Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This summer across Australia we've seen bushfires, flooding, severe storms and cyclones. In my home state of Queensland, it is the usual story of storms, flooding and cyclones. Yet sometimes it can feel a world away. You see it for a 90-second grab on TV, a couple of minutes here, a couple of minutes there. You spare a thought to remember, but these are people's lives and their livelihoods. Homes are gone, not as quickly as in a fire with a flood, but then, a couple of weeks later, the mould will show up. You might have had it structurally okay, but you're going to have to demolish it anyway. Livestock are gone, as the member for Kennedy referenced. Farmers love their livestock. They love their land. To see them go is not just an economic impact. It's heartbreaking. They know those cows. They know those sheep. They love them. They've cared for them. Communities are torn apart. The ongoing impacts, the mental toll, young kids trying to go to school, trying to navigate their way through their ATAR, through year 11, through year 12, not sure what their home looks like any more, not sure where they're going to be living in the next couple of weeks, people hurt, people killed, businesses gone—we've already seen this year lives lost to natural disasters.

When we talk about the loss and the damage, I want to make sure that on record I give my thanks to our emergency service personnel, who are on the front line. These are the people who walk towards the danger when everyone else is trying to leave. They put their lives on the line. They help people when pain and loss are at their most raw. Sometimes they're out responding and helping others when they're losing their own homes, yet they do that for our community. These people are heroes. They're Australian heroes. I know that, in the most recent disasters in Queensland, a lot of which impacted the member for Kennedy's region, people from my electorate headed to the disasters to help. That's Australia and that's Australians. You don't have to ask for the help; it just arrives. It's who we are. We understand that, at times, this great country that we call home fights against us, but we always push back together.

Disasters are nothing new for Queensland. We face nearly every kind of natural disaster imaginable. What is new is how bad these things are starting to get. We're getting more extreme weather and stronger events. When I grew up, it was called summer. It invoked ideas of the beach and fun with my friends. These days we call it disaster season, and it's putting more people and more places at more risk of these disasters coming.

To be clear, this isn't a complaint. We are Queensland. We are the north. We take these sorts of things head on. We square our shoulders, and there is nothing more Far North Queensland than stocking up on beer ahead of a cyclone, battening down the hatches and sheltering, knowing that you've got your bathtub full of water and that Ergon do a great job of getting the power back on. But that's not what we should have to do. And these disasters are having an impact on the future of our regions. These disasters are expensive. Research from the Insurance Council of Australia suggests extreme weather events, including floods, storms, bushfires and earthquakes cost around $4.5 billion annually. This is money out of Australian pockets, money taken from communities.

But I do want to give credit to governments of all stripes, because we know they will step up and provide support for communities when it's needed. This is not a blue thing or a red thing or an independent thing. I think we all agree that responding to a natural disaster is not and should never be a political exercise. It is a human one, and we continue to face these disasters, but we need to figure out how better to prepare for them. There's only so much preparation you can do, but there are things that we can do, things that we're implementing right now: making sure our emergency services are resourced, that the brave men and women who often are out there working while their own infrastructure, lives and homes are at risk, have the support and the equipment that they need; proactive bushfire management down south; making sure our weather data is as accurate as possible to give communities warning about coming danger; and ensuring that our flood mapping is up to date, limiting building on floodplains and making sure we understand where the water is going to come from and where the water is going to go.

We can all be prepared for these disasters. We can do it individually and we can do it as a country. Every year, I am relieved and given a sense of new wonder at Australians as we respond to these together.

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