Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker Windsor. As this is the first time I have seen you in the chair, I wish you well and hope that you are enjoying yourself in that illustrious spot. I rise to speak about recent natural disasters, because over the summer I have had three natural disasters occur in the electorate of Wannon: three significant and major bushfires.

We started off with a large fire at Drik Drik down between Dartmoor and Nelson. This was a large bushfire which had to be brought under control using fixed-wing aircraft and CFA, DSC and SES crews. It was a major operation and everyone involved did a sensational job, first, to contain this fire in what was a large area. Much of the area where the fire was burning is inaccessible, yet through backburning everyone was able to mount a huge effort to ensure that the fire did not do significant damage. The major damage it did do was to get into a pine plantation where the bill will probably run into millions of dollars, which shows you the significance of being able to bring these types of fires under control quickly.

We also had the Chepstowe-Carngham fire occur in the electorate of Wannon. This was a completely different fire. This was in farmland. The fire occurred at a rapid rate of knots. It burnt 1,300 hectares of farmland. Nine houses, sadly, were destroyed and it left farms and native forests charred. It also led, as we have seen once again, to great community spirit. Once the fire was finished, once it was over, the community got together and worked out what they needed to do to help those who were impacted.

It was a telling reminder for me as I drove down to fly to Canberra yesterday. As I was driving by in over 30-degree heat in the middle of the day, there were local community members fixing the charred fences which they had removed. There they were on a public holiday Monday putting those fences back together, all volunteering their time to do it for a farmer who had had all the fences destroyed. It is what country communities are all about and it was just very, very humbling to see these people going about their work, chipping in for their local community.

The other fire—and this is a more recent fire that we have had in Wannon—is the one which occurred in the Grampians. Again, this was a significant bushfire. It could have caused extensive damage. It very nearly led to houses being burnt to the ground. It very nearly meant that we saw large portions of farmland destroyed. Once again, the CFA, DSE and the SES did a wonderful job in bringing this fire under control.

Some of the stories of how they did that are quite remarkable. At some stage the fire was sweeping down hills faster than the fire trucks could go. Usually, CFA members will tell you, fires travel quicker uphill than down hills, but in this case, given the steepness of some the country and the ferocity of the wind, this was not the case and the fire was actually moving at a rapid rate down the hills. This gave a new challenge to those that were fighting it.

The fire has been contained and, once again, the use of fixed-wing aircraft was very important in doing this. I must commend everyone involved in making sure that we had air crews to throw at fires as well as ground crews.

There is one important point would like to make about all these three fires. This is something that, as lawmakers, we will have to look at seriously. All of these three fires occurred in areas which are mobile black spots—that is, when the fires occurred, community members could not be informed of what was going on quickly by mobile phone and they could not communicate to the outside world what was occurring by mobile phone. One of the great technology uses we now have is the ability for CFA and DSE to alert communities through text to those areas which are potentially being threatened by bushfires. The trouble in these areas was there was no ability to do that because they were in mobile phone black spots. If we are to get serious about warning communities, if we are to get serious about making sure our emergency response services have all the tools available to them then we are going to have to look at mobile phone coverage. This is a real issue. I will just run through some of the areas in my electorate which are mobile phone black spots: Landsborough, Moonambel, Victoria Valley—where the Grampians fire was—Nareen, Tarrayoukyan, Carisbrooke, the outskirts of Marysborough—a town of 9,000 or 10,000 people, Bealiba, Marino, Digby, north of Casterton, Cape Bridgewater, significant areas around Balmoral and Harrow. These are all parts of my electorate which are still lacking proper mobile phone coverage.

As we look at this, we are going to have to ask ourselves: if we are going to have a proper emergency response to disasters, is there an obligation for us to look at mobile phone coverage? Is there an obligation for us to make sure that the government contributes to providing mobile phone coverage in areas where the commercial facts mean that the commercial providers will not do this? They will not do it without some sort of government assistance. I think down the track as we see mobile phone coverage spread and the importance of mobile phones not only as a provider of phone coverage but also as a provider of data and a provider of broadband services, we are going to need government to seriously ask these questions.

We have a universal service obligation for fixed line telecommunications. Do we now need to look at whether we would want a universal services obligation for the provision of mobile phone coverage? We probably do not have the finances to be able to do this at the moment but this is something that we are going to have to put on the agenda because these communities are missing out on this important technology. When it comes, in particular, to emergency services management, this tool is becoming more and more important. If there is a lesson from my electorate about the three natural disasters which occurred over this summer, it is that we need to look seriously at mobile phone coverage and whether the federal government is doing enough to play its part in warning these communities of the potential of natural disasters. We have to remember it can be a split-second thing which can save property and save lives. If we cannot get the message out to communities that there is the potential for a natural disaster to hit them quickly and rapidly, we put those communities a greater risk of being impacted severely by these natural disasters.

