Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Senator Sheldon. I know Senator Sheldon only recently visited a number flood affected regions in his capacity as special envoy for disaster recovery. It is now nearly 18 months since those dreadful floods hit the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Inevitably, a disaster of this scale will take a long recovery time.

But the Albanese government is standing with the communities affected as they continue to recover, and that won't change. The Albanese government has made $1.6 billion in payments directly to individuals and families impacted by the February flood event last year in New South Wales. That is in addition to the jointly funded disaster recovery funding arrangements which have seen the Albanese government and the New South Wales government invest about $1.2 billion in the Northern Rivers for a series of home buybacks, road upgrades, grants for farmers and businesses, accommodation packages and other support for councils, home repairs, concessional loans and freight subsidies.

On Friday last week, I visited the Northern Rivers once again. Just outside Coraki, I was joined by mayors Robert Mustow from Richmond Valley, Sharon Cadwallader from Ballina and Chris Cherry from Tweed to announce tranche 2 of the Northern Rivers Recovery and Resilience Program. It is important that, while we continue to aid the region's recovery, we also put measures in place to prevent these events creating such devastation in the future. So, on Friday, another 20 projects worth $100 million from the Albanese government were committed to from this fund on top of the 16 projects worth $50 million that we announced in February. These projects span every council area in the Northern Rivers and were recommended based on research by CSIRO and supported by the New South Wales government, which undertook due diligence checks. They include road and bridge raising, flood pump station upgrades and nature based mitigation strategies among other things. The Albanese government is making these investments in the Northern Rivers— (Time expired)