Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of my electorate of Murray in northern Victoria, I acknowledge the tragic deaths and the widespread devastation in all states, it would seem, as a consequence of recent natural disasters—the floods, cyclones and fires. I also acknowledge the two-year anniversary of the Black Saturday fires in Victoria. The legacy of these fires is still very much in the hearts and minds of the families who were burnt out and the families where members were killed. That very tragic event should have taught us a lot about how to deal with suffering. Unfortunately, a lot of those lessons have not yet been learned.

Our land is a place of ‘drought and flooding rains’, of fires and killer winds. We all know Dorothea Mackellar’s poem , or at least those of us who had to recite it many years ago at school know it. This poem mirrors the reality of the Australian landscape and the Australian seasons. Australia is a land of great differences. We are also a land that has a deeply ingrained set of beliefs which value and encourage self-help and which has volunteering at its core. Self-help and volunteering are not just a part of our culture and highly esteemed. Self-help is essential when there is a natural disaster and you are a very long way from anyone or anywhere else; where there are no cameras or nearby Defence Force; when there is not an SES, a fire brigade or, indeed, a police station; and when the flood-warning communication systems fail, or were never in place.

In my electorate we have had seven years of drought—a very, very devastating time for most families; we have lost half of our dairy farms, for example—and we were so pleased to have warm, gentle rains which gave us the best crops on record some seven or eight months ago. We thought that the drought was over—here was a bumper season.

And then of course the rains kept coming—and that was not until the locusts had had their way, of course, with a lot of these bumper crops. But then the rains kept coming so we had the first of our floods back in September in the Goulburn Valley in particular and in the top of the Goulburn Valley. Then we had more rains again in the Goulburn Valley. But in 2011 it was the Campaspe area, the Loddon Valley, across the Wimmera and parts of the Mallee that had the most devastating rainfall and flood events in the history of European settlement.

I have to say that that flood legacy is still as bad as it was when it occurred some three weeks ago. It distresses me every time our Prime Minister stands up in this place or in the public media somewhere else and talks about the devastation in Queensland—which I acknowledge was distressing, heartrending and just terrible for the nation and for Queenslanders with all of those deaths, a tragic time—but fails to mention Victoria. As we speak, in Victoria I have thousands of families who have no way of living. Their farms are completely devastated. There is no fodder, no grass. Their houses have also been inundated of course and they have massive losses of livestock. And they have just, as I have said, come through seven years of drought so their financial, emotional and physical resources were already at rock bottom. So when they are forgotten by the Prime Minister it does hurt them. I have just been talking to some members of the government to remind them, please, do not overlook all of those communities that are continuing to suffer.

We had one death in these floods in Victoria in my electorate—tragically, a young boy who fell into the floodwaters of the Goulburn River at a billabong and was lost despite his brothers trying to throw sticks to rescue him. One death of course is one death too many, so I can imagine how those Queensland communities feel with their many, many more deaths. But in my electorate it is a case of livestock deaths, environmental damage, family hopes destroyed and, at the moment, very little sense of the future.

I began a moment ago by referring to the fact that you need to have early warning systems in place and, where they are not in place, it is extremely difficult. How, for example, do you know what is happening if all you get is a phone call from your local federal member? I rang on the Saturday saying to my people on the Loddon River, ‘I know that you have not heard from anyone else but you have a tsunami, metres of water coming down the Loddon River.’ They said: ‘The sky is blue. The sun is shining. The rain occurred two days ago. It was the heaviest rainfall on record and we are wet, but it is okay.’ I was saying to them: ‘No, you have not been warned. There is no system to warn you, but I know because I have been talking to people upstream at Durham Ox, to Chris Harrison, and he is right now putting all of his belongings in his shearing shed’—and in our part of the world these sheds are six feet off the ground so the stock can go underneath—‘and he is hoping to rescue some of his things. But the water is coming down very fast.’