I will leave it there. On behalf of all the communities in Wannon I would like to place on the record my sincere thanks for the efforts of the CFA, both those who are paid and those who are volunteers, the DSC, the SES, the police and everyone else who was involved in making sure that these fires were contained and eventually put out. I would like to pass on my sincere sadness for those who had their homes burnt, who lost everything in the Chepstowe-Carngham fire. For those farmers who have had their livelihoods impacted on I would like to sincerely thank the VFF and the local branches, who organised to have fences repaired and have the damage done to farms fixed so that those farmers could get on, and, hopefully, once we get rain, see their livelihoods get back on an even keel. Natural disasters have occurred across our nation since time immemorial. They are going to continue to occur. But as we advance as a society we have to make sure we use every tool we can to deal with them.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to join everyone else that has spoken on this motion on the national disasters over the past few months. I wish to offer my sincere thanks and admiration to the people of Australia who have been affected by these natural disasters, but also those that have not and have made a wonderful effort to help those in need.

It is interesting to have listened to the member for Murray's contribution, and it reminds me of the words of Dorothea Mackellar's poem My Country. It goes, in part:

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I think, given the events of the past two or three months, that is very relevant. It is certainly a country that has had many extremes: from the bushfires in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia to the drenching rains, the wild winds and the severe flooding unleashed on the eastern seaboard—not just once, but several times. Australians have definitely dealt with a range of natural challenges which have tested our resilience and resolve. For some people, the clean-up is a harsh reality, especially for those still rebuilding their lives following similar events in 2011. Once again, they have experienced the treacheries and trials of natural disasters and they have only recently been able to come up for air from the devastation that occurred previously. Many that we have spoken to have not yet even managed to complete renovations, repairs, replacements or relocations. They have yet again had to deal with the unpredictability of torrential summer rains. Following these recent events, particularly around Bundaberg and the Fraser Coast, people have still not been able to re-enter their homes or even to salvage what they can of their lifelong possessions. This in itself, I am assured, is most devastating.

We were fortunate once again in my electorate. Whilst there were widespread outages for our electricity et cetera, by and large we were spared the devastation of further up the coast and in the Logan, Albert and Coomera rivers. At last count, there were only some 15 houses that were inundated—some partially but some substantially—and the people in those places have lost almost all of their goods and possessions.

But through all of these fires, storms and floods, it is always heartening to watch that spirit of mateship—an unwritten Aussie code of conduct—that emanates across the country; whether it is Victorians heading to Tasmania or Tasmanians flying to Queensland to help out one disaster after another and to repay the favour of lending a hand to a mate when he is in dire straits. After recent floods in my electorate of Forde, which were some three inches or so below the 1991 flood—which was the last major flood that we had—I visited the Logan River Tree Farm, where they had at least 1½ metres of floodwaters through their mature tree nursery. When I visited, Ailsa Thompson and her staff were working frantically hand washing the leaves and stems of hundreds of trees with the few hoses they had. They were desperately trying to save seven years of hard work, which included the recovery from the 2011 floods.

My thanks go to the local council and the local fire station. After we contacted them and made them aware of the situation, they were able to make available a number of high-pressure water appliances to help make the job easier, particularly given that the trees were reasonably mature and on large concrete pads. Their main work was to clean the mud off those concrete pads to make access to the trees easier. My thanks also go to local councillor Jennie Breen for her effort in putting together a working bee, which was very well received by a number of people in our community, but there remains much work to be done.

As I said earlier, some 14 properties were affected by the floods and, in many cases, houses were also left without power for up to five days. One major piece of infrastructure that, fortunately, on this occasion was not damaged beyond repair—although it was significantly damaged in 2011—was the John Muntz Causeway at Upper Coomera. Fortunately, we have been able to reopen that piece of road, but it is operating on only one lane, as it has been since 2011. Thankfully, the federal government, out of the natural disaster relief funding, is contributing along with the state government to the replacement of that causeway. The result will be significantly better than what is currently there.

I remember the 1974 floods at my home in Waterford. It was interesting to see the current floods and note how much bigger the 1974 floods were than those we had recently. Thankfully, this year's flood level stayed well below the '74 levels; otherwise there would have been far more devastation. I saw a house that, on this occasion, had a small amount of water go through it, but I remember the effort involved in cleaning that up in 1974, when it was under about three metres of water that covered the roof.

