Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I'm here to give the House an update on the natural disaster that hit my community last year, because there's still a lot of work to do. I am concerned about one of the programs, which is running out, and I think we may need to be flexible with how we deliver it.

To remind you, Speaker, and the House, we had a flooding natural disaster in my region on 28 February last year. To give you the context of how big that was, the previous biggest flood by a Lismore standard was about 12.2 metres. We as a community could manage a flood around 12.2 metres. Houses were built to cope with that. The business community knew where to lift. Car yards knew where to move cars. The whole thing would be planned, and everyone would move to do their flood planning. People went to bed on the Sunday night thinking the flood was going to be 11½ metres. Everyone had actioned their flood plan. Then, at one o'clock in the morning, the flood was revised to be 14½ metres, 2½ metres bigger than we had ever seen and three metres bigger than what was predicted the day before. That caused absolute carnage. We remember obviously that, in the initial hours this was happening, the 'tinnie army' got out. This was neighbours going out in tinnies and kayaks and jet skis, saving their neighbour's and family's lives. Tragically, only four people died that day, but it was a miracle there weren't more.

From that crisis in the sense of saving lives, people initially moved to evacuation centres. For three or four days, we were basically on our own. No-one could get in, given the road flooding. We had ADF aerial support on the first day, which helped save lies, but, really, we were there for about four days on our own. Food and petrol shortages were starting because quite large communities were isolated. We got through that with a lot of community resilience and a lot of community heroes. The ADF then arrived on the Thursday and people started to come in to help us clean up and start the recovery effort.

With all due respect, there has been a lot of good work done by government, by the previous government and by the new government, which has continued a lot of grants programs. There have been a lot of grants programs rolled out, a lot of new programs, to help businesses and people to get back on their feet.

There are two things I want to touch on. Some of the insurance companies have done reasonably well, but some of them have made really silly decisions. If your house gets flooded, you're first meant to rip out any gyprock or anything else where mould can grow. Insurance companies, in lots of cases, would not let people go into their houses and do that initial clean-up because they had to assess it properly first. That meant that in some cases it was six months before people were allowed to go and start the clean-up of their house. What happened over that six-month period? Mould got out of control and has become a huge issue. It has made the job bigger and more expensive.

Both the federal and the state government have announced what we're calling the resilient home program. What do we do to keep people safe? We have people who live on a floodplain. There were probably 5,000 houses that were impacted at some level. But those houses impacted where we think something has to happen because they're not safe where they live, we're talking probably 800 to 1,000 homes.

There are two strategies we have to use here. The first strategy they've looked at is a buyback program. This buyback program has been run far too slowly. People don't know if they qualify' they don't know what they are going to get offered. This is now a year on. So people have gone, 'Well, I can't camp in my house or live in a caravan for a year or two years or three years.' So either they've sold their house, which means the new house doesn't qualify for the program, or they've started to put their own money into their house so that they can go back and live with some dignity. I think that means that the take-up of the buyback will not be what government is forecasting. The Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation is assuming 70 to 80 per cent take-up of this, which means the majority of people will have moved off particular areas of the floodplain they think are most dangerous and, therefore, that has solved the human safety issue.

My fear is that—talking to people on the ground anecdotally—that take-up will be closer to 50 per cent. The government's going to spend $700 million or $800 million on this. If we only move 50 per cent of people, it really hasn't achieved anything, because three, five, seven, and nine may have left, but two, four, six, and eight are still there. That doesn't achieve what we need to achieve, which highlights a necessity. When the CSIRO next year hands down its hydrology report, with its flood mitigation strategies, which it thinks can do things through engineering solutions and take up two metres off a flood, that mitigation study and that hydrology report has to be adhered to.

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