Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is to the Prime Minister. The CSIRO estimates that every $1 spent on disaster preparation saves up to $11 on disaster recovery costs, yet less than 13 per cent of the National Emergency Management Agency's budget is spent on preparation and resilience. Disasters are now costing Australians $38 billion per year. Will you take this opportunity to re-evaluate funding priorities and ensure greater investment in resilience?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question, and I'll ask Minister McBain to add to my comments. But we are certainly very conscious of the cost of climate change. It is real. It is real, and in recent months I, of course, have been to regional South Australia, visiting drought areas; I have been to the Mid North Coast, where there have been floods; and I went to South Australia's Kangaroo Island just last week, seeing firsthand the impact of climate change. There is no question that, whilst you can't say every single weather event in Australia is because of climate change, what you can say is that the science told us that there would be more events and they would be more intense, and that is what we are seeing playing out.

There are a range of funds—including the announcement that I made last week about changes to the RIC program—being made available so that the issue of resilience and investment can be made to that program for issues which are unprecedented, of course. In South Australia at the moment what you have is a combination of events. You have the floodwater flowing down through the Murray-Darling Basin impacting, with sediments being washed into and nutrients out of the water there, but the thing that's really having an impact is that the water is about two degrees higher than it normally would be at this time of the year. That is having an impact on the environment, which is having an impact, therefore, on our economy.

So I think the member is quite right to point towards investing upfront. That's something my government is looking at in a range of areas, as well as providing for local infrastructure programs that the minister might want to talk about.

Kristy McBain (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's because of this prime minister that there is actually investment in disaster response and readiness. We've created the disaster response fund, a $1 billion fund over five years, with projects already being rolled out in rounds 1 and 2, and 3 just announced—big projects like levees, as well as small projects like lifting up the capability of culverts to two-lane concrete bridges. But not only is it important to invest in hard infrastructure; the soft infrastructure is incredibly important—investing in preparedness programs in local communities across the country, just like communities in Lismore that I visited last week, or in south-west Queensland, which I visited the week before, working with those local councils on priority projects in disaster readiness. (Time expired)