Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to an incredible group of communities across northern Victoria who have demonstrated in these worst floods on record their extraordinary commitment to one another; extraordinary courage and hard work. They have saved each other's homes, properties and public buildings by filling hundreds of thousands of sandbags and building and manning levees night after night, day after day. The vast majority of work has been done by volunteers. They have done it selflessly.

When I go and talk to people—it might be a couple; they might be elderly or young; they are standing in water over their gumboots, surrounded by devastation, their home flooded, metres of water through their orchards or their dairies or their small business; and we look around at the sewage filled water—they say to me, 'It is terrible, but we are not the worst off.' This is the most common statement I hear. It is said to me time and time again. I want to acknowledge the courage and the stoicism of these people

The Great Northern Plains have some of the flattest topography in Australia. The country slopes very gently from the Great Dividing Range in the middle of Victoria to the Murray River. In this disaster, we had our annual quota of rain falling in just a few days—unprecedented levels of rainfall. The extraordinary volume of water has been moving ever so slowly towards the great Murray River, metres deep and, all along the way, held up by the roads, the bridges, the railway lines, the irrigation channels. So we have paddocks under two and three metres of water still, and other places coming out of the flood and having to move into the clean-up stage.

It is an extraordinary effort on behalf of over 3,000 farms, thousands of businesses and numerous towns. Some of the communities had little time to raise their equipment or their household goods up out of the floods, little time to move their livestock to higher ground or to put sandbags around their orchards, while others have had literally more than a week to wait for the rising tide to move towards them. Places like Barmah and Picola are still waiting for those waters to reach them—this inland sea—while places like Nathalia just today have had their orders to evacuate removed because it seems that those metal levees worked. Indeed they were supplemented by over 300,000 sandbags.

We are moving from immediate crisis to a very difficult situation of recovery. This area also has just gone through seven years of drought, the worst drought on record. They are also trying to survive their own irrigation water being targeted and stripped away by Water for the Environment. There are hits on every side for them, but they are trying to persist and they are persisting.

I access these communities when I can get through the floodwaters. Towns like Tungamah, Katamatite, Cobrain, Yarrawonga, Naringaningalook, Nathalia, Congupna, Numurkah, Wunghnu, Tallygaroopna, Katunga, Burramine, Bundalong, Kaarimba and Kyabram have also been affected. To all of these towns in each of these communities, I salute them.

The farming families clustered around these towns have embraced the people in the towns using their equipment—their trucks, their graders and their sheer grit. We have had the selflessness and sacrifice of our volunteer CFAs supplemented in some places with the SES with the council workers, police, the Dhurringile prisoners, the Army, the DPI, the DSE. There are no work demarcations in this business. No-one asks who you are, what you can do or where you should work but, rather, when can you start and how long can you stay?

We have had stories that are soon to become local legends. These stories need to be told and retold about the young kids who helped, about the teenagers who filled sandbags for 24 hours, about the grade 5s and 6s in the schools like Tallygaroopna who will never forget the job they did.

We still have an enormous amount of recovery to go and we will need a lot of help. I want to commend government, state and federal, for recognising this issue even if yesterday the Prime Minister only moved a motion to talk about the floods in New South Wales. We do in fact have the floods in Victoria, and at least the Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, visited the Victorian floodwaters.

These are communities who have shown their stoicism and their love for one another but they will need national and Victorian state government support to sustain the greatest food producing region in the country.