Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to support the motion of condolence moved by the Prime Minister. While, quite rightly, much of the news and focus from this exceptionally difficult summer has been engaged with the extreme weather events to our north and south—and may I on behalf of the people of Farrer pass on my sympathy to those affected by the floods in Queensland and Victoria and by Cyclone Yasi—I do also wish to raise the attention of the House to the plight of many in my electorate from properties, small businesses and homes lying to the west and south-west of New South Wales.

Can I join with others in the Riverina and pass on my personal sympathy to the family of the northern New South Wales man who perished in the swollen Bullenbung Creek at the weekend. This tragic accident occurred at 3 am on Sunday morning on a property about 10 kilometres north of Lockhart when the man’s utility was swept away as he tried to drive through unseen floodwaters. This creek, like so many of our waterways in the last six months since the drought in New South Wales came to an abrupt end, has routinely been turned from a trickle into a torrent.

In October, Lockhart’s main street was also under water from the normally docile Brookong Creek. Then, again, unprecedented rainfall between last Friday afternoon and Saturday night dropped up to 150 millimetres on the town and across much of the Riverina region. Record rainfall totals were recorded in a little over 24 hours. In some cases, it was four to five times their February average. In as many instances, the falls completely demolished the historically known record February rainfall figures.

Also significantly affected was the area in and around Urana. On the back of being swamped in October, Urana received another massive dumping last weekend. Three homes were flooded out, and the initial damage bill estimated by the local council for repairing road infrastructure has topped a further $1 million.

Other towns and centres were affected, including but not limited to Hay, Rand, Holbrook, Culcairn, Walbrundrie, Albury and Corowa. In fact, at Corowa, one day’s rain smashed the town’s entire February monthly total rainfall record, which had dated back 80 years. In Albury, the 100 millimetres we received in 24 hours was the biggest daily tally that the current weather station had received for any month of the year in its entire history. In rural and outlying areas, this was yet another setback for our local farmers, many of whom have now suffered not once or twice but four times since a massive deluge of water swept through local towns and rivers in October last year.

I visited there shortly afterwards, and, while not on the scale of what we have witnessed in Queensland and parts of Victoria, what I saw and heard was confronting, to say the least. Quite apart from the first decent crops for up to 10 years or more being smashed, there were numerous examples of small businesses and homes being caused grief by uncompromising insurance companies. In a number of cases, argument and delays centred on the technicality of whether someone’s home or property had been inundated from below or from the heavens above. As you have all heard and seen recently through the extreme experiences of our neighbours in Queensland, a home is your home and water is water, and when it runs through someone’s bedroom, kitchen or lounge it leads to vast disruption and trauma, displacement and enormous unforeseen costs. In some local instances brought to my attention, insurers, seemingly intent on minimising their outlay, have paid for the replacement of a home’s contents but not the home itself, using an available loophole in the wording which labelled the person’s property ‘undermaintained’.

I also heard of sheer and utter frustration with the increasing and often overwhelming numbers of hoops that landholders, small businesses and local governments are being asked to jump through in order to access emergency assistance. A classic example of bureaucracy being completely unreflective of reality has occurred in my own local Greater Hume shire, and I suspect that they are not alone. Under the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements—known as NDRRA—guidelines, the council can only be reimbursed to carry out emergency repairs and restoration of vital infrastructure if it uses outside labour and contractors or works its own staff during overtime hours after a destructive event. Any local council staff—or a handyman, for that matter—will tell you that, in reality, some things have to be done right away, even on a weekday, with the local staff who know the region. It is also quite feasible that the work needs to be done during daylight hours, not overnight or maybe on a possible weekend that suits. Quite often in rural areas—and I am sure this would be felt in our cities as well—getting enough available contractors in and on the ground within a reasonable time frame is simply not possible, and that has certainly been the case with the widespread damage and magnitude of events witnessed across our nation in recent months.

In Greater Hume’s case, they estimate that a burden of $3 million from their budget has already been spent cleaning up from these events, even before the most recent deluge over the last weekend. But here is the anomaly. Because the rain fell at the weekend, clean-up costs up until start of business on Monday were covered by the NDRRA, but, once the normal week got underway, council staff, in theory, had to go back to normal duties. In reality, if council’s full clean-up costs are not reimbursed under NDRRA, it will have a significant impact on their ability to undertake previously approved works programs, meaning that in the long run the ratepayers will be paying for the flood damage.

