Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about the quite traumatic flood that happened in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales recently. It has been a very sad, traumatic time for our community. The levee in Lismore, which is set at about 10.6 metres, overtopped. It went to 11½ metres. We have seen the worst and the best of a community. It was very traumatic. Between 3,000 and 4,000 residences and shops were inundated with water, including my own office, which had around a foot of water in it.

This has really psychologically damaged our town. We had a lot of people who had water in their homes, and obviously there was a lot of cleaning up and work to do. From this, we also saw the best in people. We saw community help community; we saw volunteers come from everywhere. There was a great set-up at South Lismore train station, which was a grassroots community effort where people were just walking out and being told which houses to go to and which businesses to go to to help them clean up. This went on for a number of weeks.

Obviously, the government got involved. We sent in a Centrelink bus to help people get the emergency payments which we initiated straightaway. There was $1,000 for people who had water in their houses. Also, there was a government grant of $15,000, which happened from category C.

I would like to thank the SES volunteers, the RFS, all the volunteer organisations, the local Lifeline, which has done a lot of work, and the council workers, who were amazing. They worked beyond the call of duty. There was an amazing amount of rubbish that had to be collected from the streets and that was all done with a minimum of fuss and very quickly. I would like to thank the people who literally left their homes to volunteer to help neighbours, which was very important.

The rebuild will happen. We will recover from this. We are a very resilient community and I know that we will be stronger and better for this. But, make no mistake, this has been a real blow to our community. Physically, we need to recover. Shopkeepers need to rebuild their shops and the equipment and stock they have lost. But I know the community and I know that people from the wider community are coming to the CBD to support it, to spend money and to help them rebuild. We were given support not just from within our local community but from people across the state who came to help—people who sometimes just got in their car and drove to our community to help us—and indeed from the wider country. I thank everyone involved in the clean-up. I thank the local chamber, who were wonderful in getting category C funding and helping me to achieve that. I thank our community. As I said, we will be better and stronger, but it will take us time to rebuild.