Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the people of Blair, I thank the Prime Minister for the condolence motion and extend my deepest sympathy and heartfelt sorrow to the people of Queensland and to people across the country for the loss they have sustained in lives, in property and in personal possessions, particularly the cherished mementoes that they have lost. Our hearts go out to the people of the Lockyer Valley adjacent to the electorate of Blair and to the people of Toowoomba.

The measure of any community is found not in times of comfort and ease but in times of challenge and controversy. War and natural disasters bring out the best in humanity—and, regrettably, the worst. The virtues and the vices are very obvious, open and apparent at times of crises. The floods in South-East Queensland overwhelmed communities and councils. Lives were lost. People were injured. Families and farms were destroyed or damaged psychologically. Schools were ruined. Clubs were obliterated. Roads and bridges were trashed. The damage to the lives of the people of Blair is as raw as the landscape around the Lockyer Creek, the Brisbane River and the Bremer River.

If you were to go to my electorate, you would think it was a war zone. There are people there who are living in caravans on river banks and creek banks, and they look like they are traumatised—because they are. They have not started the clean-up—you would think that the flood waters had receded 12 hours previously. It is the same for my good friend the member for Oxley. The people of Goodna have sustained horrendous damage to their communities. Their CBD of Goodna in suburban Ipswich has been trashed, and the member for Oxley and his family have endured tremendous loss of possessions and of memories and artefacts of many years of loyal service not just to his constituency but also to the party and to the people of Queensland. My heartfelt sorrow goes out to the member for Oxley, my good friend, and his wonderful wife, Margie, and their family.

I thank the ADF, particularly the RAAF base at Amberley, for the work they did during the flood. The RAAF base at Amberley is a cherished institution and icon for the people of Ipswich. I thank the Queensland Police Service. I thank the City of Ipswich Council—the mayor, Paul Pasale, and the councillors. I also thank the mayor of the Somerset region in Blair, Graeme Lehman, and the councillors. I thank the Salvos, who are an ever-present lifeline. I thank the churches, the clubs and the trade unions, who showed just how important the trade union movement is to the people of South-East Queensland. I thank the businesses, the Ipswich Business Enterprise Centre, the chamber of commerce in Ipswich and the Somerset Region Business Alliance for their wonderful support, particularly to the people of Blair.

I represent most of the city of Ipswich and all of the Somerset region—the Brisbane Valley and old Kilcoy shire. I have the Somerset Dam and the Wivenhoe Dam in my electorate. The floods in South-East Queensland were worse for the people of the Brisbane Valley—far higher in terms of the levels of floods and the damage that was done—than was the 1974 flood. The people of Ipswich suffered far worse. In 1974, there were 74,000 people living in Ipswich, and 1,500 homes were inundated. In 2011, there are 170,000 people living in Ipswich, and 3,000 homes have been inundated and hundreds of businesses destroyed. In the Somerset region, 470 properties have been inundated. Over 700 streets in Ipswich were inundated with water. For the people of the upper Somerset the flood continues. Bridges are gone. Dozens and dozens of people are living in circumstances where they need choppers or boats to bring in food and household possessions up at Mount Stanley and other places—there are dozens and dozens of people.

I particularly thank David Greenwood and River 94.9, the local radio station that around the clock served the people of Ipswich, the Brisbane Valley, Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley. It is by far the most listened to radio station, where you have David, Moffy, Goldie, Dave and Tanya—these are names that people across the South-East Queensland area know—and they did a fantastic job, sleeping at the radio station because they were cut off, as all the parts of my electorate were. Country towns and suburbs in Ipswich were cut off by water. There were 1,500 people staying in evacuation centres in Ipswich, and there were hundreds and hundreds in places like Lowood, Fernvale, Kilcoy and Toogoolawah.