I want to also make mention of the current plight of our agricultural industries and the businesses along the Murray, further to the west. Like the previous speaker, the member for Braddon, I am part of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Australia, which is looking into the socioeconomic effects of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Many of us visited a great number of locations between Adelaide and Griffith in a nine-day period in January. It was ironic that our visit to the Swan Hill area in Victoria, just south of my electorate, had to be cancelled because of the enormous inland sea that was moving towards Swan Hill and the swollen rivers in that area which made it impossible for those who wanted so much to come and talk to the committee to actually get there and give their evidence. I very much hope that we can return to Swan Hill. The irony escapes no-one that the evidence that they were going to give to our committee concerned the attempts by government and successive policy instruments to remove water from agriculture. Those policy initiatives were certainly developed during a time of drought and, while no-one would ignore the need for a basin plan that operates sensibly in the Murray-Darling Basin, it certainly has highlighted that there was haste and misinformation applied to the existing information that we have received.

On my information, as of Monday, the weekend downpour saw another 140 millimetres fall in a very short period of time, and this has further affected our region, particularly the local wine grape growing industry in the Wentworth shire. Even prior to this most recent rainfall, by last month many vignerons were widely reporting average wine losses of between 20 and 30 per cent. They were not even the growers hit the hardest. Some had already reported that their entire season’s vintage for 2011 was gone with the advent of downy mildew. This number has now multiplied, with widespread evidence of powdery mildew and brown rot. It is a very difficult situation for wine growers at the moment because, having had this enormous dump of rain on a crop that is not very many weeks from being harvested, they have to consider whether they will continue to apply really expensive chemicals in order to keep the various mildews and rots at bay in the hope that they will realise a harvest. It might even be a question of throwing good money after bad. It is not just the growers in the Wentworth shire but also those further upstream through the Balranald and Wakool shires. The town and surrounds of Euston, for example, has roughly 60 to 70 growers in the region, mainly for table grapes. After this most recent event, their second in two months, growers tell me that up to two-thirds of their harvest is underwater or lying in water and probably worthless.

In light of these unexpected rains—and they are exceptional events—I think an exceptional response is needed. I have just today received another plea for governments both federal and state to reconsider the classification of exceptional circumstances to include the event of a flood. The Murray Valley Winegrowers write, and I am forwarding this letter to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry for his urgent attention:

We urge the Federal Government to extend the existing Exceptional Circumstances Assistance Funding support for a further 12 months to March 31 2012.

In our view, the effect of the series of unprecedented rainfall events through Spring and Summer clearly warrant classification as exceptional circumstances for the industries in this region.

Without an extension of EC Funding for our growers, the heavy additional costs of fungal disease protection and fuel, together with the heavy crop losses from fungal disease will exacerbate the extreme financial duress under which many growers are currently operating and will force many more growers to exit the industry.

That letter is just about wine grape growers, but it equally applies to those who grow horticulture, including table grapes, to those graziers who have lost paddocks and stock, and to those who have lost wheat crops, because they are harvesting now and only just realising the extensive downgrade from that huge rain in October and November last year.

Every one of these farmers will explain how close to the edge they are—and it is obvious when you see it on the ground, of course. Nobody likes to put their hand out and ask for assistance, but, if the exceptional circumstances interest rate subsidy and the exceptional circumstances relief payment—the two very important arms of that policy—cease on 31 March as they are bound to do, across my electorate there will be some serious repercussions and there will be people in farming families whose businesses cannot survive. It would therefore seem a reasonable request that, at a minimum, the exceptional circumstances relief payment—the fortnightly Centrelink payment that those who are affected by the floods in other circumstances and other parts of the country are receiving under these disaster arrangements—be continued for farming families to get through at least the next six months. That is an absolute minimum, and I will certainly be asking the minister to extend the entire EC regime for another 12 months.

