Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think I need to correct some of the comments that were made by the member preceding me. With all due respect, there has been no sense of urgency from the previous government in dealing with disasters, and that's why the Emergency Response Fund Amendment (Disaster Ready Fund) Bill 2022 is so important. There are many in this place who've experienced disaster in the last couple of years. In my community there've been four declared natural disasters in 2½ years plus additional floods, because some of those were double floods. The sense of urgency in how the previous government managed its funds was completely lacking.

Let's be clear: there was $4 billion of funding set aside to help deal with natural disasters and make communities more resilient. Not a cent was spent, and it earned $700 million in interest. My community and I sat there, watching this fund get richer and richer without investments in our community. It even goes back to just before the Black Summer, when the retired fire chiefs from around the country were warning about the circumstances we were facing, using their decades of experience. They were ignored by the previous Prime Minister and the previous government.

This is a crucial piece of legislation that will turn something that was just sitting there, not even being used, into something that can make a real difference. Goodness knows so many of our communities really need a difference to be made.

This commitment is really about an injection of up to $1 billion over the next five years to mitigate potential disaster loss and damage, and it really is coming at a critical time. We know that right now there are people in the midst of floods or under threat from floods. Quite frankly, we're going to see the threat of floods for at least the rest of this year in so many parts of the country, including in the Hawkesbury, where my constituents have struggled to deal with the cumulative effects, knowing that there were things that could have been done over the last years. There were evacuation routes that could have been made. There were roads that could be made resilient.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 16:22 to 16:3 7

This fund is going to be a crucial part of our ability to prepare for and reduce the impact of disasters that we know are going to be on the increase. We know that the weather will become wilder—we're seeing it before our very eyes—and it is beyond time that there was decent investment.

This $1 billion over the next five years will allow people right across the country to start putting in place some of the things we need. For the Hawkesbury it might be things like evacuation routes, rebuilding the roads, putting in levies and doing the sorts of sensible things that are shown to deliver benefits. In the Blue Mountains, where the bushfires ravaged the countryside and the wilderness, a range of things can be done to help ensure people are safer in those sorts of circumstances. I look forward to working with both the NSW government and my local councils, as well as the community and community organisations, in identifying the very best things to do—the things that will provide in a very sensible way immediate benefits and potential benefits in a disaster.

One of the things I'm very proud of that we are going to be delivering in the context of disaster preparedness is upgrades to the North Richmond Community Centre so that it is much more suited to being an evacuation or recovery centre. Birgit and her board there have seen the possibility and the need for improvements for a very long time and have spent a long time working with council to try and get those improvements. I'm really pleased that $2.5 million of Commonwealth funding will now go to that centre. That was in last night's budget, so it's wonderful to see that that money is going to be available for upgrades.

When the Hawkesbury gets warnings of floods, there's not always easy access for people to cross rivers that might already be flooded. On the North Richmond side there's very little infrastructure. We don't have an ambulance station, we don't have a fire station and we don't have a hospital. There is very poor infrastructure. But what has happened in the past is that services have based themselves in various locations, including at the North Richmond Community Centre, even if it's just for them to be able to sleep and recover between their shifts. This community centre has already been delivering services in a building that is completely inadequate—an old kitchen, toilets that come from when it was first built. It's not suitable for anybody who needs some sort of disability access, so $2.5 million will go a long way to helping them create a place that is not only welcoming but also safe for people, if they need to evacuate their own homes. Sharon Stevens, who volunteered in the 2021 floods and has been there helping people, appreciates first-hand how inadequate the kitchen area is. This might all seem like relatively small stuff, but, when you are evacuated from your home, when you don't know how long it's going to be before you can get back there, when there is the threat of a dam spilling or a river flooding, then you need somewhere where you can have the basic comforts of being able to go to the bathroom, have a shower, get some sleep and have some food. I want to thank everybody at North Richmond Community Centre for the work they have done through bushfires and through floods, and I'm so proud that we're going be able to create a better facility there for community use.

One of the big areas where we need to become more resilient is our roads. Across the Hawkesbury and Blue Mountains, in fact, everybody who has had rain damage will say, 'It's our area too.' But I'm going to talk about my community and the challenges that they are facing in repairing the roads. A lot of the responsibility falls on council. Unfortunately, councils are just not equipped to deal with the size of the problem they are facing. In the Hawkesbury, they've estimated around $190 million of road damage. That includes damage that occurred initially in 2021. In fact, it was even before that in the 2020 flood, which came right after the bushfires. Small damage, not repaired adequately, became bigger damage in the 2021 floods and has now blown out. It is a huge job down at Cornwallis. Roads that got completely washed away in 2021 are still not repaired, like Greens Road in Lower Portland. With these sorts of roads—and the latest on the list as Settlers Road in Lower MacDonald—its really frustrating to only be able to replace the road to the standard that it was.

