Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today with other members in this place to pay my condolences and respects to those who have been so adversely impacted by these recent natural disasters right across Australia. Nature plays a very cruel hand indeed and there is nothing we mere mortals can do about it except be prepared. The loss of life in Queensland is a tragedy that we cannot overlook and all Australians are sympathetic and care for those who have lost loved ones.

The natural disasters that we have encountered and the fires that have been attributed to human hand are an aspect of life in Australia that is always shocking. The more severe the event and the further back in history that a similar event has occurred, the more shocking and disturbing it is. But we know full well that these tragedies have occurred in the past, and those that keep records and make a conversation as to the nature of those records will always be fascinated by the periods between events of a major nature and with disastrous outcomes. What we can do is be well prepared.

As I reflect on the response to these tragedies, I see that in Western Australia, for instance, we have the Fire and Emergency Services Authority, FESA, a government agency responsible for the training of volunteers, in the main, to cope with natural disasters of any nature. All I can say of their efforts and the efforts of equal bodies around Australia is that their performance has been extraordinary. The contribution made by ordinary Australians not part of those formalised voluntary groups has been exceptional. There is no doubt that when natural disaster strikes us in this wide brown land Australians come to the fore: they rally, they contribute and they make a difference. The difference they make is often dependent upon the nature and the veracity of the training and the skills learned in coping with natural disasters.

However, we must never forget that these are natural disasters. My recollection—not personal, I might add—is that 1851 was a very, very bad year in Queensland. This reminds us that we ought to reflect on history to guide us in our future actions. When we decide to create a settlement and select a location for our homestead, our farmhouse or our community, human nature is to go to water, in the most honourable sense of the phrase. We like to be, and historically we needed to be, near water. We had the house cow to keep on green feed for most of the year. We had our draught horses necessarily kept in good nick. We built our communities at the mouths of rivers to provide ports for sailing ships. We did all those very natural human things in the creation of communities, and we often looked to the immediate past only when deciding where to make our abode, where to create our industries and where to make our investments.

We now know through experience over hundreds of years that many of these locations were absolutely unsatisfactory, due to the danger of flood in particular. Lifestyle today dictates to so many people that they move to the wooded hills of our various cities and they, much to their regret, find that those areas are very prone to wildfires. In the worst of our summers, with the worst of our wind conditions, those locations can become death traps. History shows that there have been too many such tragedies in our short history. Of course, I think at this moment of the tragedy of loss of homes in Kelmscott in Western Australia, where 72 homes now are recorded as being lost to fire. It is so sad to reflect that that fire was in fact created by human error, a human accident. I feel for that individual who now has on his conscience the fact that his actions caused so much devastation.

When it comes to flood, our own actions and our being part of a community drive us to build in those very dangerous locations, and governments might try all manner of things to mitigate the impact on human lives by directing where future reconstruction is carried out. The member for Hinkler has brought to the attention of the House his views on that matter. It would be a glorious endeavour to relocate all dwellings away from areas that were severely flood damaged on a regular basis, but if one reflects on the circumstances in Toowoomba, no-one there could have reasonably expected to have their livelihoods, their homes or their lives lost to flood. What an incredible event that was. Located as they were in high country, albeit a caldera, the last thing they would have expected to happen was to be inundated with rushing floodwaters.

We have a lesson to learn from all of this, I believe, and that is that nature is a very powerful force, and she deals a very savage hand on a regular basis. If it is not happening in Australia, it is happening somewhere around the globe that natural disaster takes livelihood, if not lives. We, as those responsible for decision making federally today, need to look to the future and envisage circumstances where we are better prepared and we have policies in place that assist those who most need it, as opposed to having policies that support those who in certain circumstances do not need it.

Government has an onerous responsibility to make sure that genuine, effective financial support is in place for those who need it. Administrators of the departments of government need to look very carefully to circumstances of the past in view of bettering the circumstances in the future so taxpayer dollars are best and most effectively spent and we do not have circumstances where members of the population in a generally affected area are getting financial support where they knowingly do not deserve it but the parameters of the scheme provided by government allows them to do so. Taxpayer dollars should be highly valued by this government and only dispensed to those in need. They should not go to those who are not in need. We need to have policies that are rigorous and we need to effectively support those who are genuinely in need. This takes skill on the part of our administrators.

