Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege to be able to add my condolences to the very eloquent expressions of empathy that we have heard in this chamber over the past two days, as well as the wonderful recounting of the details associated with this season of loss and tragedy that we have experienced around the nation. It really gives us a full understanding of the depth of what we have faced, and it is a tribute to the connection, I think, that all members feel with their local areas. In particular, I pay tribute to the Prime Minister for her speech yesterday, which I believe was a magnificent, inspiring, unifying and rallying point for the nation at this time.

Certainly, they were tragic circumstances, and we have heard many eloquent expressions and explanations of some of those situations that we have all seen in the media. I will not add to that. I would like to spend my time here today focusing on what we should do now in tribute to those who lost their lives. The focus should be, of course, on reaching out to the grieving but also on dedicating ourselves to the reconstruction and recovery effort to honour the memories of those who lost their lives. There is a natural focus on the dramatic pictures that we see of the floods’ immediate effects, but it is also important to understand the long-term effects these floods, fires and other disasters will have.

In that spirit, on behalf of the government, during the summer I toured flood affected areas of New South Wales—in particular, Wagga, Dubbo, Parkes, Narrabri, Wee Waa, Narromine and Warren. I would like to state my thanks here to the mayors of those areas: the Mayor of Wagga Wagga, Wayne Geale; Parkes, Ken Keith; Dubbo, Allan Smith; and Narrabri, Robyn Faber. They did a wonderful job, at short notice, of bringing together the people that we needed to hear from in relation to those long-term effects. To the people who attended those meetings or met with me on that trail—the SES workers, property owners, small and medium business people, engineers and the like: thank you very much for the input you gave me, which I was able to bring back to the government to inform our discussions. It will no doubt inform our long-term discussions about what we as a nation need to do to deal with these sorts of large-scale tragedies. We may experience not only further events, as we have seen from the cycles that these things come in, but also events of greater intensity, with the probable effects of climate change.

I would also like to thank some of the property owners for their hospitality, particularly the Angel family at the ‘Broula’ property near Tarcutta. It is very interesting to look at how these long-term effects are playing out in some of these properties. We can all appreciate that a flood will destroy fencing and infrastructure on a farm. In the case of the Angel family, they had already suffered two previous waves of flooding in March and October, and then came the November-December floods. Their neighbour had repaired his fencing each time, so their loss was compounded in that respect. But their crops were also affected, downgraded from milling quality to feed quality. They had harvested some of their crop to try to minimise the damage by selling it for feed, but then most of that was washed away in subsequent flooding.

But the longer term problems they face may be things we have not contemplated, such as the fact that the enormous floods that came down from the Tumbarumba region, which was formerly in my electorate, have deposited gravel over a metre deep across a large section of his property. He now no longer has access to the topsoil on that section of this property because of that one-metre deep layer of gravel. Some of the silting in the southern and south-western areas of New South Wales is of poor quality and of no benefit to the soil, so there are significant issues there also regarding the effect on the topsoil itself on some of these properties.

The councils were very effective in conveying to me and showing me some of the damage to the infrastructure that they have suffered. I think that we need to understand what they are going through. Heartbreak is too weak a word to express the situation for a lot of these farmers and the circumstances they are now in. This year was going to be the recovery crop. This was going to be the crop that got them back on their feet after those 10 long years of drought and out of the debt that they had acquired in that time. The worst of it was that they had already sunk cost into that crop. They had laid the fertiliser and the herbicide and done the work, and so all the money was there sitting in those crops when they were destroyed.

It was patchy. Some properties suffered extensive crop damage, others did not. But even for those who did not suffer damage to their crops immediately, damage to the roads, bridges and infrastructure has meant that it has been extremely difficult to both get the headers down for harvesting and also the produce to market. All of this became dramatically apparent in our tour of the affected properties and certainly that information has formed a large part of the thinking of the government in informing its response, and it will continue to shape the national discussion that will now take place on how we can assist these farmers. Many of them, because of the drought, were engaging in forward selling of crops. They now have to pay for crops which they were not able to harvest but which they received money for.

While I am here, I would like to pay tribute to the member for Parkes, Mark Coulton, who accompanied me on a large part of that tour of western New South Wales. Mark is a man I respect enormously. He is a very decent, hard-working local member who has taken a great deal of time to understand deeply the impacts on his region, and he continues to do. He was very helpful in making sure that that information was made available to me in the time that we had on the ground. So I thank the member for Parkes for his assistance and commend him on the work that he has done, and is doing, in his community in the face of this destruction.

We have heard talk about betterment as well. It was very apparent when we observed some of the infrastructure that you can engage in false economy with some of the infrastructure work that goes on in council areas. We observed in the north of New South Wales a road which only 12 months previously had been sealed but which was almost completely destroyed because corners were cut in relation to the cost of building the road. It is perfectly understandable where councils are under pressure with their budgets. But, by comparison, we saw a road where the required effort, attention and care had gone into the building of it. As a consequence there was very minimal damage done to it and very little effort will be required to restore it. So there can be false economies in the way we deal with infrastructure.

