Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to associate myself with the motion of the Prime Minister yesterday. I think, as it affected her, this issue affected all who have been in this parliament, especially those of us who have been on the ground in the flood, cyclone or fire areas. The people of Bundaberg have lived through something which has not been seen there for 69 years. Back in 1942 the Burnett River broke its banks. This time it did the same and it reached 7.95 metres, flooding homes, farms and businesses around Bundaberg.

The signs were there all along that Bundaberg and its outlying communities would be hit by the rising floodwaters, but in the lead-up to Christmas and the festive season it seemed that most people were unaware of the crisis that was about to hit them. Heavy rainfall in the catchment area in the weeks leading up to Christmas pushed the Paradise Dam to full capacity. The rain kept coming, and, after the cyclone event crossed the Queensland coast on Christmas morning, it became clear as the rain depression developed that there was going to be heavy rainfall in the catchment of the Burnett River.

By December 27, communities west and south of Bundaberg were bracing for flooding, and the next day floodwaters infiltrated Bundaberg’s near CBD areas. People were rescued from vehicles in the CBD area and we were warned to expect fast-rising waters and major flooding in the town area. When the Burnett peaked at 7.95 metres on December 29, around 200 homes and 120 businesses had been inundated and around 400 people had been evacuated—some of whom did not have a chance to rescue valuables or sentimental items.

Marine businesses on the banks of the river were swallowed up whole by the waters, houses were flooded so that only their roofs were visible and businesses and low-lying areas of the city were awash. Around the nation people watched as the ‘rum city’ succumbed to the river. Like local residents they were stunned that such insidious events could befall the city in such a short time. Bundaberg Regional Council and our local emergency services excelled themselves in warning residents, organising evacuations and preparing flood prone areas for the deluge. The respite centres that they set up and the marking of roadways to be closed was done very efficiently and expertly. But even the best laid plans can never outmanoeuvre a mass of water determined to reach the sea.

I would like to pay tribute to the district disaster management group led by Superintendent Rowan Bond and the local disaster management group led by David Batt. Our mayor was on holidays in London and was having trouble getting home, and David, who is a councillor and a policeman, deputised for her and did a marvellous job. I also acknowledge the district management officer, Mal Churchill, an ex police inspector; the council’s executive officer on the committee, John Clerke; the Red Cross; the CWA; and church welfare agencies. They certainly did a remarkable job.

On that point, the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government and Minister for the Arts, who just finished his speech, made an interesting point about flood mitigation. Four or five years ago the then Bundaberg City Council, the precursor to the current regional council, sent out a flood report to every citizen in a low-lying area of the city. Let me say it was not popular. It was not popular with a lot of people. It was seen by some to be alarmist and others saw it as perhaps devaluing their properties. But let me tell you that the people who got those letters knew the truth of it when this flood descended, and a number of people in flood areas said to me how better prepared they were as a result of what the council did four or five years ago.

As the floodwaters slowly dropped over the following days, the astounding cost to the community was revealed. Commercial fishing businesses, seafood processors, Bundaberg slipways and marina facilities were destroyed by the rushing waters and masses of debris that were washed downstream. The city’s premier netball and cricket grounds were devastated, a state-of-the-art disability playground was inundated and businesses and low-lying parts of the CBD had metres of water through their premises. Only days later—this was another irony—the river peaked again. The catchment of the Burnett River goes north and south, and the southern branch of that, called Barambah Creek, which comes from the peanut-growing area of South Burnett, also had a mass of water which came down the Burnett. So we had a second peak, not quite as bad as the first, but still enough to inundate a number of those homes and businesses again.

There could be few things more dispiriting than helplessly watching your pride and joy go under water and knowing that it could happen again and again. It is a test of endurance and faith. It takes a special sort of resilience to come back and recover treasured memories and other hard-earned assets. Other parts of my electorate were also hit hard—roads cut and crops ruined. I went out with the minister and the state roads minister and looked at some of the roads. Some of the washouts would absolutely terrify you. Some of them were the width of the road, 10 or 12 feet across, and burrowed out down to perhaps another 10 feet deep. There were washouts of about three by four metres, which would be in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair.

The financial aspects of the flood were simply devastating to our local economy with cane, horticulture, fishing and tourism industries all affected. Having spoken about those dreadful things, let me say something about the spirit of resilience that we saw in my electorate, similar to that in Brisbane where people just turned up and helped. Steve Cooper, who owns the home hardware store in Bundaberg, tells this great story. He went under. He lost $1.6 million worth of stock, as I understand it, and the flood went right through his place to at least two metres. He told me that 75 people came to help. Some were friends; some were passers-by. I said, ‘How did you know there were 75?’ He said, ‘Well, I got the Lions Club to come down and do a barbeque for them and they served 75 meals.’ So that gives you an idea of the generosity of some people.

