Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Bushfires are part of our Australian landscape. We have had a long history of bushfires in this country. Probably our largest ever bushfire was back in 1851—the Black Thursday bushfire in Victoria, in which over one quarter of that state was burnt. My electorate of Hughes has also experienced and has a long history of bushfires. And we know that, as sure as night follows day, those bushfires will come again to our area.

That is why I am very pleased to advise the House of a product, invented in the Sutherland Shire and produced locally in southern Sydney, called the WaterGate. This product was designed by a local resident of Illawong called Clarence Buckley. The way the WaterGate works is that you attach it to your downpipe and it enables you to backfill your gutters and enables the water to stay in your gutters and prevent ember attacks to your house for days or until you undo the WaterGate. The reason this is important is that our bushfire services tell us that ember attack is the main hazard to houses in a bushfire. Many houses are located in bushfire prone areas. The way the ember attack destroys the house is by embers getting into leaves in the gutter, and that is what causes the house to catch fire. This product backwashes your gutters, removes those leaves and leaves a barrier of water up in the gutter.

This is a fantastic product. But WaterGate have had a problem getting their product to the market because of the massive rebates they must pay to the major retailers. This was recently noted in a KPMG report in Australia's Food and Grocery Council, which also applies to suppliers in our hardware sector, where they noted a significant increase in the trade spend: the trade discounts and promotional allowances paid to retailers by the supplier had increased from 19.5 per cent to 23.4 per cent in 2011-12. So a producer—someone who designs these products—actually has to pay something like 25 per cent of the gross sale back to the retailer in a rebate. For this reason the manufacturers and designers of WaterGate have decided to market their product direct to the consumer through the internet.

This is a very significant invention. It is something that is made, designed and produced locally in southern Sydney. It is something that I would hope the building codes all around Australia look at, because it has the potential to save millions of dollars worth of property. It also has the potential to prevent people from climbing onto their roofs—and we have seen many reports of people being very badly, even fatally, injured through climbing onto their roofs to clean the gutters. This device enables people to do that without actually getting onto their roofs.