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

There is no income—absolutely not. They are exhausted by trying to treat their surviving dairy cows daily, and, needless to say, the dairy cows are not eating. As you would imagine, they too have been traumatised. There have been 30,000 sheep killed or injured—bear in mind that only two-thirds of the farms’ losses have been surveyed—and 330,000 chickens killed. One intensive chicken farm had seven trucks full of drowned birds to take to a local landfill, and thousands of beehives have been washed away. Someone said to me ‘that’s cute’, and I thought to myself, ‘They have no idea—beehives are not about honey; they are about honey in some circumstances, but they are in fact the pollinators of the entire crops of the Goulburn-Murray valleys and all of the almonds along the Murray River and around Mildura. The beehives between Laanecoorie and the Murray River have been washed away. That is thousands of beehives, and they cannot be replaced in the short term without very substantial financial support. For a while, we had to argue with Rural Finance in Victoria, who said, ‘Bees aren’t livestock.’ So we have lost the bees as well.

There are the most amazing stories—I am sure you have heard them from many other members and senators too—describing the heroism and the courage of the families and communities who saved one another. Very often they talk about the SES, the CFA, the defence forces and the police, and I acknowledge also those agencies and volunteers who helped in our towns—towns like Rochester. Rochester is on the Campaspe River, and they should have been told virtually to the centimetre and to the hour when the peak of the flood was coming down to their town. Their town also includes one of the biggest dairy manufacturing centres in Victoria, Murray Goulburn Cooperative, which is right on the banks of the Campaspe River. They were told to expect only a moderate flood on the Friday evening, so they made—if you like—moderate preparations. But by about 2 am on Saturday night, they found that they had the highest flood on record ripping through the town and their milk dairy processing factory.

They had had no warning, but the response of the community in that town was nothing short of miraculous and mind-blowing. The local channel constructors, who had all the gear, took charge of looking after sandbagging and levee management. No-one in that town, even the most recent of the newcomers, was alone; their houses were sandbagged, and, when the floods went through, their houses were cleaned and stripped bare of wet carpets and soggy furniture. The shops, which to a large extent were inundated, were cleaned out by gangs of community workers. One woman who has a quilting shop and who had most of her fabrics standing on the floors, as you do, anticipated that when she got into her shop from where she lives out of town she would be looking at a sodden ruin. But other people in the town, knowing that she did not live in the town, had entered her shop and shifted all of her fabrics, and she did not lose a thing. It was that sort of voluntary activity that saved the people of Rochester from the harm that they might otherwise have experienced. The Army helped by taking the aged residents out of the town in the back of trucks, and some went out with the fire brigade to be evacuated to Echuca and other places.

It was a magnificent community effort, and I commend people in towns such as Rochester, Bridgewater, Serpentine, Boort, Pyramid Hill and Korong Vale. All those little towns put in that magnificent effort, but forgive me for focusing on the farms, because they are the forgotten ones. I have not heard our Prime Minister talk about the farms. What would you do if there was no CFA, no SES, no police, no Army and no warning, and it was just you, your family, your workers—if you had some around—and your neighbours who could still get to you? The amazing thing was how often neighbours got to each other through water over their tractor wheels to bring in equipment and how they managed to put up new or better levies or to breach channel banks so they could save piggeries and dairies. It was a stunning effort.

I have to say that we are still neglecting the farms. It is not enough to say, ‘Too bad that your Exceptional Circumstances payments in this area are going to run out on 30 March and it’s all over because you’ve no longer got drought.’ Well, we sure as hell have exceptional circumstances right now: it is the worst flood on record. I am begging the federal government to announce, right now, the continuation of Exceptional Circumstances support for these people. Otherwise, how are they to buy food to put on the table? Thirteen weeks of income replacement is 13 weeks. They are going to need much, much longer than 13 weeks. Low-interest loans are fine at $200,000, but if you have no sense how your $1 million loan from the drought can be met then that makes it very difficult. These are very highly productive properties, but they are properties that at the moment look like a moonscape. Their fences look like they have been making hay along them—they are completely festooned with dry matter, with the remnants of crops pushed against them. Some fences are still standing; most are gone. In fact we have lost, as I said, 4,000 kilometres of fencing on two-thirds of the properties. There are some volunteers out there, but there are not many cameras, you see. There is not much media out there. They are very tiny districts, and the Prime Minister does not get out to these places, so we do not have the numbers of volunteers from other places that we need for help.

I am trying to put on the national record the fact that floods affect cities, and that is a tragedy; they affect towns, and that is very tragic; but they also affect farms, and farms do not have the numbers of people there to assist, but the impact of floods is just the same. The devastation is just the same; in fact, it can be worse. I had farmers tell me how they watched their sheep stand in water in full wool for two days before they drowned. Sheep can only stand for two days, then they fall over. Some dairy farmers had to walk their cows in full milk for seven hours to be milked. They were doing their best. We have got to do our best to help them.

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