In dollar terms, it looks like Bundaberg’s cane industry has lost around 2,000 hectares, worth about $30 million. In the Isis—that is the Childers area—it will be about $11 million. That is $41 million worth of cane from the district. At least $10 million has been stripped from the region’s horticulture sector—tomatoes, capsicum, zucchini, rockmelon, watermelon, pumpkin and sweet potatoes all damaged or destroyed.

One of the worst things about the flood is that, although cane on the undulating ground sometimes gets away with it, when you are on a river flat and the water is over your crop for a number of days, the crop rots. I know one case where two-thirds of a tomato crop went and I know that a lot of the cane that has survived will not have the same sugar content when we finally get it to the crush later in the year. The prolonged wet also means that replanting on some of these crops cannot be undertaken until you can get into the field.

On another note, the port of Bundaberg is very important for the export of sugar and molasses. So much silt was carried down the river that it closed the port. It is going to take six or seven weeks, when the dredges eventually get there, to get that port back to order. That means that all that sugar in those huge sugar sheds cannot be exported. That becomes another anxiety for farmers who are tied up with forward payments.

Four seafood processors were badly damaged. People in the river cannot get flood insurance. They can get through when there is a fresh in the river or a minor flood but when there is one of these one-in-75-year floods or one-in-100-year floods they are just devastated. I would like to talk about that shortly. The local marina was totally washed away, including the fuel facility for most of the trawlers on the east coast of Australia. That means that there will be quite a problem restoring the fishing industry in the area.

In all of these things, of course, the human dimension is the most important. We all have in our minds that image of Jordan Rice telling rescuers to take his little brother first. We have other images in our minds, especially of people being swept away in Grantham. Some of the devastation in Toowoomba, Grantham and, more recently as a result of the cyclones, in Cardwell and Tully would make your stomach churn. Whole streets were devastated. Houses were washed off their blocks. In some instances even modern houses were washed off their concrete foundations. I have never seen the like of it.

Those things are certainly important and we should focus on them but now I am going to become critical. I am not going to be critical in any partisan sense, although I suppose some things, in the end, sheet back to the state and federal governments. There are river industries like the fish processing works that service the trawlers that come in. In particular, ASP Holdings lost its big catwalk that goes down onto the river—$200,000 or $300,000 worth. Its fuel facility went under 1½ or two metres of water. That cannot be restored by a grant of $25,000 or even a loan of $250,000. If you have trawlers and pleasure craft you need a slipway. The slipway went under three times in that flooding incident. As I just said, the marina owned by Ray Foley was totally obliterated and the fuel facility—one of the busiest on the east coast of Australia for servicing trawlers—was washed downstream. When you take those types of industries together you see that the whole marine and fishing industries become vulnerable. That involves 120 full-time jobs and during the scallop season up to 275 women come in and work three, four or five hours a day shucking scallops. That is a supplement to their incomes.

I am saying to the government that what we have on offer is not enough. Those industries should be given a grant of about $100,000 and ready access to the $250,000 grants. In fact, those grants are not as good as the ones available after Cyclone Larry. In Cyclone Larry the limit was half a million dollars and you could get a grant equivalent to 25 per cent of your loan, to a maximum of $50,000. So when we say that we will do everything possible within our means to help and we do not do quite as much as we did after Cyclone Larry, only five years ago, then people become cynical.

As I said, the crops are sodden, waterlogged. I believe—and the minister alluded to this in his speech—that we should have replanting grants, with perhaps one-third coming from the state, one-third from the federal government and one-third from the grower, to get crops back in, be they cane crops, small crops or tree crops. The trouble with tree crops is that once their feet have been wet for a while—especially citrus, avocados, lychees and those sorts of things—you can lose part of your orchard very readily. In the case of citrus trees, if mud gets on the leaves the trees cannot breathe. The leaves die and drop off and the trees die. So I think cropping grants are necessary.

In places like Innisfail in special circumstances and with the agreement of the growers and the unions, I think the equivalent of the dole payment should be paid to the farmers to keep their existing workforce in place, with the farmer topping up the dole to a full salary level. I understand this has been tried before. In that way you keep the skilled labour on the farms, you give the worker a full salary rather than just a dole payment and you keep the expertise in the area. If there are no jobs and there is nothing to hold people then they drift off. For some of these agricultural industries having skilled people is almost the most important thing.

Let me talk about roads. Again I want to be critical. I know the government has to find somewhere the $5.6 billion for its program of restoration. Our position on the levy is well known. I would like to talk about the $1 billion worth of infrastructure. In Queensland, $325 million of that $1 billion worth of infrastructure is coming from roadworks and flood mitigation works—most of it along the Bruce Highway. For the life of me I cannot follow that, because the one systemic failure along the east coast flood area and cyclone area was the failure of the Bruce Highway. Yet we are taking $325 million plus a bit of flood mitigation away from that area. I would have thought that it was almost critical—absolutely essential—that that stay there.

