Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a really important bill for the people of the Hawkesbury, who have just been through a one-in-50 flood and they have experienced damage unlike anything that has been seen before in the Hawkesbury. Why it's so important is because, while many homes have been inundated, around 40 homes were completely destroyed by the flood, around 100 were severely impacted, another 100 were moderately impacted and then still another couple of hundred suffered some sort of damage or loss to the home or the property. What schedule 4 focuses on is the disaster recovery grants that are made to primary producers and small businesses.

It's a really interesting thing when you talk to your community during a flood. What I found is that every homeowner who has suffered damage has said to me, 'Oh, but at least I didn't lose my income or my business.' And, every small business or agriculture producer has said to me, 'Well, at least I didn't lose my home.' There are some people who have lost both, but, by and large, people are just grateful that they have something left.

The ability to earn an income and to get your business back up and running after a natural disaster is so fundamental to your recovery. In 2013 when my house burnt down in the Blue Mountains bushfires, my business was based at home. I'd closed my Sydney offices when ADSL became available, relocated to the Blue Mountains and employed local people in the Blue Mountains to help me in my business. But, with a home based business, when your home goes you lose your business too. What was the saving grace for me was knowing that I had been at work as the fires approached and I had in my car—my one car that didn't get burnt—my training bag that I used to run my training sessions. So I was able to start my business back up. The house burnt down on a Thursday, and on the Monday I was back with clients. I did realise when I got back to the training room that the dress I was wearing on the day the house burnt down still smelt of smoke. But that was the least of my worries, knowing I could get back to business.

What we're seeing in the Hawkesbury is people haven't yet been able to back to generating an income from their business. Most of them are still on hold, and it's now nearly 10 weeks since the floods. The grants, though, that they're receiving and that are covered by this schedule are absolutely vital for them. For primary producers, it's up to $75,000. For other small businesses, it's $50,000. There are some businesses that you would think would fall under the primary producer category, like some of the pastoral properties that have been destroyed. Those working with horses may not qualify for the primary production grant, but they will potentially qualify for the small business grant. There are a lot of grey areas, and I'll talk about those later. I'm very pleased to see that, for those people who do qualify for these grants, they will be able to receive those grants as non-assessable income, so they will not have to pay tax on the grants as they won't be subject to income tax.

These grants are fairly small in the scheme of things for some primary producers, and I'm going to paint a bit of a picture to illustrate that. The turf growers are the single biggest group of people in the Hawkesbury who've been affected. The larger turf properties might have lost $5 million worth of turf that was just about to be cut and rolled. It might not have been that much, but they may be carrying large debt. They may have been funding another property they'd just bought, assuming they would have a steady cash flow. The amount of money they tell me they have to spend to get their property back to being a place where they can actually produce turf down the track can be as much as $200,000. It is coming into winter, so it's not the ideal time to be planting new turf and they know that their cash flow is very severely damaged. These grants don't support cash flow. There's nothing that will support the cash flow of a business after a natural disaster. What these grants will do is cover costs to help get the business get back on track. They will cover things like payment for tradespeople to come and do safety inspections. They might need equipment and materials for cleaning up or to hire a cleaner to assist with post-flood clean-up.

When you're cleaning up a turf property, you need a lot of cleaners, a lot of people on the ground going around, metre by metre, picking up and trying to salvage what's there. Most of the turf growers have found that a lot of stuff that isn't theirs has come onto their land. People have been making an effort to return things to their original owners, but the clean-up has been enormous. These grants also cover equipment and materials essential for immediately resuming operations. That might be something like a pump that's floated away down the river. These grants also cover removal and disposal of damaged goods and materials, repairing premises and internal fittings, leasing temporary premises if needed, hiring equipment or replacing stock. They can be really big-ticket items. The same sorts of things apply to small business and to primary production grants. The primary production costs obviously are going to go way beyond the $75,000 that's available. I have spoken to the people at Turf Australia, who have done an incredible job of advocating for their growers. They have been working with government, with me and the minister for emergency management, to make sure the immediate needs were able to be covered. Some of the hardest hit are the newer ones with large debt. They might have lost 30 to 40 per cent of their crops and might have lost 12 months of income.

The feedback from this is great. They're really pleased they don't have to pay tax. I have to say they didn't expect they would have to pay tax on the grant money anyway, and finding out they don't have to was done to a pretty short time line and they are grateful. One of the things that is significant is it doesn't affect just the turf growers. There are also the vegetable growers. I'm disappointed that New South Wales government has taken some time to reach out to a lot of the market gardeners. There is a big cohort who are a Chinese-speaking market gardeners and there have not been materials available for them to even understand what is available. It has taken some time, and I believe those resources are now hitting the ground. But this group is still way behind in their recovery because those things were not in place, so many of them had not yet even applied for support.

