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

In rising to speak on this very important matter, in which my communities were sorely affected, I recognise that your city of Rockhampton, Madam Deputy Speaker Livermore, also received quite a large flood and that that impacted severely on that community, and a lot of my remarks today could well include your own area.

There have been six major flood events in the Bundaberg area since the 1890s. They varied quite dramatically. The daddy of them all was 9.04 metres in 1890 itself, with 8.9 metres just three years later.

In 1942, during the war years, they had 8.5; it was 7.3 in 1954; and then they had two peaks in 2010-11, with 7.9 before the new year and 5.8 after the new year. But what we saw in this current circumstance was a once-in-200-years flood, where it went to 9.53 metres.

That just sounds like a lot of figures, but let me put that into context. We had a severe flood two years ago, and this flood was 1.5 metres above that, which is shoulder height. You can imagine that volume of water on top of a then almost record flood, and it was 0.5 metres over the all-time high. So you can see from that that we were in uncharted territory. And no-one knew that Cyclone Oswald, which started up in the Gulf of Carpentaria and moved across Cape York, was going to spend its time coming down the east coast and then move inland doing strange twists and turns, feeding inland rivers and causing tornadoes as it came down the coast.

The circumstances around Bundaberg started on Australia Day, with most of the functions in the Bundaberg area cancelled. I came home from Childers that morning and the rain was pouring down. We were anticipating 400 millimetres of rain, or 16 inches, over that Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which would have been just horrendous. That afternoon and night, five tornadoes hit. The first hit Bargara at 1.35 in the afternoon. Pine trees came down, houses were unroofed, the shopping centre lost its roof and the Bargara bowls club was grievously affected. In fact, the staff and patrons who were in the club at that time had to take refuge in the coldroom, which was the only secure place in the building. One of the Norfolk Island pines came down on a car. Fortunately it did not kill the two people inside, but they had to be removed to Brisbane for expert medical attention.

There were then three tornadoes at Burnett Heads, slightly north of Bargara, at 3pm, 6pm and 6.30pm. I went to both of those locations—Bargara and Burnett Heads—in the second instance with the Governor-General. We saw a house there which the tornado had gone right over the middle of and completely taken the roof and all its struts and sucked the contents out, as if a huge vacuum cleaner had been put in it. It was just horrendous. Then the fifth tornado hit at Coonarr, a small and rather secluded beach just south of Bundaberg. In the early hours of Sunday morning a sixth tornado hit Burrum Heads. We did not know the extent of that at the time because Burrum Heads lost its mobile telephony and was cut off for two days before we could get in to see the extent of the damage.

I thought the damage at Bargara was horrendous. I remember one vivid image that I was looking at with the Prime Minister. There was a five-foot-long piece of timber, about a metre and a half, that had speared through the door. It was spiked at one end and it had gone clean-through the back of a house. Anyone standing next to that door would have been a goner. In fact, our local parish priest had only just moved away from the window of his house, which was not far from that, when a Norfolk Island pine slapped against the window and showered the whole kitchen area with glass. There were some very lucky escapes. But Burrum Heads has to be seen to be believed. The caravan park was just a total wreck, like a tsunami had been through it. There were caravans that had been tossed through the air and were on their sides, strips of aluminium and timber, and household items almost up to waist height everywhere.

Then there was a swathe—this was similar in Bargara—of about four blocks wide cutting across, ripping out trees and foliage and taking off roofs. Old houses were wrecked. Strangely, new metal-roofed houses survived, but the tile-roofed houses were just lifted off and smashed into a thousand pieces. I came back from Burrum Heads, and the Army were at that stage on their way to Bundaberg. I was able to have one unit diverted as they came through Maryborough into Burrum Heads, and those boys worked there right through till two days ago.

The river came up very quickly this time. I was there in 1974 and during the 2010-11 floods in Bundaberg, but this one came up with a vengeance. On Sunday at 6.30 am it had reached 5½ metres. We can always tell when these things are coming down quickly, because there is a monitoring station at Wallaville, which is near Gin Gin, west of Bundaberg. Once it reaches around 22 metres, you know you are in trouble, and in this instance it went over 23 metres, so we knew something fierce was coming. By 6 pm that Sunday, it had passed the 2010-11 peak. Late in the evening it had reached 8½ metres. At dawn it was 8.7. I know some firms called their staff on that night when they were warned by the city council that a heavier flood was coming than had been expected, and they tried to move stock and everything. By the next morning, they were paddling in knee-deep water; that is how quickly it came down.

But the real focus was in Bundaberg North. As I said, we were in new territory. The river was an absolute torrent. One expert estimated it was running at about 40 knots. As you know, there were cuts closer to Brisbane at places like Caboolture, so there were no trains. Both the traffic bridges were gone, and you could not take a boat into the river. The lifesavers made one attempt; it just threw the rubber ducky into the air, with the three lifesavers in it. Luckily they had vests on and were able to get to the bank. So water crossings were out, and there were more than 2,500 people that had to be either moved or evacuated. Fortunately, we had been able to get two Black Hawk helicopters from Townsville on one day and another two the next day. The idea was then to shift people over to the south side of the river, where all the emergency services were located, while another 1,200 who were originally to go to Bundaberg North State High School were moved out to a small state school on the edge of town, called Oakwood. At one stage there were nearly 2,000 people there, but when they scattered to various farms and friends and neighbours it came down to 1,200 and later down to 700. Then, of course, they had to be fed. That meant the helicopters were doing two things: taking people south and bringing food north.