That's why I'm very pleased to see the decision that we've made to ensure people are disaster ready by allowing them to build back better. This has been a real sticking point, and there is now more than $500 million from the Australian and New South Wales governments that has been set aside for this. In my area, they are entitled to apply for some of the $200 million of the Infrastructure Betterment Fund to help recovery efforts focused on rebuilding damaged and destroyed infrastructure in a more resilient way. That makes sense to all of us; you don't just build it back to the standard it was, because guess what? In the next flood it's going to wash away again. We have roads that suffered that extreme heat during the Black Summer Bushfires, and then they had extraordinary rain. So across the electorate the seals on the roads have just disappeared. This betterment fund gives both the Hawkesbury council and the Blue Mountains council an opportunity to identify places where they can build back better. It's what they've been asking for. They have both had very good meetings with the minister for local government, and I'm very pleased that we can show we have been listening to the needs that they have.

When I talk about roads, I have mentioned the Hawkesbury and the $190 million that they have identified. Of course, that will be available under the existing joint arrangements. There are already joint arrangements, but I'm pretty sure that, over time, we're going to be able to do better with those, so that it is a smoother process. Right now, it feels like there is a bit of a blockage. The money is there and waiting, but there is a process councils have to go through. They have to have enough people to help them do the paperwork and the essential things they need. I look forward to us, over time, being able to support them even better, so that they can access that funding and don't have to sit around saying, 'There's a problem with the money at a state level,' let alone any subsequent issues. At this point, what councils are telling me is that they are waiting on the states. The states seem to indicate that they're waiting on councils to go through a process. These are some of the things that I hope we can get in and streamline. It's worth us getting involved to streamline these processes and have discussions about it—how can we help to make this better?

When we talk about roads, the Blue Mountains—I don't want to say they're equally impacted because their damage bill, including repair of roads and 66 landslides, exceeds $400 million. This is an area where it's the storms that've done it and that has led to flooding. What both councils are finding is that every time it rains they get set back. They're struggling to get contractors who have the availability when they need it because when it stops raining everybody wants them. I understand the materials are an ongoing challenge. Even though they fixed 7,000 square metres of local roads in the Blue Mountains, which is the same amount they did in the entire previous financial year—and they've done that just in a month post floods and storms—there is still a huge amount to do.

To put the challenge that the Blue Mountains faces into perspective, the mayor says that council staff are in the process of implementing 10 years worth of roadworks in 12 months just to get back to where we were. The mayor says that councils right across eastern Australia are experiencing similar issues. These are the things that our fund has the opportunity to head off at the pass. We've got an opportunity to invest so that there is much greater resilience in what we do.

There's another area where this fund can really make a difference and that is on the cumulative toll that disasters take on infrastructure. I will give one example of what some of the farmers and land owners in my Hawkesbury community are finding now. They're saying that after two years of rain and floods fences are now rotting, and that's not just a panel here and a panel there but the foundations of their buildings are becoming unstable. There has been a cumulative process. It isn't only the big community assets that we need to be thinking about; we need to be thinking about what we can do to help people make their own assets more resilient. That when we give them funding to rebuild their homes after a flood, we make sure they're able to make their homes more resilient.

I am very much looking forward to bringing my community together. There's a group of people who have been through successive floods and they've learnt from those floods. They have learnt how to redo their kitchens so that there is less damage to repair next time—with hard surfaces, not replacing gyprock with gyprock but using better materials. I had organised to bring them together, with help from the experts from Suncorp who also have a lot expertise in this area. But, ironically, a flood meant that no-one's head was in a place to think about rebuilding. People were just thinking about getting through the next few hours. So I look forward to bringing my community together in the new year to be able to share their experiences. It isn't just governments who have the answers on this; it's the people who have experienced it time and time again who were learning, rather than repeating the same mistakes. My Hawkesbury community knows we can learn from each other. Although I will be grateful to have the Suncorp building experts there too, with the work they've done, particularly in Queensland, around cyclones and flood resistant homes. But there's a lot we can do for ourselves.

I absolutely welcome that, finally, we're going to get to see this significant fund being used, and put to good use, rather than having it sit languishing as it has done for years. I remember that when we first voted for this fund we supported the government on this fund even though they took money away from university assets to do it. But we said, 'This is needed and it's needed now.' That was years ago and not a cent has been spent. It has earnt interest but that has not helped my community. I am very pleased to see tangible action from the Albanese government.

See this speech in context