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

On indulgence, I also would like to make a statement on Australian natural disasters. We have always been the land of drought and flooding rains. If you have lived in Australia for more than a holiday you will understand this. Add fires, cyclones and the very occasional earthquake, and we do have more than our fair share of natural disasters in this country. Fortunately, in the form of our volunteering we also have an enormous spirit in responding to these natural disasters. We do not just expect the government or the defence forces to come to the aid of those who have been inundated or burnt. We pull together as smaller or larger communities and literally help ourselves, with the support sooner or later of those who have a professional capacity to help. I think it is one of the amazing strengths of our Australian society that these very often unsung heroes come out again and again as the disasters occur year after year, as was the case with the floods in Queensland. During those floods people in very high risk areas were inundated for sometimes the third or fourth time. Again and again the same people come out to help them to mop up and start again.

In my particular part of Australia, we have a broad set of flat plains. Given our average rainfall of about 15 inches you would not expect that we would be inundated with floods. They have always been a fairly rare event, but over the past two years we have had extraordinary flooding rains. Before our flooding rains, which we have just commemorated—not celebrated, but commemorated—as they occurred one year ago and two years ago almost to the day, in the first weeks of March, we had the worst drought on record, some seven years of heartbreak, when we saw more than 50 per cent of our dairy farms forced to sell their water in order to survive financially. You can imagine that in an area like ours, which is dependent on irrigated agriculture, once you have sold your water you are no longer productive as a dairy farmer enterprise. And of course hanging off our dairy farming are our jobs in food manufacturing, transport and all the other logistical activities that make food manufacturing one of the biggest employers in the country.

Drought first of all occurred in my area as a natural disaster. It was a slow insidious drought that sapped the financial, physical and emotional strength of our families. Then, literally within weeks we saw the worst floods on record in those same formerly drought stricken areas.

Two years ago almost to the day the floods swept across what we call our northern plains. There was a tsunami of water moving from the south to the north pushing before it the fodder and the fences. There was an extraordinary loss of over $2 billion in both private and public infrastructure and assets. Those people, all in tiny communities—the biggest often had only about 2,000 people, some of which are districts and not towns at all—pulled together, saved lives, saved livestock and helped one another to recover by sharing farm equipment. We had farmers walk their dairy cows for seven hours to someone else's dairy, which had not been flooded. The cows stayed there literally for months while the original dairy could be put back into action. We had some loss of life later on when some tragedies occurred as people tried to clean up. In one very tragic circumstance one man fell into a fire he was making from the debris on his farm fences.

But, in the far west of the electorate of Murray, the community's spirit has been extraordinary. I want to reflect on the small town of Bridgewater, which is on the Loddon River. That town was completely inundated, to a depth of over several metres. Their caravan park was washed away and their shops were completely put out of action. You can imagine the distress in the town, given it is a very old, historic place. But I was there just a week ago, and it was like a phoenix risen from the ashes—or, rather, from the mud. That town is now celebrating a new bakery. It has had a huge influx of newcomers, who are going to the bowling club and celebrating the beauty of the town and its recovery from the flood. I have to commend the spirit of that community, who have fought back bravely and strongly. Of course, the Loddon Shire has supported them all the way.

Just 12 months ago we had the flood to the east of the electorate, over what we will call the Goulburn and Murray valleys. These floods occurred particularly in the shire of Moira, where 70 per cent of the entire shire area was devastated. It is the home of some of the best fruit and dairy production in Australia, so you can imagine the impact of these floodwaters not just moving across the country but then settling and staying for six and seven months in some places on what was highly productive land.

Twelve months after this devastating flood in, for example, the Moira shire, in March 2013, 70 per cent of the repair of roads, bridges and other infrastructure is still not completed. The March 2012 floodwaters destroyed, for example, the Numurkah Hospital. Twelve months on, that hospital has only just moved out of tents into an interim, temporary building. This temporary centre only opened a few months ago. For nearly 12 months this community, of 5,000 people in the town and many hundreds more farm families in the surrounding area, had its community health centre, its hospital, operating out of tents. I am not talking about Bangladesh or Pakistan; this is northern Victoria, only three hours drive from Melbourne. That community was expected to look after its sick, its elderly and its children, using tents, and that is what they did. They need $18.3 million to rebuild their hospital, which was devastated by the floodwaters. I want to commend the chief executive of the hospital, Jacqui Phillips. She has been magnificent. In particular, she has been so patient. We have to do better when we have flood devastated infrastructure as vital as a hospital. That $18. 3 million is, of course, a lot in a state which inherited a lot of Labor debt, but you have to look at priorities sometimes. That town has to have its hospital replaced some time very soon.