Across the electorate of Blair the mud is still there putrefied, and the silt is still there. You can see from the faces of people that they are still reliving the events of 11, 12 and 13 January. Countless farms have had the topsoil ripped off them. Farms have lost 40 per cent of their farmland due to the rapid release of the water from the Wivenhoe Dam and the rivers gouging through the farmlands. Three schools in the Somerset and four in Ipswich were inundated. At Brassall State School, every computer, every piece of paper and every teaching aid was lost. Every building was inundated, and three have gone. At Ipswich East Primary School, a school of 520 students, 40 per cent of the children had their homes inundated. Their school was inundated. At Bundamba State School, every school building was inundated. Near Bundamba State School is Ipswich Basketball Stadium. It is trashed. It will cost about $800,000 to repair that basketball stadium in Ipswich, and the Ipswich Force women’s and men’s teams play in the state league just below the WNBL and the NBL. You cannot now play basketball in a stadium in Ipswich, one of the major cities in Queensland.

The Salvation Army corps, the biggest church in Bundamba was trashed. The evacuation and recovery centre at Bundamba was trashed. But still the Salvos kept on going—1,700 people registered, 15 volunteers a day, and they still kept on providing assistance to the people of Ipswich. Clubs such as the Karalee Tornadoes Junior Rugby League Club, the Ipswich Dog Obedience Club and so many others across the whole region were inundated and destroyed. So many country towns were cut off—places such as Rosewood and Kilcoy. Every community was isolated. Water, food, power, electricity, gas and shelter were crucial to avoiding civilisation breaking down. We teetered on the brink of lawlessness in some of these communities. There were many failures, and I am thoroughly furious at the lack of communication, coordination and consultation. The people of my electorate were let down, I have to say, at every level of government.

But I thank the Prime Minister and the ministry for listening to my incessant and insistent phone calls all day and night. I thank the Queensland Premier for the wonderful leadership she showed. I thank the mayors for the leadership they showed. The impact was disproportionately inflicted upon the poor, the weak, the frail, the aged, the infirm and the young. This was our Hurricane Katrina in my area. The hard-pressed suburbs like Basin Pocket, Brassall, Booval, East Ipswich, and Bundamba were hit hardest. Those people, in large part, were left to fend for themselves. They needed people to advocate for them. I saw the discriminatory application of resources to leafy suburbs in Brisbane. Do you think I am furious about it? I absolutely am, because eventually we got the help we needed. But we did not get it quickly enough, and those people suffered.

I said, in my first speech after being re-elected, that I would argue, advocate and even annoy people for the people of Blair. I guarantee that I fulfilled that in the last few weeks, because we needed to. We failed repeatedly in terms of emergency services at the level of local disaster management groups and even at the federal level. We came good eventually through Centrelink and through the application of the ADF. We are so appreciative of the wonderful work that was done, but I need to say this, because people need to hear it: the people in my electorate are really angry. I went to a community meeting in Fernvale last Saturday. People were absolutely furious at the lack of drainage and consultation. The waters were allowed out. They were given very little notice indeed. Some people in my electorate had five minutes notice before their houses were inundated. They fled to schools. They broke into schools to get away from the water. It was not like Brisbane, where they had days of preparation; the water just came rushing down—the volume of water was more, in fact, than the whole of Sydney Harbour—destroying, gouging and affecting people day by day.

The cost to the electorate of Blair will be more than $1 billion. Ipswich City Council says that it will cost more than $300 million. Even the Brisbane City Council, neighbouring us, says it will cost them $500 million. Blair contains the Somerset region, bigger than Ipswich and Brisbane combined. The damage bill for that area will be enormous.

I have spoken of the many people who have been injured but there are many people of inspiration—people who put their lives on hold to staff evacuation centres and, of their own initiative, established evacuation centres when local disaster management groups simply failed. In places like Karalee, Esk, Fernvale, One Mile, Riverview, North Ipswich community leaders—school principals, a local councillor, a police officer, an emergency service worker, a rural fire brigade leader—got together and formed evacuation centres. Sometimes these people were left without food and water for days. This is the reality.

But for the kindness of Dick Karreman, a philanthropist who runs an excavation business in Redlands and up in the Brisbane valley, the people of the Wivenhoe Pocket would have been left without food and water for four days. It is simply not good enough in Australia in the 21st century. This happened despite the fact that I repeatedly raised this issue with the people in emergency management.

