Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome this opportunity to address the situation that has emerged in the context of these terrible disasters beyond the scale of anything we have ever seen and it is, I guess, a concession that should be made that on disasters of this scale we do need to learn lessons and some things that may have been unforeseen need to be addressed. But there are so many things that have been so glaringly obvious about the failures of addressing this disaster that they do need to be highlighted if we are to move forward at all. Just to put it in context, in Eden-Monaro we saw over a million hectares burnt. That is greater than the entire extent of the damage in the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, larger than the famous Amazon fires recently, larger than the Californian wildfires of 2018, all just within the borders of Eden-Monaro. Associated with that too, we lost over 1,000 homes across the LGAs in Eden-Monaro and close to around 9,000 livestock. I guess when you stick out that raw number of 9,000 livestock, it doesn't mean a lot to people. But if you are a farmer—I have lived on dairy farms with my family—and you have go out there and see an animal that is suffering from terrible burn injuries and then have to go through the trauma of euthanizing them—putting them down—and having to do it on a large scale and then dealing with the corpses, it is traumatic stuff. One farmer from out Batlow way was telling us the other day how his kids had to be involved in that too. Because these animals were suffering so much, they didn't have time to waste. He was in tears when he was telling me this story. So the trauma and the tragedy out there has been just enormous. It certainly has been a big awakening about the future we all face if we done do something seriously about climate change and that is something that we can talk more about.

We are now talking about the recovery phase and how we deal with that scale of damage, disaster, destruction. I have travelled all around Eden-Monaro meeting with chambers of commerce in Jindabyne, Merimbula, Eden talking to business communities, attending community meetings in Tumbarumba and it has been a common disturbing theme out there that the measures meant to have been put in place to help particularly small businesses haven't been. Some of these chambers of commerce have actually surveyed their members. For example, in Jindabyne they said that 71 per cent of the businesses that had applied for assistance had completely failed and they were mystified by the process. When I was talking to the Narooma Chamber of Commerce members, they were telling me that, looking at the Austrade package of event support, there is this 11-page document they have found absolutely impossible to navigate. When we talk about to assistance allocated to councils, it works out to be around $30,000 per LGA. They estimated that to stage the Narooma Oyster Festival this season is going to cost $85,000 and no business which normally would support that activity can afford to engage in the sponsorship that they usually do. So we have to completely revisit the scale of this assistance to these councils.

I think in the context of some of the other things we have been hearing in the last few days, what has made them particularly angry are things like the story about the $10 million North Sydney pool project, which used regional money. To hear someone from that area saying, 'Yes, but people from the regions sometimes visit and use the pool,' just underlined how ridiculous that situation is. I've seen the Bega District News reporting on the anger of the Mayor of Bega Valley Shire Council, Kristy McBain, who had to deal with those terrible fires at Tathra only a couple of years ago, which destroyed 65 homes, killed animals—no people thankfully—and killed off a lot of businesses. We've just seen On the Perch Bird Park fold at Tathra—the double whammy of the two seasons. Mayor McBain is absolutely livid. In the past she's asked for $5 million to help get them through the infrastructure and repair challenges that they faced, and they weren't granted that money, and then she saw $10 million of regional money go to a North Sydney pool. They've had situations where the disaster recovery money won't cover the loss of infrastructure, like dressing sheds and cemeteries and town halls. The whole scope of that program needs to be revisited. In relation to this North Sydney pool issue, the Bega member, Andrew Constance, who's a Liberal government minister, described it as disgusting. This has to be looked at. We have stolen regional money from shires who are really suffering from the damage of these bushfires, and they're watching this money being frittered away in places where it just should not be.

To go back to the effect on small businesses, I mentioned in questions to the Prime Minister that the Longstocking Brewery would normally be employing 24 to 30 casual staff at this time of the season but is now only employing four. The message we're getting from these businesses all around—because they do mostly employ casual labour based on the seasonal nature of their enterprise—is that these people are leaving town in significant numbers. In a country town, if you lose your job, you have no other option. There are no other jobs to go to and you're forced to leave town, and that creates this vicious cycle: you start to lose numbers and families and kids and then you lose your schoolteachers and maybe then you end up losing your local police officer. So it's a terrible cycle, which we have to intervene now to short circuit.

Of course the Longstocking Brewery is not the only example. I've had feedback, as per the other question I asked the Prime Minister, from the President of the Merimbula Chamber of Commerce, Nigel Ayling. There are 140 members of that chamber. Mr Ayling surveyed them, and 90 responders basically said they got no help from the assistance packages that are out there. He indicated that there are seven businesses that could close in Merimbula within the next 12 months and that there are a further 20 that are on the edge of closing if they don't get some help. He said:

When it comes to government assistance, it's a big fat zero with 100 per cent of respondents saying they have received no government assistance at all.

This is in the face of them losing 60 per cent of their annual turnover. When I met with the Jindabyne Chamber of Commerce they highlighted that 71 per cent of their members couldn't achieve success in their applications and they just didn't understand the process. It was just too hard. This is a message that's emerging all around the region. It underlines the fact that, instead of having these travelling buses moving around only occasionally, we need on the ground in each significant town a small business adviser and a Centrelink representative to help navigate people through these processes. It has to happen. I've had a lot of constituent feedback about how these buses have failed. Someone from Tilba, for example, indicated to me they weren't even aware the bus was coming and, by the time they heard about it, the bus had gone and wasn't coming back. So we need people on the ground for these next few months through to the next summer season at least to help people to navigate this stuff. And those advisers need to feed back to government how those processes need to be adjusted and improved and streamlined to facilitate getting money flowing now.

I know that there is hesitancy in the government because of the political capital that was made during the global financial crisis about so-called cheques to dead people and that sort of thing, but that immediate cash in the hands of people during that crisis saved us from going into a recession. The estimates of the government agencies that were advising us to do it that way were that we were essentially going to have 200,000 people on the streets unemployed, and that didn't happen. This is the issue: that money needs to be landing in the streets right now. If it doesn't happen right now, it's going to be too late. I know there is caution around this and you want to put accountability mechanisms in place, but there is this double mechanism now of things going from the federal to the state government and buck-passing that's going on. Minister Barilaro is saying this is unacceptable. The buck-passing has got to stop and the buck has got to land on the ground for the people that really need this to happen.

I would beg the government to take a good, hard look at how this is working. There are shamrock measures that are being taken, where we've got a shingle on the door saying 'Bushfire Recovery Agency' and then we find there is actually no agency, and then we find there is no appropriation for the $2 billion that we've heard has been allocated. It has got to start happening now. The government has got to get off the dime. If there are issues with the New South Wales government, sort them out. In my community, this is burning holes in the government. The fires have finished but there is one fire still burning—a fire of anger, and I am not exaggerating.

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