I would like to commend the local councils, both the Gold Coast City Council and the Logan City Council, on the work that they did in trying to notify residents in at-risk areas. Also, as the water receded, they returned to each of these homes to assess the flood impact and offer clean-up assistance to affected homes. As with any of these things, some people were missed along the way, but this has been a great experience for the council to try to improve its processes. My thanks go to the SES, the local state MPs, the councillors and community groups, who were all out in force assisting affected people. I would also like to thank everybody on the Gold Coast weather website, which continued to put up information for people on what was happening around the neighbourhood, and also the people who started the Logan region weather and information page on Facebook. These same people also started a drop-in centre at Park Ridge for people who needed assistance. When people in the community are working together to help provide information to everyone else in the community and let them know what is happening locally, it makes dealing with these events so much easier for everybody involved.

The damage that has occurred during these natural disasters around the country has been phenomenal. Our thoughts go out to those people who have lost income, livelihoods and valuables, not only in my electorate but around the country. We thank the federal government for its support of those people in difficult times and also the various state governments, because they have their own disaster relief arrangements as well.

For those in my electorate of Forde, whilst Logan and the Gold Coast were not declared natural disaster areas for individuals, we have written to the Attorney-General on behalf of people and businesses affected for consideration on an individual basis. We do thank the government for the fact that a number of those people have already been assisted. We must not to forget them just because we are a month or two down the track. These people will take a long time to recover from what they have been through. I encourage people to continue to get behind those who have been through these disasters and assist them in rebuilding their lives.

John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the natural disasters. As I was sitting here a while ago listening to my colleague speak, it struck me that it does not really matter what religion or god you believe in—if you are a farmer, you very definitely believe in Mother Nature. Just lately she has been a very, very tough lady. She can be absolutely wonderful, but just listening I realised that in the last month or so we have had fire, flood and drought all at the same time in our country. As the member for O'Connor will no doubt tell us shortly, we did have and still have very serious drought in WA. In western New South Wales, if you have not had the recent rain, you are still going into it. We have the repetition of floods in central and south-eastern Queensland and south-western Queensland. At the same time we have had fires in northern New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, as we just heard the member for Murray talking about. They are all horrible and they all have an incredible effect.

Strangely enough, the greatest stock losses, and probably the greatest loss of human life, is not normally due to fire, except where you get an incredibly quick one—which you would expect—or to drought, although it can be if it goes on long enough; normally it is flooding that seems to take the most in human life and in stock, I guess because we do not take it as seriously as fire. But, by heaven, in recent years it has caused an enormous loss of life in Queensland and enormous losses in terms of our animals.

On the Friday and Saturday just after the worst of the flooding had subsided in Bundaberg and up in that area, in North Burnett, Banana and Gladstone, I was up there with my leader, Warren Truss, Paul Neville and Kenny O'Dowd, the member for Flynn. In Bundaberg it was quite something. It was a record flood; it was beyond anything ever seen. Two years before it had gone up to just under eight metres. This time it went over nine. It was just an amazing thing. That last metre of water is one heck of a lot of water. When you think how flat it is there, you are talking an unbelievable amount of water. There were something like 2,500 homes inundated, and, if it had not been for the helicopters, undoubtedly people would have been in a lot more trouble than they were. The same thing occurred two or three years before up in central Queensland, and of course a couple of years before, almost to the day, down in the Lockyer Valley. You do not expect Mother Nature to be quite so severe so at times close together in pretty much the same places.

I saw things with dairy through North Burnett and areas up there, where people, for three, four and five days, were unable to milk their cows. For anyone who understands dairies at all—and obviously a lot do not—they are not going to milk again after going out for that time. They go dry and get incredible complications.

One family that we saw there were just at the end of their tether. It was a father and son, and they had an electrician there. He could hook the power up, but they could not make anything work because most of the motors were still under water. They had to hand milk something like 400 cows just to try to relieve them, and that does not work that well—not with today's number of people to do it.

That was a family I really worried about, but they were not the only ones. There were others that had gone for days without milking—others had gone five. One bloke had pigs for 30 or 40 kilometres around. He would get a phone call to say, 'There's a couple of pigs wandering around here—are they yours?' At least they were alive; a lot were not. There were permanent plantings in orchards where there was just nothing there. I am talking about serious citrus trees, and it looked like a desert. It was pretty horrendous stuff.

