Stirling Griff (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

This Emergency Response Fund Bill 2019 and the related bill are very much a positive move to help fund recovery and relief efforts after natural disasters in Australia which have a significant and catastrophic impact.

I might point out, though, as others have, that climate change is predicted to cause more frequent and severe storms, cyclones, droughts, floods and bushfires. So this fund will definitely be needed and, indeed, might be tapped out in future years. But, in creating this fund, the government is simply supplying a bandaid when it also needs to be doing far more to avoid the cause of catastrophes and to be more vigilant on climate change itself.

So, yes, my colleagues and I are 100 per cent supportive of building up an emergency fund—of course, provided that processes are put in place to ensure equitable distribution across Australia when it's needed most. I'm glad Senator Watt has spoken about the amendments Labor has negotiated with government, because we, like others, haven't seen them yet. He indicated that Labor has secured a deal to increase the funds disbursements by $50 million. Labor: surely you could have done much better than that! It's better than nothing, but as Senator Faruqi said, it's not a huge amount to deal with the substantial needs of the VET sector.

As Centre Alliance has made clear, we do not believe it was reasonable to create a fund which repurposed money from the lapsed Education Investment Fund without dedicating a good component of this $4 billion to boost vocational training. In fact, in my state of South Australia in particular, we very much have a dire shortage across many trades, and a lot of this could have been alleviated with a good proportion of this fund going to vocational education promotion, training and mentoring—and I know the situation that we have in South Australia is certainly not unique; it is in the rest of Australia as well.

So, yes, we do support a degree of repurposing of this fund. But we are disappointed that Labor didn't flex its muscle a little further and that we had no opportunity to move more funds towards vocational training.