Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am grateful to have the opportunity today to speak on the motion of condolence which encompasses the devastation that has affected the eastern states and Western Australia in the last month or so. Like Senator McLucas, I am a proud Queensland senator and, whilst I certainly have great sympathy for the people of Victoria and Western Australia, I will be confining my remarks to the devastation that Queensland has faced over the past month.

I would like to begin by reading into Hansard the names of the 21 deceased who have been positively identified to date by the Queensland coroner’s office in Brisbane. The names are: Sandra Matthews, Steven Matthews, Donna Rice, Jordan Rice, Llync-Chiann Clarke, Garry Jibson, Jocelyn Jibson, Bruce Marshall, Jesse Wickman, Jean Gurr, Pauline Magner, Robert Bromage, Selwyn Schefe, Katie Schefe, Van Toan Giang, Robert Kelly, Joshua Ross, Brenda Ross, Reinskje Van Der Werff, Sylvia Baillie and Jessica Keep. Those people died. Their families, their friends, their neighbours and everyone around them have been directly and immediately affected by their deaths. So many others almost died. A huge scar remains on Queensland.

I had the opportunity to visit some of the flood affected areas near Brisbane not long ago, and I visited Grantham. My hosts there were a family, Ron and Gwen Kuhrt, who live on a property just out of Grantham proper and whose business is hay carting and chaffcutting. They do not have a business right now. They do not have anything you would call a home right now. They do not have very much except themselves and the will to keep going and to survive. The Kuhrts are of Lutheran background and stock. They are proud people, and you could see the pain in Ron Kuhrt’s face when he said: ‘The hardest thing I have had to do is work out how to accept help. I am not good at accepting help, but we have to have help. We cannot do this alone.’ The fire brigade had been through their house twice to hose it out. The suggestion was that the floorboards were going to have to be ripped up to get to the mud that was stuck under their house. There was no part of the house that was likely to be reclaimed, except perhaps the frame.

These people were in Grantham, which of course, as many people know, was one of the worst hit parts of South-East Queensland in the floods. Everywhere we went in Grantham, Gwen could point to something that had been devastated. The only thing left of a solid brick house were about 200 to 300 bricks set in three or four little piles in a front yard. She took us to the bridge with the cars jammed under it, which I know everyone here saw on television over and over again. The cars had all gone by the time I saw it, but everyone in Grantham had a story to tell that was somehow related to that bridge. As to their fears, some of them were not realised, thank God; but unfortunately others were very, very real, and people are simply gone. At the recovery centre in Grantham I met a very fit-looking woman in her late sixties who, along with her husband, had clung to the guttering of their home for over three hours. She said, ‘People ask me how I did it, and the answer is that I have no idea how I did it. I just knew I wasn’t going down there’—and by ‘down there’ she meant down into the raging torrent that was over the windows of their home.

We talk a lot about Grantham and Murphys Creek, but there are many other towns in South-East Queensland that have been absolutely devastated—towns like Fernvale and Lowood and Esk. Thank God there was no loss of life in those towns, but the damage has been just as devastating. The mayor of Esk, Graeme Lehmann, was still on his feet after two weeks without sleep, basically, but just as worried as his constituents that there was absolutely no reason for the same thing not to happen again before the month was out. The wet season is just starting, not finishing, so there was real concern in Esk and the towns around there.

Kingaroy was affected by a bit of water in backyards and things like that, but the Blackbutt Range road, which is Kingaroy’s main connection to the world, was out of action for over 10 days. The day I was there they had just started to allow traffic and trucks up to 14 tonnes through. The motel owners in Kingaroy were pleased for the first time in two weeks because finally there were some people back in town who might stay in their motels; finally food and other supplies were coming in on trucks, which meant that they could perhaps go back into business. That story was repeated over and over throughout Queensland.

I would particularly like to comment on some problems that have developed for organisations in the disability and mental health sectors. I spoke to David Barbagallo, the CEO of Endeavour—a major disability services provider in Queensland—just after the floods and asked, ‘How is it going?’ He said: ‘In the not-for-profit sector we’re used to getting on with things and looking after ourselves. We’re not going too badly. We did have a bit of a problem in Toowoomba, though. The Endeavour opportunity shop in Toowoomba was flooded and the staff had to swim out.’ I can only imagine what it must have been like for those staff to have to do that. The disability sector is trying to get on with it. Nevertheless, there are dozens and dozens of small organisations that will have great difficulty in recovering from these floods unless we remember them in the months to come and work out ways to fund them.

In the mental health sector, there are six organisations that are basically out of business because of loss of equipment and loss of premises. The mental health sector in Queensland has put a figure of about 19 per cent on the services that are not functioning right now. This sector is already hard-stretched and very pressed in meeting even some of the demand. Given the recent circumstances, the need for mental health services is likely to increase. Again, this is an area that we cannot afford to forget. We must do everything we can to improve the situation for these organisations. They are not big organisations but they are a desperately needed part of their communities and they are desperately trying to hang on in order to help their communities.

Today is, as Senator Humphries pointed out earlier, a day to talk about our losses; it is not a day to talk about the future—but we do need to remember that future. I would like to point out that, whilst we have talked about the deaths and the loss of property, we need to understand that in Queensland, as Senator McLucas pointed out in her assessment of North Queensland, you do not need to be flood or cyclone damaged to be flood or cyclone affected. I do not know of one business, one person, one sector or one corner of Queensland that has not somehow been affected by the floods and the cyclone. People who were not in the flood areas themselves may have lost their jobs because the business they worked for was affected by the floods. Businesses have had problems with customers who cannot pay their bill because they have been affected by the floods. Other businesses have had problems because their supplier cannot supply because that supplier has been affected by the floods. As I said earlier in relation to the Kingaroy group of motels and businesses, their businesses were affected by the floods because the road to Kingaroy was damaged. So every business, including agribusiness and the sorts of primary producers that Senator McLucas and others spoke about, has been affected by the floods and the cyclone. This is something we need to remember.

Rocklea, a western suburb of Brisbane, was seriously affected by the floods. A woman who runs a fireworks events company has her business located there, but it was not affected by the floods. However, you do not have many fireworks events in the sort of weather that South-East Queensland has been experiencing since November. She told me that since Christmas—and this was about two weeks ago; so we are talking about a period of six to eight weeks—she has had 39 fireworks events cancelled. She was very concerned about what to do. She does have a cancellation policy and she could have tried to charge some of them because they had cancelled, but her concern about doing that was that so many of them were small community organisations from areas like Toowoomba, where they will need every cent for the restoration of their community. She is just one example of a company that was not flood damaged but was certainly very, very flood affected. So, as we go forward, we must remember that not just people but also businesses are very damaged and that there will come a time when their strength and resilience will be at an end unless we as a community support them.

As a small measure I would like to encourage everyone here, as Senator McLucas also said, to visit Queensland, to spend some money in Queensland and to do whatever you can to assist businesses in Queensland to redevelop. If you cannot do that, buy some Queensland made products. I was interested to hear people talk about not being able to afford to buy bananas if the price goes up. Could I suggest that they buy half as many bananas if the price doubles rather than stop buying bananas, and apply that across every business and group. We all need to be very kind to each other in the months to come—and that is not just towards individuals but companies as well.