Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The bushfires that swept through much of the Australian continent over the course of the last half of 2019 and the first months of 2020 were unprecedented but not unpredictable. The bushfires caused immense damage, and Australians in bushfire affected regions are looking to the Morrison government, wanting it to keep the promises that it made.

There will be an opportunity over the course of the coming months to examine in some detail the level of preparedness and the capacity of the federal government and state governments to do their work in terms of bushfire mitigation, hazard reduction and dealing with the impact of dangerous climate change. But right now what Australians want to see is a government that keeps to its word. And the evidence is that what we're seeing in Australia from this Commonwealth government has all the hallmarks of the Morrison adman—all spin and no substance, the big announcement and zero follow-through every single time. No doubt we'll see advertising about bushfire recovery, but what we don't see is the government spending what it said it would spend. We don't see boots on the ground doing the work that needs to happen in terms of recovery.

I can tell you that, in the area that I come from, in the north-west of New South Wales, on the bushfire recovery effort, six months after those fires swept through some of those towns, the promised clean-up only recently commenced. It took even longer for the promised clean-up to commence on the South Coast of New South Wales. That is unforgivable. That shows a wanton lack of care, a lack of commitment and a lack of understanding of the role of the Commonwealth government at this point. I heard one of the senators opposite bellowing out across the chamber recently that this is all a state responsibility. Bushfires don't know state boundaries. This is absolutely squarely the role of the Commonwealth government.

Recently, Services Australia Deputy Chief Executive Officer Michelle Lees told the royal commission that one in 10 people who applied for one-off disaster recovery payments were unsuccessful. One in three who sought recovery allowances were rejected. When she was interrogated about why, Ms Lees said that applicants may have lived outside an eligible local government area or the damage to their property was considered insufficient. Tell that to the people on the South Coast of New South Wales.

The royal commission has heard that some people struggled to apply because their identity documents had been destroyed. The head of the National Bushfire Recovery Agency, Andrew Colvin, told the commission that many victims had been treated differently because of jurisdictional issues associated with disaster recovery efforts. What people need is a government that sweeps all this aside, that steps in and makes sure that the promises it made—belatedly, not before Christmas and not after Christmas, as it scrambled in its response to realise what the real responsibilities of federal government, of Commonwealth leadership, actually are—are kept.

People who lost their homes in the Clear Range fire at Bumbalong have been forced to start their own heartbreaking clear-up. They've decided they can't wait for the Commonwealth government. They're going to do it themselves. According to Kim Templeton, Secretary of the Bumbalong Valley Progress Association, people in that community feel abandoned. 'After losing a third of the valley's homes in the space of an hour, it took three weeks for official records to reflect the loss,' he said. He went on to say:

It took us about five weeks to convince the Department … that our postcode was fire affected.

So what is the government doing about it? The Liberal candidate for Eden-Monaro says that bushfire recovery has been hampered by poor coordination between the groups offering aid. She's right. 'They're not coordinated enough,' she went on to say. What an indictment of the government that she wants to join! Coordination during and after national disasters is what governments do. It took Minister Littleproud until two weeks ago to announce a review of disaster recovery payments. A review? What's actually required is to get the payments out the door, to do the job that the government is entrusted by the people of Australia to do.

In the meantime, the government have blamed everyone they could point the finger at. It's been a concerted effort, led by Senator Molan and some of the characters who are involved in the Eden-Monaro by-election, to point the finger at charities, at councils, at state governments—at anybody else but Scott Morrison and the Commonwealth government. Well, the buck stops with you. Through you, Madam Acting Deputy President: the buck stops with the Prime Minister. The Liberal candidate for Eden-Monaro wants to join a government that is chaotic, incompetent and obsessed with itself, until it comes to launching an advertising campaign. It's very focused on the press release and very focused on the announcement of big dollars, with breathtaking figures and justifications, but there's zero delivery.

When you look at the National Bushfire Recovery Agency organisational chart, the one thing that the government has been good at doing is filling all of the communications and engagement positions in the agency. There's a big tick for the communications officers, a big tick for the people who designed the memes and a big tick for getting the message out there, but zero for delivery in terms of policy substance and the things that matter for bushfire communities.

The government's rhetoric isn't matched by what's happening on the ground. Businesses in those communities can't access the services that they need to access. People who lost their homes can't get their ruined houses cleaned. Businesspeople who've lost their businesses in many cases are still waiting for demolition. And people are still living in substandard accommodation, particularly as winter on the South Coast of New South Wales sets in. We've got a government that's obsessed by spin, obsessed by marketing and obsessed by sloganeering but has just not been able to deliver, particularly for the people of South Coast New South Wales. It should not have taken a by-election to wake up this hopeless rabble of a government to its real responsibilities.

We are going to do the work here in the Senate. We're going to do the work to hold this government to account. We're going to do the work in the Finance and Public Administration References Committee inquiry into bushfires and the bushfire recovery. We're going to make sure that this government is dragged kicking and screaming to do the job that it's responsible for, that it should be delivering upon and that it has manifestly failed so far to do.