Those who are familiar with the exceptional circumstances policy—and in the last government I was certainly involved in a lot of its iterations—will know that it was a policy designed to address drought in a long-term sense rather than a catastrophe, such as a flood, which occurs in the short term. But the flooding catastrophe which is being addressed by national disaster relief arrangements has a long-term effect no different to a drought. In fact, if your topsoil, seed bank and vegetation are removed, the effect is very much like that of a drought. We have, over time, changed that EC program, and at one stage we persuaded the National Rural Advisory Council—an important body in the assessment process—that it should apply to irrigated agriculture. That has nothing to do with the drought but has to do with a lack of irrigation allocations. So there is scope for this policy to address the very real concerns of the farmers not just in my electorate but across Victoria and New South Wales.

To the far west of New South Wales, nature has arguably been even more volatile. Next week I will be taking an inspection tour of that region’s mid-January flooding. During that four-day period, some properties near Broken Hill received close to their entire annual rainfall. One homestead 140 kilometres north-east of Broken Hill reported 240 millimetres in two days, with 160 millimetres of that having fallen in just over two hours. Last week much of that property was still underwater, the only way in or out being by light plane. Even that has been made much more treacherous with the main airstrip underwater. Here—and the story is mirrored by many other property owners—hundreds of kilometres of fencing have been wiped away. Access roads are either still blocked or impassable through normal means. Wild animals remain dead and decaying and entangled in tree branches where the water ran metres above normally red and parched creek beds and channels. I am told the welfare of the stock that remain alive but still at risk is uncertain simply because the landscape is impenetrable and will not allow the owners to check on them. There has not been a postal service into or out of the place for three weeks, with the deadline on applying for government assistance even for that required to be in hard copy and now passed.

Another property owner I spoke to, whose home was inundated with 30 centimetres of water overnight, still cannot get the local insurance assessor in to check and begin the clean-up—that is no simple task when your local agent is five hours away. Early last week the far west region received another 75 millimetres of rain as a precursor to the cyclonic weather coming in over the Top End. Last weekend, on the back of that, we received a further three inches of rain. For this weekend there is still more heavy rainfall forecast. On this, spare a moment’s thought for the prospect for the Bornholm family, who live 80 kilometres south of Broken Hill. Margaret and Colin Bornholm run a merino sheep property which was affected by severe dust storms in September last year, before the drought had broken. In January they were hit again, this time by rains which destroyed the same fencing that had just been repaired. Channels and piping to local dams were also destroyed. Then—yet again—this past weekend the Bornholms’ property was inundated with a further 100 millimetres of rain. They, like many of us in many corners of this nation, must be wondering just how much more they can take.

I cannot better sum up how my electorate feels than by quoting the last paragraph from a letter sent to me last week. It sums up the spirit of the people of Farrer—that Australian spirit which has been so often detailed in the House during this week by my fellow members. Sue Andrews from the Pastoralists Association writes:

The damage to dams, fencing and flood gates is very extensive across the area. Stock losses will not probably be known until people can get out to muster, which could be months.

The storms over the last week are making it more difficult to move about.

As to the psyche of the people, we had 10 years of severe drought, now flooding rain which in a way we all expected as this is what happens after such a drought.

The hardest hit have had good support from neighbours, SES and national parks (helicopter) and also the rural counselling services.

Having the financial support from the Government will make a great deal of difference.

The people of western New South Wales are practical, commonsense people. They clean up, they pick up, they get up. They do not often ask for help. If you ask them, they will tell you what they need—reluctantly—and of course they will always tell you that somebody is worse affected than they are. They have given extremely generously to the pleas for help from the Queensland flooding, from Cyclone Yasi and from the Victorian flooding. Many of them have spoilt hay that they have harvested from their own ruined crops; they have offered to send that hay to farmers in Victoria. They have explained that they cannot afford to actually deliver it but that it is there in their shed and they want to donate it.

I, and of course everybody in this House, along with people everywhere across the country and internationally, feel enormous sorrow for the toll that has been extracted from the people of Queensland, the Lockyer Valley and everywhere that has been affected by these disasters. I do want to say today in conclusion that I do hope that my communities, the communities I represent in the electorate of Farrer, are not overlooked as governments restructure and rebuild.

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