Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise solemnly to speak to this motion on natural disasters and I start with a quote:

Mr McErlean grabbed a rope, tied one end to a post, the other around his waist and set out to rescue the woman and two boys but the fast-moving water swept him downstream.

Another rescuer, known only as Chris, pulled Mr McErlean to safety before tying the rope to himself and approaching the car to grab Jordan.

But Jordan wanted his brother to go first so Chris took Blake, handing him to Mr McErlean part way across before heading back to the car.

‘I had the boy in one hand, the rope in the other. I wasn’t going to let go but then the torrent came through and was pulling us down,’ Mr McErlean said.

‘Then this great big tall fellow just came out of nowhere, bear hugged us and ripped us out of the water. When I got back I turned to look at this guy [Chris]. He looked at me and we knew it was over. The rope snapped and the car just flipped.’

Chris, who had been holding Jordan’s hand until it was torn away from him, flew metres in the air before locking his legs around a post in the centre of the road,’ said Mr McErlean.

‘The others were just gone, just disappeared,’ he said.

I think the story of Jordan Rice unfortunately personifies the terror of the flood. The terror, and the bravery, of Jordan Rice was no greater and no lesser than the bravery of the others who perished. It seems beyond belief that at this point in time we would be talking about 22 people perishing in South-East Queensland—35 if you look from 30 November; people who literally could not believe their eyes.

We have heard terrifying stories of creeks that had been mere trickles rising five to six metres in just 10 to 20 minutes. Stories have been conveyed to me of houses taken away by the floods where grandparents had been minding grandchildren. This is the sort of horror you just cannot grow used to. But it happened in Queensland and it has now also happened in other areas due to the cyclone, and also now due to the fires—perhaps there have not been the deaths but certainly there has been the same horror and the same fear. It has brought out the best and the worst, and this period continues.

I do not think anything can match the terror experienced at places like Murphys Creek, Grantham and Lowood. Driving through those areas and seeing the damage is beyond comprehension. These areas have been gouged out by the flood waters. Pads of concrete remain where houses once stood. Dead bodies of people were carted 80 kilometres from where they had unfortunately perished. This is what was delivered to this section of the state. In places like Toowoomba nothing really could have been done. It was a freak event; an urban flood sheeting off concrete and off roads. The consequences of this flood when it arrived in the CBD and in the middle of towns are beyond comparison.

There are many whom we will always remember; names and faces of Australians we will remember. When you see a house that was not much of a house to start with—not an opulent house but a house belonging to a person whom you would say was struggling—that was completely devastated by the floods and on the front of that house an Australian flag is hanging, you know there is a spirit there and that they will offer their support to the people around them. This disaster will have an immense effect on the psychology of the people in these areas. People are having to deal with their grief. People are still missing. I think seven are still missing at this moment. In the future there will be a plaque, a memory or a story, but for the people involved it is their lives.

Llync-Chiann Clarke, 31, and her two children aged five and 12 were caught in a rural fire brigade truck when it was hit by a wall of water on the Gatton-Helidon Road. All three were found dead inside the truck. Imagine the terror of the children. How would they fathom what was happening to them? How would they understand going from being on terra firma, on grass near a road not associated with flood, and in an instant the topography changes to a roaring and terrifying mass of dark water and everything that goes with that? Imagine the fear in the eyes of children and the fear of the parents as they try their very best to save them. We hear stories of cars going past with people inside screaming. These stories leave an indelible image and it breaks the heart of even the most hardened person. It is outside of what we can reasonably perceive as happening to people whose faces and accents we know. We know the houses they lived in but they are not there anymore.

Pauline Lesley Magner, 65, was found dead on the bank of a creek near the sawmill in Gatton. Selwyn Hector Schefe, 52, was swept away in his home on Monday and his body was found on Thursday. Everything has been put asunder. Who would have thought that someone could be in their house and that their house would become a trap. Who would have thought that you could be in a house that could subside in a flood. The vision of the floods as they tore through houses is beyond comprehension. Whole paddocks were turned into a tumultuous sea of water. This happened on both sides of the range. The body of Robert John Kelly, 30, was found in his upside down Toyota Landcruiser in Myall Creek, Dalby. People in these situations would have been terrified. These people and these events are what we are remembering at this time.

We saw the evacuation of whole towns. That has never happened before in Australia. In towns like Condamine and Theodore everyone was moved. When these people move back we have to be conscious of what they are moving back to. What did they have to start with? How do they get their lives back on track? Let us not forget other areas such as Bundaberg, Rockhampton—massive floods went through Rockhampton—Emerald and my home town of St George. In St George, we were unfortunate in that it was our third flood in the last 10 months. But through that people had begun to prepare themselves better and gain a better understanding of how to deal with the situation. Those who got flooded before got flooded again and, in some instances, fortunately, the damage was not that great because they were still repairing from the last flood. Some people however had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money renovating their own house only to see it flooded again. Crops were lost. You have to keep a financial lifeline going in these areas. You must keep commerce going in these areas. Without a job people have nothing. Just in my area tens of millions of dollars in crops have been lost.