Floods do not just inundate and destroy; they also cause road closures. Some individuals from Numurkah, Nathalia, Katamatite, Tungamah and other small places simply could not travel to work along the closed roads to centres like Shepparton, Cobram and Yarrawonga for weeks. Often, small businesses could not afford to pay individuals during their absence from work. In some cases individuals were required to use their holiday time. All of the community, well beyond those whose houses or farms were flooded, bore the brunt of this natural disaster. I commend those who were so stoic about this situation, who spent their time when they literally could not get up the road to go to work helping their neighbours—mopping out homes, pulling out rotting furniture, trying to make safe animals that were stranded and comforting the very elderly. I want to commend those communities, whose strength was extraordinary. They now have legends which I am sure will be passed on to other generations, about the amazing saves that occurred; the extraordinary metal flood barrier that was built in Nathalia, behind hundreds of thousands of sandbags; and the young children, the SES, the CFA, the Red Cross and other community groups who manned and patrolled that flood wall day after day, daring it to overtop. As I said, tragically the western region of the Murray electorate had its experience of the flood two years before; in the east of the electorate it was one year ago—all following that seven years of the worst drought on record.

I want to talk about how we can help in the longer term, because we have a problem with, for example, the flood loans that were offered. These natural disaster loans were made available from the federal government via the Rural Finance Corporation of Victoria, who did their very best. But, if you have already had seven years of drought, obviously your farms and your small businesses have had their equity eroded, they have been going deeper into debt; so, when a government offer loans of up to $200,000 at some 3.2 per cent interest, they are very attractive, but unfortunately they are unavailable to many of the people who wish to borrow—they have had their equity eroded too far. Yet, with a break, these properties could be back being viable dairy farms, orchards or small businesses.

So I think we have to understand a bit more about the context in which loans are offered by the federal government, that we are going to be looking at a community of smallbusiness people and farmers whose equity is going to be very low but whose capacity to fight back, given a break, will be quite substantial—given the demand for food, the quality of their properties, the quality of their soils, the climate, what remains of their infrastructure, and their skills and expertise. In my area there was only $5.78 million lent to some 44 individuals in the shire of Moira, the city of Greater Shepparton and parts of Indigo. While 81 per cent of all the loans that were applied for were approved—54 were processed—and that may sound a good figure, so many of the people who came to my office and looked at the criteria just walked away sadly saying, 'We're not going to be eligible for these loans, given the erosion of our equity', and sadly those farms did need that support very much.

I am also very concerned about the exceptional circumstances drought support, which we have had for many years in Australia. It, of course, kept literally thousands of my farmers during the seven years of drought with food on the table. They were not able to make enough for their children to have even basic things like new school uniforms, or to go on school excursions—and they could certainly not take holidays. So the exceptional circumstances support, which gave them the equivalent of the Newstart allowance plus an interest rates subsidy, was an essential part of keeping numbers of our dairy farmers in business so our economies of scale could be maintained, which in turn of course kept our food factories in place, with all of the employment consequences.

Once we started to hear of a new regime of exceptional circumstances that Labor is proposing, you can imagine a lot of people sucked in their breath to see what might be proposed. I am not convinced that the new response to natural disasters that has been put on the table is adequate to deal with the situation where we are not looking at how to deal with prospective climate change but at when a natural disaster occurs suddenly. Whether it is fire or flood, and you have a devastating situation with a lot of loss, whether it is livestock, infrastructure or even lives, you do need an emergency response, you do need more than a low-interest loan which you cannot apply for because your equity has been eroded. So I am asking for this government to understand that there are extraordinary circumstances often in Australia, with low-interest loans not necessarily being the best way to provide support in the longer term. Rather, we need to be looking at how, in my part of the world in particular, we can better build our infrastructure—our rail and roads, which held up the water. The Goulburn-Murray Water Authority's infrastructure had not been built with the capacity to manage these floods. In fact, we know that the floods that occurred just two weeks ago again led to the inundation of the Shepparton East area, where Goulburn-Murray Water Authority channels seem to still be a problem in relation to of local flooding. We have to look at that infrastructure and how it can be better managed or built to withstand flooding, especially when we are told the new legislation related to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is to put another 420 gigalitres down the Murray and Goulburn rivers in my part of the world with the deliberate intention of further flooding.

