Fiona Phillips (Gilmore, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Can the Prime Minister confirm that last year the Morrison government announced an annual $200 million recovery and mitigation fund to help communities across Australia prepare for and recover from natural disasters? The next fire season is upon us and not a single dollar has been spent. Why is this Prime Minister always there for the photo-op and never there for the follow-up?

David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party, Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Gilmore for her questions. Yes, there was a fund created, and part of that fund was to provide funding in two tranches: one through $150 million to be able to be spent on rebuilding infrastructure. That hasn't been used because we have created a $2 billion fund in which to rebuild the infrastructure that was devastated by these fires, and that was predicated on advice of the Director-General of Emergency Management Australia. They didn't believe that it was worth doing that because we had created this other mechanism in which to do that. To give a perfect example, the electorate of Gilmore itself received nearly $139 million in direct relief. With respect to the $50 million that is there for resilience building, the Director-General of Emergency Management Australia is taking submissions and, in fact, is about to provide me with some of those programs. In fact, I had a conversation with the member for Eden-Monaro only last week about putting forward projects that her community may benefit from.

This is above politics. This is about people, and the people's lives that are impacted. We need to make sure that we understand the trauma that these people went through and that they are at different stages of recovery. We need to allow them and their communities to decide what that recovery looks like, what resilience looks like, into the future. To rush that isn't about making sure that it's a locally led recovery.This means that it will be a Canberra led recovery. We'll continue to engage with communities, with members from both sides of the aisle, in a constructive way in rebuilding the lives and livelihoods of Australians that were destroyed through this bushfire season. We'll do that in a calm, methodical way using Australian taxpayers' money in the most effective way.