On the good side, it showed the best in character. I remember looking at people around St George. The thing that went out everywhere—and I am sure it was the same in all towns—was that you did not have to ask for help; it just happened. As one so aptly put it, ‘People turned up like black flies.’ As soon as they saw the problem you did not need to ask for help—they just arrived. People would arrive to go sandbagging. People would drop off their bobcat or their excavator to help you build a levy. People who were already doing it tough with the bank would say, ‘Don’t worry, I will lend you some plant to try to make sure that we keep the flood away.’ People would turn up at people’s places and say, ‘We will try to muster this section of your place and see if we can get your stock to a place where they are not going to perish.’

It was not that people were expecting great laurels for it; it was just the way people worked. Later on we saw people turning up in Brisbane—in fact, so many people turned up that they had to start to tell them to turn around because the numbers were so great. This is the positive side of the story. People from Brisbane, Rockhampton and Emerald would just turn up and help. They did not need to be asked; they just did it. Something bound them together that said that they were all in this together and that they will empathise with you by doing more than just watching you on television—they must get to where you are and help you.

This was incredibly powerful. It gave so many people a sense of succour and comfort to see that people were prepared to turn up without even knowing who they were helping. We always have the minor instances of people who exploit a situation, but they were so minor. The overwhelming story was one of empathy, shock and horror. Then it was the overwhelming desire of so many Australians to say, ‘What can I do to help?’ I was humbled in my own town to get call after call that went like this: ‘I want to be off the record. I do not want to be known. I want to put some money up. Can you tell me where to put it? What can I do to help?’

There were people from other states and territories who put substantial amounts of money on the table who said: ‘I just want to do something. I have seen this on television. I cannot believe this is my nation, but I want to do something to help. I just want to be part of a solution. I want to be somewhere of some effect. Do I turn up myself or do I just send the cheque? Or do I send something else? What can I do to help you?’ After such a tragic and terrifying event, this is what gave you the sense of a nation pulling together—that at times people will speak up for an area other than their own and say, ‘They are doing it tougher than us.’

I remember in St George when everybody saw what was happening in Gatton, in Lowood, in Grantham, in Toowoomba and in Murphys Creek. Everybody in St George stopped thinking about St George. St George, at that point, did not matter. What mattered were those people down there and what we could do to help them. These were the same people in my town who left a positive message when the bushfires were happening in Victoria. They had the same attitude: ‘What do we do to help those people down there? Do we go fencing? What do we do? Do we go down to clean out? How do we help?’ This is the positive story.

The people in our area would have disaster meetings at one o’clock to try to work out what the tactics were for the day. No-one in those meetings was self-aggrandising; they were just asking, ‘Where do I go in this maze to be of some use?’ The Army were great. They were doing whatever was in their power to do. Shift after shift, the SES were continually trying to help. They never got tired of it and never whinged about being sick of it and wanting to go home. They just said: ‘Oh well, if we have to work tomorrow we will work tomorrow. If we have to work the next day we will work the next day. If we have to work the next week and the next month we will work the next week and the next month.’ I remember seeing on Australia Day the SES boat cruising up and down our river, still carting people with the Australian flag flying out the back. They were just giving people a sense that everything was going to be fine and that we were going to get through this.

You have to thank the doctors who went out of their way to help. They were always planning and thinking ahead: ‘If this goes bad what do we do next? If the hospital floods where do we move the people? If the old people’s home has to be evacuated how are we going to get them out?’ Everybody was diligently being a cog to try to make it affect people as little as possible.

The media were great because you had to get the messages to people about everything from trying to evacuate areas to looking after people to getting other messages that you needed to get out—such as, when the floods go and the sandflies and mosquitos turn up, remember that it is also when Ross River fever and other things will turn up. They helped people to think over the horizon about what they were going to do next. It was essential to get those messages out. The ABC local radio was great at continually informing people about what was happening, where to go and what not to do.

People in general were also very good in that they were not going into areas—especially where there had been a tragedy and where people were affected by grief—and being unnecessarily intrusive in the lives of people who were going through the absolute depths of despair over the loss of family members, friends and people from the community. People were generally pretty respectful and gave them the space to find their own solace in their own time, in their own area and with their own people. This was a wider sense of the Australian community working together.

Now we also have the unity of politics. There is a desire across this chamber and the other chamber, and between all parties, to do something and to rebuild. We must rebuild the economy of this nation because the one thing that we do not want to have at the end of this disaster is people without jobs or people in towns with no economic future. We want to make sure we fix the roads. We want to make sure the tourists come back. We want to make sure the produce is moving. We want to make sure the mines are open. We want to make sure the planes are landing. We want to make sure we get back to where we were and move ahead as quickly as possible. We want to make sure we never forget those who were so tragically killed by the floods.

This will not be the last natural disaster we have, but it is one for our time. We are so lucky and so blessed that we did not have any fatalities from Cyclone Yasi. Why is that? Hopefully it shows that when you plan, when you are ready, when you see what is coming and you put all your endeavours into protecting human lives, there is the capacity to save those lives. There was nothing we could really do about the people in the Lockyer Valley. Those people at the epicentre of this disaster died because of a freak of nature. You cannot plan for five, six or seven inches of rain in a couple hours; it just happens. If we can do whatever is within our power in the future to mitigate the effects of future events like this then the purpose of this is not lost and possibly the lives of those who were so tragically killed will provide some benefit into the future. Maybe that gives some meaning. All those who were killed remain in our thoughts and prayers, as they will forevermore.