In the member for Flynn’s electorate, close to my area, $65 million worth of that would have gone to works just north of Gin Gin. I hear that the member of Herbert has similar difficulties. As I have said, I am not saying these things to be partisan; I am saying that I do not feel that they correspond with logic. If the Bruce Highway goes under again later in this cyclone season or next year, we are going to have this game over and over again.

I want to talk about QR—Queensland Rail. Fruit and vegetable wholesalers came to see me and said: ‘Can you do something with QR? They will not give us trains to bring supplies up to Bundaberg and backload fruit and vegetables out.’ As well as being one of the biggest salad bowls in Australia and growing all of those crops I described before, Bundaberg also brings other small crops in and distributes them to places like Biggenden, Gayndah, Mundubbera, Eidsvold, Monto, Biloela, right up to Rockhampton, through that North Burnett-Central Queensland area. It is a great distribution point for fruit and vegetables, and you have to get the stuff into town.

I usually do not interfere in state matters, but I did in this instance. I rang up QR. The attitude was, ‘We prefer to service Bundaberg by truck.’ It is fair enough for short-haul stuff that the railways use trucks rather than trains in normal operational circumstances. But I said: ‘You say use trucks, but Gympie and Maryborough, south of Bundaberg, are both underwater. What trucks? No trucks are coming up and down the Bruce Highway.’ ‘Oh well, we might be able to do it,’ they told the fruit and vegetable wholesalers, ‘if you would guarantee us 40 wagons.’ In an emergency, why would you put a limit of 40 wagons on it? Anyway, neither of those things occurred. They could have occurred but then the rail went under for a short time. It reopened later and they did send a dry goods train to Bundaberg, but believe it or not they could not find any refrigerated wagons to take fruit and vegetables, which was part of the need of the exercise.

That is simply not good enough. It is a state facility. It seems they could not break out of their normal mindset to do it. I said to one guy: ‘How much worse has it got to get? There are people dying, there are roads closed, the Bruce Highway is not functioning. You’ve got the only train line into Bundaberg and you’re not going to shift anything.’ In fact, it got to the point where we had to have two RAAF Hercules bringing supplies into Bundaberg. The RAAF had to be used for a city of 55,000 people. I found that totally and utterly bewildering and I ask the state government and QR to have another look at this. Everyone else around Australia was responding to this great tragedy, and our local railway was still reading from the rule book. We have to be more flexible when these sorts of things happen.

Finally, I want to talk about flood mitigation. The Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government, Simon Crean, has just spoken about this so I will not go over it all again, except to add one feature. In addition to those sorts of things like levies and adjustments to drainage, which are very important and proved to be so in Bundaberg in this recent flood, we have not really come to terms with removing housing from flood prone areas. The same houses go under over and over again. Some of them have been going under for 130 years. I just throw this possibility on the table: with bipartisan support make available for 25 years $25 million a year, or perhaps even $50 million a year—say it is $25 million a year for 25 years, that is $625 million and if it is $50 million a year over 25 years, it is about $1.25 billion; not big money on a year-to-year basis—to give councils the ability to do things like go to a street and say: ‘Look, if you’re prepared to put your houses up on stilts, higher blocks, you can get a grant of $50,000 or $100,000 toward that process. Or we will buy you out and turn that area into parkland. We’ll buy it at a commercial rate so you can shift to another area.’ If we did that in all of those flood prone areas in places like Ipswich and Bundaberg and Maryborough and Rockhampton, sure we will not get to all of them, but at least over 25 years you would be making an impact. We will get other storms like this and other cyclones and floods and people will be put at risk again and we will go through the clean-up of houses again. Let us make a start and when we get to a good year where there is a surplus then we could always add a few more million to the cake.

I would like to end on a positive note and thank all of those people who have worked so generously. I thank the ministers and the shadow ministers who came to Bundaberg, the Prime Minister, the Premier, the Hon. Simon Crean, both the state and federal leaders of the opposition and the shadow minister for agriculture. All of these people came and offered valuable assistance. What we must ensure is that, having moved on from the hand-on-the-heart ‘we are going to help you’ stuff, we start to act in a timely fashion.

In my closing comments let me be a little bit critical again. Twelve months ago we had a flood circumstance in Queensland and a number of shires and councils were declared. Bundaberg Regional Council, for example, was in for $13 million, with North Burnett $600,000 or $700,000. When this flood event hit 10½ months later none of those grants had been paid. We are still waiting for the flood payments from what is now close to 12 months ago—it was 10½ months ago when this flood circumstance hit. So it is important that we act in a timely fashion. If these councils are going to have to wait for another 12 months to get the net tranche of work, just imagine what the Bruce Highway and all of those other areas that have been flooded are going to be like. Already in parts of the Bruce Highway there are patches on top of patches. I am not exaggerating; that is not just some flippant comment. There is physically one lot of bitumen that has been laid to fix up a hole, breaking up with another lot of bitumen on top of that and sometimes a third lot on top of that. We have to rebuild these roads and rebuild them properly. I thank the House for its indulgence.

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