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

What I've known since coming to this parliament is that the Morrison government is big on announcements but poor on delivery. And we can see that nowhere more than on the bushfire ravaged New South Wales South Coast. I have been going around my communities and talking with them about what they would like to see to help bushfire-proof their communities. What they ask for is pretty simple. They want to be able to have good communications. They want to be able to have power so that they are not put in that situation again. The Durras Community Association got together in their very small but lovely community hall in February 2020. There were 150 residents and they put together a series of recommendations and questions to the government. They worked hard. They put in submissions to the bushfire commission. They came to me, and I wrote to the minister. All they wanted was a 145-metre-long aerial cable placed underground and to fix the mobile black spots along the Princes Highway between Batemans Bay and Ulladulla. So I wrote to the minister, and the response that I actually got—not from the minister but from his chief of staff—to be quite honest, was appalling.

This government has a $4 billion disaster mitigation fund, announced years ago, that it hasn't spent a cent of. The government announced the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, but Durras can't even get support to bushfire-proof their community. The president of the Durras Community Association was interviewed in the Eurobodalla local online Beagle, and I want to read some of that today. It said:

The Durras Community Association … is calling on the Commonwealth Government, especially the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher MP, to stop making excuses and start funding real on-ground actions to provide better bushfire protection for south coast communities.

'The Durras community has asked for some specific simple communications upgrades to be funded to improve local resilience for bushfires and other emergencies but the response so far from governments, especially the Commonwealth has been absolutely pathetic' said the Association's President, Dr Trevor Daly.

The Durras Community Association wrote to Minister Fletcher in late 2020, but his office basically came back and said that they couldn't do anything. Then the association wrote to Minister Fletcher and invited him to the area, and Minister Fletcher has not agreed to that at all. (Time expired)