Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Defence Personnel) Share this | Hansard source

On Friday evening, 25 February, I attended a Raemus Rover racing season launch at Yamanto. That evening I was at a workshop and the pounding, relentless rain made it difficult to hear anything. I kept on getting phone calls from the mayor of Ipswich and the mayor of Somerset. I constantly went back and forth to the meeting. The flood was upon us. The president of the RSL Raemus Rover racing organisation, Ian Baker, and his wife, Justine, were becoming concerned that they wouldn't be able to get back to Karalee. Their homes is on the Brisbane River, with creeks intersecting their street at either end. Karalee is akin to an island, surrounded by the Brisbane River on two sides and the Bremer River on the other.

My electorate of Blair has the Wivenhoe Dam, the Somerset Dam, the Brisbane River, the Bremer River, the Lockyer Creek, the Bundamba Creek and so many others. It's flood central. I drove home that evening through the back blocks of Yamanto, taking a circuitous route to avoid the flooded roads. In my 14-plus years as a federal MP, we have experienced three significant floods. I lived through the 1974 flood in my parents' house. It was eight feet over the roof. My family were evacuated. We saw military vehicles going down the street, providing support, relief and even vaccinations later on, which might be news to the minister for emergency management, who claimed the ADF hadn't been involved in such a domestic disaster even 20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. In 2011 and 2013, it flooded again in our area. This is the fourth major flood in my lifetime.

On 25 February, disaster struck Coolana, a small community in the Somerset region of Blair. Merryl Dray, a 62-year-old SES volunteer, along with three other SES personnel, responded to a call from a local family. The family needed evacuation as floodwaters rose around them. On the way, the SES vehicle was swept off the road. The four occupants were able to climb out, but tragically Merryl was swept away. She was beloved by the Lowood SES group and by her family and her friends. She was well trained, with more than 520 hours of experience over 4½ years of service. This was a sad reminder of the dangers our emergency services personnel face every time they head out. My condolences go to Merryl's family—her immediate family, her extended family and her SES family—and all the SES volunteers around South-East Queensland, so many of whom knew her.

I want to thank our SES volunteers, our emergency services personnel, frontline workers, the police, the ADF, the rural fire brigades, the RSLs, the faith based organisations who helped out, the chambers of commerce and the small businesses who helped out—those clubs, unions and so many others who helped out to help people recover and to protect and serve the communities they love. It has been a difficult few years for frontline workers, with two years of uncertainty and disturbance as a result of COVID.

We got another rain bomb, as the Queensland Premier said. It hit South-East Queensland. In three days, we got over 80 percent of our annual rainfall. Intense rainfall broke riverbanks and claimed 13 lives in South-East Queensland. Homes, livelihoods and farms were destroyed. In my electorate, areas were cut off. Karana Downs and Mount Crosby are the only two Brisbane suburbs in my electorate. It is normal for the low-lying Colleges Crossing to flood, but the water normally recedes pretty quickly. They were cut off. They call themselves 'Crosby Island' and the rest of Australia 'the mainland'. They were cut off. All the ways for them to get out, all the bridges, were cut off everywhere. So for three days they were without food being delivered and they were cut off from any sort of medical treatment. I will come to that in a minute.

I want to congratulate Colleges Crossing medical practice and doctors Cath Hester and Tony Bayliss, who arranged emergency medical supply drops and kept the community and so many others informed. Vicky Mills of Karana Downs set up a food distribution centre. Like so many others, such as Councillor Cheryl Gaedtke in Somerset, Arthur Needham helped me in terms of information every day. I was cut off in Ipswich central and couldn't get out to many of these places. All these country towns in my electorate in the Somerset region were cut off. Arthur Needham kept me—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:09 to 17:17

I want to thank the councillors and the council staff of the Ipswich City Council and the Somerset Regional Council. I want to thank, also, Mayor Graeme Lehmann and CEO Andrew Johnson of the Somerset Regional Council for keeping me apprised of what's going on in detail. I also thank Councillor Kate Kunzelmann for her regular updates from the Ipswich City Council.

The Somerset council gets cut off, and I want to praise the Somerset council for learning from mistakes made back in 2011. The Somerset council did a fantastic job, in my view, of building back better—building bridges and making roads better. So I want to thank them very much, because that's what you should be doing: building back better. They made sure that their infrastructure was better when they replaced and improved it after the 2011 flood. It was obvious in 2013 and even more obvious this time.

