brick wall called the Public Service. The Prime Minister, Mr Howard, gave me a name to ring up, and this fellow came round to see me and said, ‘No, we just send money.’ Why do we do that?

That was in the Howard era. Stephen Smith could not give me a more responsive answer when I took the matter up with him. That is not a criticism of him—I know I failed. The whole fact of life is that here is a practical form of protection, easily transported. It has no volumetric problem and could be airfreighted into these areas. They should be flying into Sumatra as we speak. And there is a roadblock in Canberra that says, ‘No, you don’t do those sorts of things.’ Yet the Pakistani ambassador at the time was delighted at the prospect and would have welcomed them. That is just one example.

Let me go a step further. One of the biggest problems in Aceh after the tsunami was drinking water. The Australian government eventually packed up what I imagine was a very large piece of equipment, utilised by the Australian Defence Forces to purify water and fluid up there. In a town called Katanning is a manufacturing company that could have provided all that equipment on the back of a car trailer. They are called AQ2 and their whole industry is built around a worldwide patent of a very small, extremely accurate measuring pump, all of which is manufactured out of solid PVC. I am proud to say that under the now defunct Regional Partnerships system—which I introduced and which was later criticised by the Labor Party—funding was made available to small business in regional areas on the principle that if your small business is prosperous, you will always find paint for the scout hall and you will always find paint for a school hall.

Making small business prosperous in small country towns is a positive initiative, and in this case the Australian government contributed to them buying some machine tools—to which their local investors made the major contribution—that allowed them to speed up their manufacturing process. That is, of course, done to very precise measurements. The machine that they make meters to the water supply a very small but measured amount of sodium hypochlorite, a liquid disinfectant. More particularly, to give you some idea of the size of this equipment, you can put two 20-litre square plastic containers of that product on top and they virtually take up the full area of the top of this piece of equipment. That is how small it is. It is fully computerised. They are marketing these units to Australian water supply authorities for remote communities. They are in Katanning, some 250 kilometres south of Perth, and they are controlling one of these units east of Derby in an Aboriginal community. When the sodium hypochlorite in one bottle runs out, they chuck one on the local overnight transport and the bloke—the driver—pulls up alongside the unit, pulls off the empty one, puts the new one on, screws the cap on and it is going again.

If in the circumstances of Aceh we had had problems of the water going saline and if there had been other contaminants, you could have added to that equipment a typical household sand swimming pool filter and some of the smaller reverse osmosis desalinators. These people could have put that package together, with a two-inch firefighting pump if necessary. They could have been supplied and flowing up there in numbers and people in many locations could have got clean, fresh and sterilised water. Someone in the aid organisations might have seen those and said, ‘What a great thing they’d be in Africa.’

Who said no? It was the Australian bureaucracy here in Canberra. They said, ‘Just send money.’ I find this very annoying. I am giving examples of two items, of which there are many. The technology in building frame houses has existed in Australia for years. I cry every time I see the media coverage, the TV coverage, of the places that have fallen down in these earthquakes. You may as well put a sign on—and I should not laugh, because it is too serious. The reality is that these buildings are designed to collapse and, unfortunately, fall on top of people. If those buildings, particularly residences, had been framed—and that can be done in a multistorey context—they might have cracked and they might have rattled, but they would not have killed people. It is technology: steel frames, BlueScope Steel. We know all about that, and we do not go up there and build houses like that for them. We did not build any in Aceh, admittedly. At the back of Aceh are thousands of square kilometres of forest. Presumably wood framing gives you a similar design, and I think the little houses they replaced there were probably of that nature. But they are not so much an earthquake spot.

The whole fact of life is that we should be out there saying to these people, ‘Here is the solution for your problem so that this doesn’t happen again.’ I have always been a great advocate for better community design. I am a bit of a frustrated builder. I have built horse stables and all sorts of things out of tilt-up concrete. It is common. Virtually every commercial building today is made that way. Yet we do not go out and teach Aboriginal people how they can make them in their communities from local materials, with the exception of a bit of reinforcing and a bit of cement. We could erect them with limited amounts of machinery.

A reasonably sized tractor with a three-point linkage that you can put a cement mixer on and a front-end loader could build that sort of construction. It is very robust but it can also be designed to be much more resistant to an earthquake. You do not, typically, use that method for floors, although I know we do in some of our buildings.

On Christmas Island, as minister, I was responsible for the construction of the staff accommodation building. Three-storey prefabricated concrete walls were designed and manufactured in Perth. They were then put on the ship that goes to Christmas Island; they were lifted out, stood up and a building was put up between them. I am not saying that is the perfect response to an earthquake, but we have all this building technology that we never export during these crises.

I welcome the government’s financial commitment. Both sides of government cannot get into the newspapers quickly enough—‘We’ve sent 10 million’ or ‘We’ve sent 20 million’. Sometimes we do not know where it actually goes, and there has been public criticism of that. Why are we not loading up these new strata cruisers—or whatever they named the bigger ones that Brendan Nelson brought—with products of Australia, even food, as part if not all of our contribution? And I have named only two pieces of equipment. There are photographs of Pakistan showing these funny little tents in which they were housing hundreds of people. They could not have been very comfortable or safe and yet we had better technology that we never sent there. I just cannot understand that.

I took this opportunity today to specifically make this point: as a parliament, why do we not start talking about what Australia could do for these people with real items. It would create work here and, what is more, demonstrate technology which—in the case of the sterilising pump—is unique to the world. Nobody else has anything as good or as small as this. These sorts of things are very suitable for small communities and, more particularly, are an appropriate response to the disasters to which the statements referred. I trust some of my colleagues in government might want to raise that issue in the party room.

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