I think that everyone had to be commended for hooking into it; governments—local, state and federal. I think that, by and large, people did what they could and did the right thing. It got to the point where, particularly up there around north Burnett and further up, they could not even ring. It was mobile country—the standing lines were down. But after a couple of days the mobile towers do not work because their batteries go flat. Embarrassing as it might have been for Telstra, that was the case for quite some time.

Sometimes there is only so much that people can take. At least Emerald, Theodore and those that have been belted twice in a couple of years were spared this time, but Bundaberg and the horticulture there—not to mention the domestic side within the town—certainly had Mother Nature give them some hurry-up over those two or three years.

As I said, the fisheries were totally wiped out two years before; cattle had ended up on North Keppel Island that time, and it is away out on the Great Barrier Reef. Certainly, once again beef cattle, as well as dairy cattle, have been scattered across the countryside. There were people who were missing a thousand cattle. At times like this you wonder why we farmers do it. We deal with flood, fire and drought and, as I said, this particular time it was all happening in our country at the same time.

In my part of the world—I grew up in an area in the Cobar shire—through the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties and into the nineties we had serious fires every 10 years. My electorate, Calare, was pretty lucky with the fires. It did have some small ones, but nothing like in the north of the state and certainly nothing like in Victoria and Tasmania—thank heaven! We had flood last year—Forbes was cut into three—but, once again, not like the sorts of floods that South-East and west Queensland had over the last few years. One would think that that part of the world at least is going to be spared a repetition of it in the near future; these things do seem to even out. But I think we have to take our hats off to the people who have marched through it.

As I said earlier, I think that by and large the right thing has been done by the various levels of government. Certainly, when called upon the armed forces did their job as professionally and competently as they always do when asked to do it. Wherever it happens—not just agriculturally, but in all ways—I think we have to admire the people who shrug and get on with it and who say, 'Next time we'll be luckier.'

Tony Crook (O'Connor, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Natural disasters like those in the Prime Minister's speech and those mentioned today by members in this place have also been affecting Western Australians, particularly in my electorate of O'Connor, where we lost a volunteer firefighter in the Two Peoples Bay bushfire west of Albany last October. Wendy Bearfoot suffered horrific burns to more than 60 per cent of her body when her truck was engulfed by flames caused by a freak wind change and, sadly, she passed away as a result of injuries. 25-year-old Charlene Hordyk was also badly injured with burns to 20 per cent of her body along with five other fellow firefighters.

I take this opportunity to acknowledge the bravery of these Australians who are risking their lives to help protect other people's lives and property. I would also like to offer my sincere condolences to Mrs Bearfoot's family including her husband of 30 years and her three children. To Charlene and the other injured firefighters I wish them a very speedy recovery and thank them for the outstanding contribution they have made to our community.

The Two Peoples Bay fire was only one of several bushfires around my electorate, with other major fires in Esperance on the South Coast, Bremer Bay on the mid-South Coast and Northcliffe last month. In all of the stories that members have contributed to this discussion there is a common theme and that is the remarkable work of emergency services personnel and the thousands of volunteers who support them.

Bushfires are not the only disasters to hit the O'Connor electorate, although they are the dramatic events that catch our attention most vividly and that demand our vigilance. Freak weather events are becoming more common across this vast electorate such as the storm that devastated the small community of Dudinin in the central wheat belt. While the east coast of Australia has been hit by similarly dramatic flood and fire, Western Australians and particularly Western Australian farmers have been suffering the much slower and less striking effects of drought and other unpredictable weather patterns.

I have been contacted by many of these farmers who are currently in dire straits. They have said that this season has been particularly difficult. In some parts of the state it is the culmination of five dry years in a row. Others are experiencing unseasonal rainfall patterns and freak storm events. WA farmers are under some of the most difficult agricultural conditions in the world, which appear to be getting more difficult with changing weather and increasing incidences of natural disaster.

As with all disasters there is one critical factor that enables us as individuals and as communities to prepare in advance, to manage the event while we experience it and to react to a worst-case scenario when it happens. That critical factor is information. Information is the key to working together in difficult situations. Information is the tool that allows us to assess past disasters and to plan for future disasters. The availability of information is a service we rely upon in the modern world to keep in touch with our loved ones, to make sure that they are all right and to check whether they need our help.

Information is critical for emergency services responding to big disaster events. It is also critical for farmers and communities struggling to cope with a series of lesser, progressive events that combine to create a disaster for their lives and livelihoods. Information is important for local governments, for health services including the Royal Flying Doctor Service, for the main roads, for industry, for tourists and travellers, and for people in their homes when these disasters strike. However information is the one thing that the firefighters at Two Peoples Bay were working without.