I also want to say thank you to some of the councillors up there in the Somerset council—who lead their communities, by the way—for making sure that people were cared for. I thank the RSLs up there and the Toogoolawah Show Society, who looked after people. The RSL in Kilcoy did a fantastic job.

There were problems. There was a situation where about 60 people were trapped by floods, east of the D'Aguilar Highway, east of Kilcoy, east of Kilcoy Creek, and there were issues in relation to that. These are lessons to be learned.

I want to thank longstanding principal Di Pedersen of the Mount Tarampa State School, who looked after about 12 other people there for three days during that time. After about three days, Di thought: 'We're running out of food from the tuckshop. We'd better call for help.' And she did a mighty job, by the way.

Ipswich had stranded residents in Karalee, and I know there are people in Karalee who feel they were forgotten. There are things that could have been done better, and there are many grievances people have about what went on. There was a slow response at times in terms of communication.

I want to thank Lyn Birnie and Marie Kavanagh for their great work in getting the school hall at Karalee open to the public as a place of refuge. I want to give great praise to Dave Cullen for keeping people informed, on radio. River 949 radio and West Bremer Radio did a fantastic job in keeping people informed. We had lots of hard-hit suburbs—hundreds of houses in places like Bundamba, North Booval, East Ipswich, Brassall, North Ipswich, Moores Pocket, Basin Pocket and so many other places. I visited many areas, and I walked the streets providing advice, support and care.

I want to thank my staff, too, who did a great job during the floods helping people living with the trauma they are going through. I'm still amazed by the people I met who were cleaning out their homes and dumping treasured items, photo albums and furniture, people like Francis Togia, at Diane Court in North Booval, or Lorraine Dunn and Kevin Enright, at Christine Court, also in North Booval. While Francis was busy preparing to rebuild his kids' bedroom under his house, Lorraine and Kevin, aged in their 70s and 80s, were not coming back, and that's what has happened for a lot of people—they're not coming back. For businesspeople in the heart of Ipswich, we've got issues in Marsden Parade, Limestone Street and Brisbane Street. We've got people like Noel and Janet Roberts, who have relocated their Ace Computer World over to Yamanto from Ipswich. We have issues there, and the council needs to have a look at that. There are flood issues, and it took a long time for people to get help.

I want to thank some local heroes, and there are so many of them: Bruce Robertson, for the great work he did at Brassall State School as principal, leading that community that was inundated, with one building almost destroyed, rebuilding to do and sewage in the playgrounds. I met 25-year-old Jordan Smith, who was doorknocking flood affected people in North Ipswich. I'd heard all about him. He was helping flood affected people, delivering sandwiches and water, helping people move heavy items and checking on their welfare. He'd been flooded when he was living in Rockhampton. He wanted to do his bit. Troy Dixon in North Booval did the same, driving around, providing food and drinks, supplying drinks on his front lawn, providing his laundry facilities for flood affected neighbours and offering a place to sleep for those who couldn't sleep in their homes. Troy and his neighbour Anna spent their entire pay cheques on food and drinks, while the public started dropping off items for them to help their neighbours. Troy was amazed that, even when people had lost everything, they kept on smiling. These are great heroes. They are fantastic people. There are so many I could name, but they're just a few. There are a lot of things we can learn.

I want to thank the Services Australia staff, but the flood eligibility when it comes to 'adversely affected' is too restrictive. The amounts need to be increased. The delivery of services needs to be quicker. The ADF need to be applied more quickly in my community. The Ipswich City Council needs to do better in terms of road closure signs, and why we only had one flood evacuation centre in Ipswich, at the showgrounds, is beyond me when you could have multiple centres in the Somerset region. We had multiple centres in the 2011 floods.

There are lots of things we can do better, but at every level of government this is the time to rebuild and support people. There is a time and place for review, and for hard questions of all of us, at every level of government, as to how we can improve situations, including voluntary buybacks in places. I thank the community who backed it, the clubs like the Karalee Tornadoes Rugby League Club, the Norths Tigers Rugby League Club and the Ipswich Knights Soccer Club. All of them, and so many others, were affected. We're with you, and we're going to back you and help you to recover.

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