We have also learned a great deal in terms of civil engineering techniques and technology over the years. Many of these significant pieces of infrastructure—bridges and the like—were put in place many years or even decades ago. We saw one bridge near Wagga where the bridge itself was completely intact but both approaches had been completely washed away. Since the approaches were built, civil engineering techniques have changed dramatically. Certainly in the rebuilding we do need to learn lessons and understand the patterns that we observed in this flooding, and in particular to shape how we do the infrastructure reconstruction. I am grateful to the engineers and the councils for showing me those effects and discussing the technical and specific issues with me.

I think that it was particularly poignant that in the context of this season of loss and tragedy we celebrated Australia Day, and of course close to Australia Day we also had the announcement of the Victoria Cross for Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith. The response of the community to the disasters was what made us particularly proud on Australia Day to celebrate the thousands and thousands of volunteers who came out to respond to the crisis in Brisbane and other places and also of course to celebrate the VC, demonstrating those traditional Australian values of courage and sacrifice we all admire so much. It gave us the opportunity to re-dedicate ourselves to a unified approach based on fundamental Australian values in dealing with this tragedy, pulling together as a nation in a multipartisan way at this time.

In my own area of Eden-Monaro, we were, I guess, the starting gun for this season. On 9 December the floods arrived in my own region, and by comparison now we consider ourselves extremely lucky. I received text messages from members asking me how we were travelling—I had to evacuate my electorate office—but many of those members subsequently suffered much worse circumstances, so I think of those messages.

Four shires out of my seven were disaster declared. In particular, in our local area here, Captains Flat, a lovely little town with a wonderful community spirit, suffered very significant damage. One of our Comcar drivers, whom many will know, Leslie McIntyre, was affected by this. Leslie woke up in the middle of the night hearing strange noises. She climbed out of her bed and found that she was up to her knees in water. In the dark, she scrambled out of her house and battled out to the front yard. The waters were quite strong and she feared for her life. Today I would like to pay tribute to Mr Gary Baker who, despite warnings not to cross the river at the flat because it was unsafe, did so. In the middle of the darkness, Gary’s arm reached out, grabbed Leslie and saved her from those circumstances, in disregard of the warnings that he had received. So I would like to thank Gary Baker for his courage, and I certainly know that Lesley is extremely grateful for having her life saved.

On the negative side, there is a significant insurance issue in Captains Flat, just as we have seen play out in many other regions. There were people who carried insurance and were keen to make sure that it did have flood coverage. Now we are finding that there is unwholesome quibbling going on, on the part of the insurance companies, in respect of this damage. It is traumatic. We are still, and have been since 9 December, in the situation where this to-ing and fro-ing is going on with great trauma, stress and personal and economic loss to the victims of that damage in Captains Flat. I urge those insurance companies to rethink their position on this, to rediscover their compassion and to interpret these provisions in the way that they ought to be interpreted. There is the scope to do that. You could always find ways of interpreting words to mean one thing or another, but there is certainly scope there for them to come to the rescue of these very deserving people in the Captains Flat area.

I also take this opportunity, as many have, to salute the service of the emergency service providers and respondents that operated, but in particular to my brothers and sisters in the Australian Defence Force who have done a fantastic job. As many have said, wherever they have turned up they have brought heart and hope to people who find themselves in these circumstances. I know that often we think of the Defence Force in its overseas operations but, if you look back through its history, by far the overwhelming commitment of our Defence Force has been in disaster response in the service of this nation. The capabilities that they bring with tactical lift, heavy lift, water purification, engineering capabilities and just sheer manpower are a great asset to this nation and well worth the investment this nation makes in it. For those who cry of a waste of money in defence spending, let them see what those assets have done and have brought to bear in this disaster and think again.

Many reservists were also mobilised in this support. In the previous term, I had responsibility for the reserves in the portfolio of Defence and met with the defence reservists who had worked in response to the Victorian bushfires. I spoke to them about how they felt about that and, overwhelmingly, they tremendously appreciated and felt privileged for the opportunity of being able to serve directly the Australian community that they had joined up to serve. They found the experience rewarding and would do it again in a heartbeat. We have seen that demonstrated time and time again. I salute the men and women of this country in uniform, including our reservists, who have responded so magnificently in all the disasters that this nation has experienced.

We do now have to focus on the next job. I have seen Australians confront these tragedies. I have seen many disasters and wars and much destruction overseas. I have often seen people in such a state of shock that they did not know what to do next and would sit around waiting for someone to provide a solution. In this country it has been magnificent to see communities not wait for that and to see how they self-organise and self-help. Certainly, as they do, we need to now focus on the next step, putting one foot in front of the other. However, I stress that, in doing that, we all need to be in step as a nation.

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