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

It's nearly two years since my community suffered one of the biggest disasters in Australia's history, and I want to give the House an update on how our recovery is going. I'd like to say that the recovery is going very well, but unfortunately I can't report that. In fact, I think it's going quite poorly and causing more trauma to my community.

There were two options when 2,000 houses were identified as basically being in danger. On top of that, we had businesses, the CBD and villages, as well as some of the houses within those villages, that were seen as being in danger. I'm talking here about Lismore, the mid-Richmond, Coraki, Woodburn, Broadwater and Wardell.

I think the first major mistake was in the choice of either withdrawing from the flood plain or committing to serious flood mitigation, giving the community some idea about what you'd be looking to take off a flood with that flood mitigation, but saying to people, 'If you're going to stay, it's going to take quite a few years to do the flood mitigation work.' The decision made by the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation was to withdraw from the flood plain. That meant that basically they were going to go in and buy back the 2,000 houses that had been identified. That was the plan. We gave them round 1 funding to do that, and they started the buy-back routine.

I thought that was never going to be successful simply because of the number of houses involved. There were over 2,000 houses, and it would have been unprecedented to move that many homes. There were also some logistical reasons for it not working. One was that it took too long to get the program up and running. Many hundreds of people sold their houses before the program got to the stage where they were eligible to apply for it. Because it became a 12-month program, before it was announced and offered to people they had gone back in and started to put their own money back into their homes.

The reconstruction corporation assumed that people in 80 per cent of the homes were going to take up this offer, that there'd be a hodgepodge of households left that would almost volunteer to move from the flood plain—even though they hadn't accepted the first round—and that there'd have to be some funding to mop up some businesses that were on the flood plain. We haven't got anywhere near that. Nothing looks like that. It's now been scaled back. Having spoken to some of the people responsible for this, I think we're now talking maybe 900 homes. So, at best, 900 homes out of the 2,000 will have moved. What you've got then is a chequerboard effect—one house has been moved but the one next to it hasn't. That doesn't achieve anything for the safety of our community. Remember, this has cost $700 million of taxpayers' money. You really have to question the value of that if it hasn't kept the community safe.

There's also the situation, with some of those homes, where people have accepted a buyback—it's a question of how many, but I know quite a number of them myself—and bought a house around the corner in the same flood affected area. Hypothetically, they might get $600,000 for their home, and they've bought a house around the corner for $300,000. You can't blame them for doing that, because it gives them $300,000 to fix up a home when obviously they couldn't fix up the one they had. But you've got the situation where they're getting $600,000 for a buyback and buying a house around the corner that is still on the flood plain. They're no safer. And the people who sold their house to someone else didn't qualify.

The whole thing has been a complete stuff-up. We're going to have to do an audit of it. At the end of these programs, where we've just spent $700 million, we're going to have to ask: What has been achieved? Have we done 700, 800 or 900 homes, maybe? That's not even half of what was identified as safe. How many of those people have repurchased on the flood plain, and what is the overall improvement in safety for people? I think it's going to be a very poor audit when we look at that.

There is also the Resilient Lands Program, which is offering people a place to move within the region. It's two years on, and just last week the first land that will be part of that process was identified. So we're talking four years between the event and when houses will be available for people to move into. That's too slow. Hardly anyone who was devastated by a flood would have waited four years to move in.

So unfortunately there's a lot more work to do. In the CSIRO report next year we need to look at flood mitigation to keep our community safe.