On 12 October 2012 Wendy Bearfoot and her colleagues were working in an area with limited radio network coverage and no mobile phone reception. There was little or no means of conveying critical information about changing conditions. There was little or no means of calling for help. In a dangerous situation where rapidly changing weather can make the difference between life and death, how can this be an acceptable set of circumstances for our emergency services to operating under? Yet this is the exact situation in many regional areas. In the Great Southern region around Albany, the local Chief Bushfire Control Officer, Mr Ross Fenwick, has been working with state member of the Legislative Council Mr Colin Holt to identify nine bushfire brigade sheds that receive no mobile phone coverage whatsoever and a further seven that can only access a signal via connection to an external antenna. These are the volunteer bushfire brigades that thousands of people are relying upon to protect them, their property and their livestock against bushfire events that are a serious threat, not just an outside possibility.

Again, it is not just the bushfire scenario we need to consider when we talk about the lack of critical information. The Bureau of Meteorology has recently decommissioned the Eucla weather radar on the Western Australian and South Australian border. I understand that the radio was old and that it was going to be costly to replace it, so it has been switched off. This is a service that provides critical weather information to emergency services, to the flying doctors, to the main roads, to the pastoralists and to the local and travelling community. It is a service that is seriously lacking in other parts of O'Connor as well, denying people the information they need to protect themselves and to defend themselves against weather events that can devastate their lives immediately in freak events or slowly over seasons and years.

My electorate offices have been approached time and time again by farmers crying out for government support. They tell me they need more information—critical weather information. They need to know when and where rain is falling so they can farm productively because, while the effects are not so obvious and not so immediately dramatic, drought is a natural disaster like flood and like fire. It has the power to take away people's lives and livelihoods. These farmers need to know what has happened in previous years so they can prepare for what seasons might look like in the years to come. They need weather radar so they can prepare for and respond to changing conditions so that those conditions do not become a disaster.

I understand that at least two weather radars are necessary, one in the wheat belt and one in the south-west. This is in addition to the existing weather services, which need to be protected and replaced when necessary. But what I am hearing is that the weather radar is being decommissioned, and it is not only Eucla that is getting the chop. I understand that the Bureau of Meteorology has undertaken a review recommending the enclosing of aerodrome forecasting equipment at 78 regional aerodromes around the country. This equipment, like the Eucla radar, is old and needs upgrading. I understand that the costs of upgrading these services is somewhere near $7 million. What I want to ask is: what is the cost of not upgrading this equipment? What is the cost of switching off these services and taking away this source of vital weather information for remote and regional areas? What is the cost to these communities that can no longer rely on the Royal Flying Doctor Service, because the flying doctor does not have the information required to get in and out of a particular aerodrome safely? What is the cost to the communities when the viability of their aerodrome services is questioned by operators that cannot afford the extra costs of contingency fuel supplies to make it into the next aerodrome in case the weather is found to be inclement upon arrival? And what is the cost of further isolation from emergency services, from essential services and from help? The cost is similar to that experienced by communities whose fire brigades cannot communicate effectively. It is a drastic and dangerous cost.

I implore members of this House to think more broadly about natural disasters, not just about how we help people to clean up and support them with crisis response initiatives and not just about how to assist communities struck by dramatic events. These communities are very worthy, and they must receive our help. But I implore the government and future governments to help and support the people on the ground who are preparing for, managing against and battling with the effects of all sorts of natural disasters, big and small, on a daily basis. In Western Australia this means that people in regional areas in O'Connor and across rural Western Australia must be provided with more information—equip them with the tools they require, arm them with the information they rely upon, provide them with critical information services and information communication services so that when things do go wrong they have the very best chances to survive and to carry on battling in the years to come. These people need mobile phone towers. They need weather radar and weather stations. They need to know that they will have the information they need when they need it. And they need to know now that the government takes the natural disasters they are experiencing seriously and will help them to protect themselves.

In 2013 in Australia, one of the most advanced, prosperous and privileged nations in the world, how can we justify denying a significant proportion of our population this kind of information? It is information that is so much more critical to those people living in remote and isolated communities amongst harsh and dangerous environments and far from major service provision centres. This information is taken for granted by the rest of the population and by populations across other developed nations. It is time that we brought our regional Australians up to date and provided them with these basic services. Australians in the regions need information and services for communication for their survival.

There is a huge anomaly in talking about supporting people in the face of weather driven natural disasters when we are taking away weather monitoring data services. There is a huge contradiction in providing services for emergency situations if those services cannot communicate effectively when the disaster strikes. The bottom line is always going to be very important, but in this instance the bottom line must not cost lives.