The way a lot of primary producers access support is by seeking help from the Rural Financial Counselling Service, which, again, deserves medals for the work it did in the weeks immediately following the floods, working with primary producers and small businesses to access these very grants we are talking about in this legislation. But there still are people who have not got around to accessing them and part of the reason is the Rural Financial Counselling Service is just a couple of people normally based in the Central West. Because of the bushfires, they were given a licence to support bushfire-affected people and that has been extended to flood-affected people, as it should be. They are gold and their ability to help farmers and vegetable producers work through complex application processes is the difference between a market gardener going, 'You know what, this is just too hard. I have so many things to cope with. I am not sure this is worth the small initial amount of money I will get,' to going, 'Yes, okay, I am going to do this because every bit helps.' We really should be supporting the Rural Financial Counselling Service to have even greater numbers on the ground, fast, after a flood or natural disaster.

The other business group I want to talk about, who would benefit by this legislation if they apply for a grant, are the caravan park owners. These are the van parks, more than two dozen of them, along the Hawkesbury River. They have a few permanent vans usually allowed but most of them are weekenders for people who love water skiing who come to these places and they have their van. This is part of the Hawkesbury culture—you may not live too far down the road but you may have your caravan and all the things that have grown up around it. As I speak to this group, they are so profoundly affected by this flood. None I have spoken to have been able to really get operational. Some have a small number of sites that were less flood-affected.

One of the biggest van parks is the Sackville ski park. I spoke to Shane there this week. Shane is still struggling to put together all the things that need to be done to even apply for these grants. He has to get scope of works, he has to talk to electricians and plumbers, get quotes for things, and they are big structural jobs. The $50,000 that the owner of his park is eligible to apply for won't not even touch the surface of what is needed there. I should point out the owners of the vans themselves are not eligible for any of this assistance. The amount of support for homeowners or van owners is very minimal; $1,000 is all those people have been able to access in government support. People have said: 'They have a home or they have a van beside the river; this is what they should expect.' What we need to make sure is that they get sufficient advice, accurate information and preparation, not just a few days before a flood, but a long time before. We can make these communities more resilient and that would be where the special assistance fund that is available—that the government hasn't accessed yet—would be really useful. It is a floodplain. We know there will be more floods. We don't know when, we don't know how high, we hope it will be not as high as the one we saw this time but we know it will come.

I was speaking with Elizabeth at Riverside Gardens and with Rachel at Percy's place. In one case, they had not had any of this grant come through. They are grateful it will not be taxed but it has not turned up yet. In the other case, they have not even got around to applying for it because, when you go through a trauma, paperwork becomes an even harder thing to do than at the best of times. They have seen massive holes in their river banks, huge gulfs—like massive, giant sinkholes the size of a two-story house, carved out like a horseshoe—on their land. They're struggling with how to come back from that. The state government has not been able to get its agencies together and come up with: here's the way forward for everybody who has suffered massive riverbank damage. I have to say, the small amount of money that these grants provide, $75,000 or $50,000, is not going to be able to be used at all to tackle that river bank damage. It's massive. One business told me that the initial quote they got for just one of the big sinkholes that appeared when things were washed away was $300,000. So I think I will be coming and asking the government to do more than these grants, once we get costings on what people are up for.

But we really need—it's 10 weeks on—the state government to pull it finger out and give these businesses and landowners a plan—a way forward. They're operating in a vacuum. They are being threatened with fines for noncompliance if they do it the wrong way, yet they're not being told, 'Here's what you can do.' They're still operating under the pre-flood rules, which don't cater at all for the sort of damage they're seeing.

So while schedule 4 in this legislation is, absolutely, something that I'm very pleased to be able to speak to, I think the parliament needs to know the level of loss, trauma and anxiety that people in the Hawkesbury who have been flood affected are suffering. It's not just that it has been a one-off flood; they had a flood a year ago. Some had only just got fences back up from that flood, especially properties in the Macdonald Valley, when this latest one came through. Also, many of these areas suffered months of smoke in the bushfires, and that came on the back of drought. So you've got the cumulative effects and the pressure on their finances of drought, bushfire, flood, COVID and then massive flood. So to have these grants tax-free is great, but I have to say there is much more that we need to do.

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