Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

There we go. For my sake let's call it the Emergency Response Fund. Local governments already have long pipelines of local projects that they know they need to deliver to mitigate future disasters, whether they be flood levees, seawalls or other hard infrastructure to protect their communities from a future disaster. There is a concern that this money will be set aside for mitigation projects. It is often hard for local governments to actually source that funding from state governments. There is a concern that this will be going towards those pipelines of infrastructure projects that already exist across the country with local governments in conjunction with state governments and won't be going to social services, charities et cetera. It will be for those hard, often unsexy, infrastructure projects that actually do the heavy lifting during natural disasters.