I will concentrate for a moment on my own electorate of Durack. Carnarvon, at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, is a local food bowl for the metropolitan Perth population. They were devastated before and during the Christmas-New Year’s break. I have said to them—tongue in cheek, of course—that they picked a hell of a time to have such a natural disaster. Effectively, they were quite overshadowed by the destruction and death on the eastern seaboard. Their circumstances—some 2,000 people, at most, affected and some 200 drastically affected—were personally just as severe as any suffered on the eastern seaboard. But we have a fascination with the latest and the most tragic natural event, and yesterday’s news becomes tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper. The people of Carnarvon have a dire situation of rebuilding their homes and their plantations in order to get back into business to meet the winter planting deadlines. That involves replacing the very soil that these products are grown in. Those floods washed away thousands and thousands of tonnes of valuable growing topsoil. To its credit, the Western Australian government has put $3 million up for the replacement and laser levelling of those plantations. We only hope that that quantum of dollars is going to be sufficient to attend to the task.

Of course, every business that has been affected by this deluge is entitled to a payment of $25,000. When I reflected on the necessity for accuracy and rigour in the payment of taxpayer-dollar support for those affected, I had in mind the fact that it is necessary to create some parameters when it comes to the payment of this support. There are circumstances in Carnarvon under the Western Australian emergency relief program where this money was paid to an ABN where one owner with one ABN had four plantations and, therefore, was entitled to one payment of $25,000. In the same area we have share farmers, each with an ABN, working one plantation. There are cases of up to four farmers. That property will receive $100,000. It is those circumstances, which are administrative errors by way of design of the program, that have the most impact on the local population. They question the equity of the program. It is devised with the best intent in mind, but the outcome is impractical and, from one particular perspective, quite ridiculous and inadequate. So it is important that, when we set about devising the parameters of recovery programs and payments to those affected to cover the future, we do so with hindsight in mind and all of the mistakes of the past well in front of mind.

I should not harp too much on the negative, but it needs to be said. Specific to Carnarvon again is the circumstance of flood mitigation. For over a decade now there has been serious discussion of the design and construction of relatively simply engineered bunding to protect the majority of the plantations. That has not been put in place. The quotations for capital investment range from $50 million to $130 million. The best calculation for this single event is that it will cost taxpayers some $8 million. If you contemplate that this year alone the wet season is not yet over and inundation could occur again and if you think of the number of $8 millions in, for instance, $50 million, you realise that protection put in place that would reasonably last 100 years would be a damn fine investment and ought to be done. But human nature, once again, tends to look to the future and not reflect on the immediate past, so these mitigation programs are understandably lost when looking to the future. It is the immediacy of getting back into business and getting the infrastructure in place that takes front of mind, and the programs that would prevent such circumstances occurring again are overlooked until the next time. That is something that all of us, from us in this House down to the local grower, need to keep in mind. We need to take the action today to guarantee better protection in the future, and I, for one, will be very focused on that outcome.

It is a case of dollars always and unfortunately the bean counters of this world tend to rationalise investment. Carnarvon, with a total population of some 6,000, would probably have only 160 plantations that would be protected. But I remind people in this House and those listening that it really does not matter if the one who is adversely affected by a natural disaster is one of one or one of 100,000—the impact on that individual is just as debilitating, it is just a soul destroying, regardless of the total that they are a part of.

Bidgemia Station, in the Gasgoyne, is struggling through some of the worst continued drought in history. It is struggling to save the remnants of a breeding cattle herd. It had salvaged some 200 head to handfeed close to the homestead that had never been impacted by flood events in the past. It salvaged a mere 20 head of those cattle having spent months and capital investments in handfeeding. Bidgemia Station homestead has been inundated and infrastructure destroyed. Its very location at the bend of the Gascoyne River has been severely impacted. This has never happened before; Bidgemia has been there for well over 100 years.

We need to be reminded that nature plays a cruel hand and that, if we are associated with a natural water course, we must at some stage expect those torrents. They will have a devastating impact. We need to look carefully at where we rebuild in the future. I urge all that had any part in building and rebuilding this great nation of ours to have some consideration for the future, to develop good policies that will allow and prepare us for all manner of eventualities. When it comes to water, it is a very powerful force. We need to be a powerful force in dealing with the future when we are impacted again.

Once again, I give my thanks to every volunteer regardless of their degree of effort and to those that cared for others with true human compassion. I express my condolences, once again, for those that have suffered such great loss.

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