In finishing my remarks about natural disaster, I want to make the point that we are not responding sufficiently in my part of the world to fires. We have just heard from the member for Wannon about the devastating fires in his part of Victoria and we are very sympathetic for the loss that occurred in that Western District and in the beautiful areas around Stawell and Halls Gap and so on.

In my part of the world we have not had a history of bushfires because we had a lot of irrigation channels to intercept any fires such as grass fires or overland fires. We do not have that much mountainous country. But just after Christmas we had serious fires in the Violet Town area in the Shire of Strathbogie. The area does have quite inaccessible rough and steep and hilly country. That really drew to the attention of our local fire brigades, volunteers, Red Cross, our professional firefighters and to all of us the fact that you must have access to firefighting helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. They were the key to our being able to fight these fires in this very inaccessible country. The fact that those planes cannot fly after dark is a problem. I do not know how we surmount that. Fires that were being controlled during the daylight hours simply took control again after dark when the planes stopped dumping their loads of water.

The other problem with inaccessible country was that with a lot of these farm properties we were trying to send fire trucks in where the farm tracks and the farm creek crossings simply could not take the vehicles. We need to have better information for fighting fires in these areas. That means surveillance between fire seasons and information gathering so that we do not have loss of life or people or their equipment put at jeopardy because no-one quite knows the terrain or where the access tracks, fences, bridges and culverts are. I want to commend the Shire of Strathbogie, the local firefighters and volunteers who fed the firefighters, and the farm owners themselves who did everything they could to protect their own and their neighbours' properties. Fortunately there was no loss of life there.

There is a serious problem in Victoria. We have the world's biggest red gum forest in the shape of Barmah Forest which is a high-risk area. It is so fire prone that the local country fire authority refuses to go in there should there be a fire. They argue that there have not been sufficient cold burns. There are no longer cattle grazing in the Barmah Forest so there is nothing to reduce the fire load other than cold burns. These are not being carried out. The tracks into the forest are now overgrown. Trees have fallen on them. If you should send in firefighters on the ground in trucks, their lives would be seriously in jeopardy. That is why local firefighting brigades say that, until the state does the job and cleans up the forest and makes sure that there are proper fire access tracks, they are not going to risk the lives of their members.

Even more than that, we have a stupid situation where South Australia and New South Wales have a ban on any fires being lit in public areas, outdoors, state parks and state forests between the months of December and March through the fire summer season. Victoria, which has even more at risk country—especially along the Murray River—only has regulations which say that you cannot light a fire in the open on a total fire ban day. On any day in December, January or February which is not a fire ban day you can light a fire outside, with certain restrictions about the size of that fire. We had 10 unattended fires that our rangers had to put out at Ulupna Island on the Murray River this summer. Those rangers are very concerned that each one of those fires could have spread and burned Australia's biggest red gum forest, enormous numbers of wildlife—particularly a very vulnerable koala community. Yet we have this discrepancy between the regulations governing fire lit in the outdoors between New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. I am calling again on the Victorian government to consider bringing its fire regulations into line with the two other states which border it so that we can have a better chance of controlling outdoor fires during this fire-prone period which occurs in Australia every summer.

I am pleased to make a statement about natural disasters in Australia. Clearly we depend on our volunteers in this country, and they are magnificent. We have seen sad loss of life through our fires in the past in Victoria; we have seen extraordinary loss of assets through flooding, in particular in my part of the northern plains of Victoria; we have also had drought, which has decimated families and left them so in debt that they struggle still to survive; and we have had fires—very happily, with this most recent fire, without loss of life, but I recall the Strathbogie fires of 1989-90, when there was loss of life. I thank the chamber.

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