At the council's instructions, 20 teams from the SES went around to warn people to be out in three hours when the river was coming up. Sadly, some people did not take that advice, and we were plucking them from the roofs with rescue helicopters and Black Hawk helicopters. In fact, I was talking on Australia All Over on Sunday, and Ian McNamara had an expert with him who said he thought it was the greatest civilian rescue by air that he had heard of—certainly by helicopter—since the days of the Second World War. So thank God for the helicopters, which plucked 35 people from the roofs of houses. Every one of those was a hairy rescue, so you can imagine what that involved.

But it did not just stop at simple rescues and moving able-bodied people around. The RSL retirement home, which had high-care and low-care patients. A retirement village called Liberty Villas had to be evacuated. The Lakes, also a retirement village, which only had minor damage at the end of the day but still was too close to the centre of things to be left there, had to be evacuated.

So all of those people had to be ferried across by helicopter to the south side.

So the north was isolated. The damage there was horrendous. I went back there with the Prime Minister when she came to Bundaberg. You could not get into the suburb, but to give you a bit of a colour of what it looked like: it was not just a matter of putting down some new bitumen, because the streets were scoured out to the depth of a metre or more. Sewerage, water pipes and cables were exposed. The two bridges were closed. On one of them, a new bridge that luckily had nothing wrong with the integrity of the bridge itself, the up-ramp had been undermined and had collapsed, and that will not be fixed properly for another three weeks. The Army are building some form of Bailey bridge construction to at least give us one lane as an interim measure. In the 2010-11 circumstance Bundaberg Slipways had severe damage but this time was just swept away.

I went over to North Bundaberg on Monday afternoon to see some of the shops just before I came back. I went to Digger Thiele Electrical. He is the bloke who will have to fix up all of the appliances that have to be tested—fridges, stoves, washing machines, hot water systems, toasters, jugs and all those sorts of things. They cannot be used again until they are fixed up. In fact, it would be quite dangerous to use them. But the firm that will have to do that work is not there. They are one of the firms that have to be got up quickly.

In another place, a building that used to be a pharmacy but is now a real estate agency—it was next to but not attached to a two-storey building—fell into a sinkhole. In North Bundaberg, mainly—but there are a few more instances on the east side of the town—49 structures either floated away, like they did in my colleague the member for Blair's area in similar circumstances during the Lockyer Valley evacuations, fell off their stumps onto their sides or went into sinkholes. There were 49 of them. Imagine that.

So, when you looked at North Bundaberg it was just a horror scene. A lot of work will have to go on there. I went around and looked at some of this with my friend Bill Morehead, a very responsible developer, and I am coming to the conclusion that we have a circumstance where we are going to have to look very seriously at relocation. I talked to the Prime Minister about it this morning, but I do not want to go too heavily into it until there are community consultations. I have spoken to the mayor and so on. But we cannot just go back for a 10th time and revisit this sort of destruction, especially if we are going to have these more violent weather events that we have noticed over the last four or five years.

Talking more broadly about Bundaberg and not just North Bundaberg, nearly 400 houses are severely affected. They are structurally sound but severely affected. In other words, until they are repaired and properly cleaned out there will be 400 that cannot be used. There are 870 homes with medium damage, which is where you have to pull out gyprock and walls like that. There are another 829 homes with minor water damage above the living area. There are 1,808 homes that are undamaged but have water under the house—and the Deputy Speaker would be familiar with this, because Rockhampton cops this a lot. So, the total number of dwellings wrecked, unusable, requiring repairs or in some way affected is just a tad under 4,000. That is a major disaster.

The farms—and I have not had a chance to visit many farms—suffered in the electorate of my colleague here, the member for Flynn, but citrus seemed to cop it worst. They not only had hail in the last four or five months; now they have had floods that have ripped trees out—whole trees are gone. I will let the member for Flynn talk about that in more detail. The Bundaberg-Mundubbera-Gayndah area is one of the biggest citrus-growing areas of Australia, so do not expect a lot of oranges in the coming season.

I also went to a blueberry farm. The product was all under igloos, and you can imagine what happened there. Luckily, they only lost about 11 igloos, but there was a lot of water there. Some of the cane will survive because it was a reasonable height, about the height of the table in front of me, but lower down still it got waterlogged and you can write that sugarcane off for the coming season. I visited with John Cobb, the shadow minister for agriculture and food security, last week and I am going up on Friday with Senator Ludwig, the minister himself. We should get a better picture of the agricultural damage to many crops. I am touching on that because I recognise the importance of the crops, but the assessment of them is still going on.

Bundaberg was well prepared for this because, as you know, it copped a flogging in the 2010-11 floods. Actually, there were two peaks to that flood. As I said earlier, one peak was at 7.9 metres and the other was at 5.8 metres; one was reached just before New Year and the other was reached about 10 days after New Year. I remember returning from holidays in Perth in the middle of that circumstance. That was bad enough. At that time, the Prime Minister and Minister Crean travelled north and were of great assistance, as was the Leader of the Opposition.

I have to say that I got enormous support this time—from Campbell Newman three times in the week, from the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister on one of the days, from the Leader of the Nationals and the shadow minister for agriculture on the next day, and from the Governor-General on that afternoon. The next day, we had the Leader of the Opposition and Senator Joyce, the Leader of the Nationals in the Senate. And I mentioned that I will visit there with Senator Ludwig on Friday. I do not think any member of parliament has had a retinue of that seniority in his or her electorate, certainly not since the Victorian bushfires.

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