Those farmers along the Loddon River, around Canary Island, Fernihurst, around Durham Ox, and further downstream around Lake Leaghur should have had text messaging. They should have had systems which said, ‘There is a wall of water coming down upon you. You only have hours to get out of there with your lives.’ These people were not able to assess whether they had time to rescue their livestock or their belongings, their lifetime memories, or to put their things into sheds, or whether they should simply try to get out in a four-wheel-drive. Or at this stage maybe some of them could only make it on a four-wheel-drive motorbike, all that was possible to get them up the gravel roads to the nearest bitumen some 19 or 20 kilometres away.

In the east of my electorate, in the Goulburn Valley, we are very lucky as we have text messaging and excellent telemetry. We have all sorts of gauging systems in the Goulburn, the Broken and the Seven Creeks systems and we had excellent information for the September floods. We were told within centimetres and within hours of when the peaks were to occur, and the information was so accurate. You have to ask why, therefore, in the far west of the electorate communities just as dependent on that information—in fact, are even more critically dependent on information to move livestock because there were further distances to travel—had virtually no information available for them. The Bureau of Meteorology websites had not been updated for 12 hours. There was a breakdown in their phone landlines; they could not ring each other because of the congestion and telephone exchanges going underwater. The only thing they still had working were mobile phones—and no-one was texting them.

I am pleased that the Premier of Victoria, Hon. Ted Baillieu, has announced a very comprehensive review of flood warnings and emergency responses to the severe flooding across Victoria because he has had so many complaints about the failures in the system. We cannot say that the Loddon Valley was overlooked because the streams there are ephemeral. No, they are not; they are irrigation and regulated streams. And at the top of the Loddon River there is both the Cairn Curran and the Laanecoorie reservoirs. Part of the reason we had this tsunami coming down on these farms without warning was that those two reservoirs were spilling at rates never seen before. Why weren’t these people downstream told by Goulburn-Murray Water or by Coliban Water or by their local catchment management authority that this was what was happening literally hundreds of kilometres up basin from where they were? That information was not transferred to them.

I was told by the Bureau of Meteorology, which I was ringing desperately to try to get them to start telling people what was going on through their website: ‘Look, we don’t know ourselves. We actually heard about some of those dreadful flood risings through your local farmers ringing talkback radio. We picked it up on talkback radio. That is where we heard about the floods.’ This is our Bureau of Meteorology. Another person ringing the Bureau of Meteorology begging for more information about rainfall events and river levels was told, ‘We have other priorities.’

I think this is a time when we have to look very, very seriously at why it is in this modern age of telemetry—where our irrigation systems all through this part of the world are automatically managed through telemetry—when you have an event as severe and catastrophic as this, that people were not being told what was going on unless someone knew of them and made them a personal phone call.

What we are looking at now in northern Victoria on the farmlands is catastrophe; it is environmentally a disaster, with the blackwater now ponded up against every roadway and every channel. We have huge losses of livestock. I will go through some of those losses. This is in my electorate and spilling over into the electorate of Mallee next door. The Department of Primary Industries is now auditing the losses on farms in northern Victoria. So far they have checked 2,800 farms. They have another 900 farms to go. So this data is only for about two-thirds of the numbers who are in fact very seriously affected and for whom this disaster will go on not for weeks or months but for years.

They have lost 4,100 kilometres of farm fencing; 133,150 hectares of grazing pasture was totally destroyed, and that included some of the best dryland lucerne anyone had ever seen and grown; 76,909 hectares of field crops are gone, and that includes most of the state’s tomatoes; and a massive loss of 123,200 tonnes of hay and silage. Bear in mind that all of that had been harvested and manufactured up at great expense. Also lost was 5,245 tonnes of stored grain, and 500 mainly dairy cows. For anyone who knows the value of dairy cows you will be able to do a quick sum and see that that is a very substantial loss. But many more dairy cows are still missing or are injured. Of those dairy cows who have survived, because they could not be milked on time and some of them not milked for days, mastitis is a huge problem. We cannot get hold of all the veterinary supplies needed for that mastitis treatment. It is an animal welfare issue. It is a serious problem for the owners and managers of those dairy cows—

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