I want to thank the heroes of Blair. I want to thank so many people. So many are anonymous. So many are compassionate and humane. I want to name just a few and tell the House what they have said. I want to congratulate Arie van den Ende, the SES coordinator in Ipswich. Arie is a brilliant bloke. He worked around the clock with magnificent men and women to help us. I want to thank him very much, and sincerely, for the work he did.

I want to thank St Johns Ambulance Superintendent Robyn Rossi and her offsider Corporal Pat Roach. Robyn said: ‘Our job was to treat the wounded. The first 72 hours were horrendous. I think we never slept. I had to set up Ripley, another evacuation centre.’ Seven hundred people were treated by St Johns Ambulance, including the residents of four nursing homes. Robyn said, ‘I guess we’ve never been privileged to see the people of Ipswich at their most vulnerable—to save the community in a different way.’

Former Deputy Mayor Denise Hanley was always there at the Ipswich evacuation centre at the showgrounds. She was there on her feet all the time, with a cheerful smile giving to people whatever she could and helping anyone in need. Majors Bruce and Margaret Dobbie and Brad Strong from the Salvation Army at Ipswich and Bundamba did wonderful work. I will never forget the Salvos. Councillor Cheryl Bromage from the Ipswich City Council had to deal with the death of her own uncle, Robert Bromage, who died driving his car into floodwater near Karrabin, seven kilometres from the CBD in Ipswich, but she still had time to set up and run an evacuation centre at St Joseph’s Catholic primary school in North Ipswich, after working to the wee hours of the morning to warn people of the floodwaters coming down. When asked about it, Cheryl said, ‘It’s the Ipswich spirit; you’ve just got to get on with it.’

The wonderful women of Riverview set up the evacuation centre at Riverview. Mysteriously, magically and stupidly someone wanted to close it down. That centre fed hundreds of people. Dozens and dozens of people stayed there. People walked there when faced with floodwaters and people like Kerry Silver, Christine MacDonald and Pastor Paulo Paulo and his wife Lorinda, a registered nurse, looked after them. I also want to thank the Ipswich GP Super Clinic. The Ipswich GP Super Clinic tended the evacuation centre at Ipswich showground, beside it. When I rang the clinic up Dr Simon Barnett went down to Riverview to look after the people.

I want to thank also an honorary Ipswichian who is my very good friend, the member for Rankin, Minister for Trade. His performance and that of his staff were simply wonderful in the way they helped the people of Ipswich. I sincerely thank you, Craig, for the wonderful work you did. I will never forget it as long as I live.

Peter Doyle is the principal of Brassall State School. His school was left covered with silt, garbage and driftwood. An army of volunteers came around—parents, teachers, RAAF, workers. QBuild was magnificent, repairing this school and all the others, so they got started. Peter said this:

The whole community’s devastated.

And then he said defiantly and deliberately:

We soldier on because we’re Brassall boys and girls.

And Pastor Mark Edwards, of Ipswich Region Community Church, opened his church as an evacuation centre and delayed the marriage of his daughter Gabrielle for a week, and tended the frail of three nursing homes in Ipswich. Liz Bailey is the principal of Patrick Estate State School, which was entirely destroyed. And while her school was being destroyed, she was trapped in Esk in her home. She took strangers into her home. She had never met them before; she took them in and they stayed with her. And all the while she was organising the evacuation centre at Esk State School. These are just a few of the many heroes of Blair. The Ipswich Ministers Fellowship president, Fred Muys—he is the pastor of Harvest Rain church—said this about the people of Ipswich and the Brisbane Valley:

Neighbours who didn’t know each other before have banded together to help each other.

Some years are etched in the memory of the people who live in Ipswich: 1893, 1974 and 2011—floods of horror and heartache; floods that damage and destroy. They did not defeat them; they could not because the people are resolute, stoic and determined. We will recover. We will repair. We will rebuild. I have never been more proud to say I was born in Ipswich, I was bred in Ipswich and I live in Ipswich.

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