Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by Senators Ruston and Birmingham to questions asked by Senators Gallagher, Chisholm and myself today.

Right now, across Australia, we're seeing dozens of bushfires. There are some happening right now in my home state of Queensland, in particular on the World Heritage listed Fraser Island. There are also fires in New South Wales and other states. It's another reminder already that we are in the natural disaster season.

As well as those fires happening in some parts of the country right now, it's also coming to the time of the first anniversary, in so many parts of Australia, of the terrible Black Summer fires we saw last year. I'll give one example that I don't think anyone will forget: the town of Cobargo, devastated by fires, the scene of those embarrassing visits by the Prime Minister after he came back from Hawaii, forcing people to shake his hand and then scurrying off once they actually had something to say to him. Unfortunately, we still see residents and business owners in towns like Cobargo being left behind by this government, nearly a year after they experienced the devastating bushfires.

Only this week on the Q&A program, which was, among other things, looking at how people are coping after the bushfires, Cobargo resident Graham said, 'We've been politically and practically abandoned.' That's how bushfire victims feel one year on from the bushfires around which they were abandoned at the time by the Prime Minister and his government. The National Bushfire Recovery Fund is one example of that. This was the Prime Minister's great response to the bushfires when he pledged that he would spend $2 billion on a National Bushfire Recovery Fund to assist survivors of the bushfires recover. Of course, we discovered at Senate estimates earlier this year that this was in fact a notional fund. It's a fund that didn't really exist and would only ever reach $2 billion if it really had to.

Recently we've seen that the government is claiming to have spent $1.2 billion of that Bushfire Recovery Fund, but again at estimates we uncovered that this was another example of the government making claims that just don't stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the amount that the government claims to have spent from the Bushfire Recovery Fund includes half a billion dollars that it has yet to distribute to the states. I don't know why it's so important for this government to misrepresent what it's actually doing for bushfire victims. Why not just admit that what you've actually spent is $700 million from the fund and that you will be spending another $500 million, rather than going out there and claiming to have spent $1.2 billion when it's actually a lot less? This is why bushfire survivors find it so hard to trust this government and why they feel so abandoned and left behind by this government—it's because, for all the promises that the government have made to look after people, they continue to be left behind.

We're also seeing this government not only failing to respond properly in terms of the recovery from last year's bushfires but also, again, demonstrating that they are not prepared for the coming disaster season. Today I accompanied the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, and the member for Eden-Monaro, Kristy McBain, to Braidwood, an hour and a bit away, where we met with RFS cadets who are being trained through the local high school. That community was also hit by the bushfires last year and is doing a good job of recovering. By training up young people to assist in the RFS they're showing that they're preparing for what lies ahead this summer.

Unfortunately, their effort is not being matched by their federal government. To give just one example, 18 months ago, in last year's federal budget, the government announced the $4 billion Emergency Response Fund. We worked with the government last year to get the legislation through to establish that fund, and, here we are, 18 months after it was announced, while fires are already happening around Queensland and New South Wales—and not a single cent has been spent from that Emergency Response Fund. We are already seeing fires in this country, we know from the Bureau of Meteorology that we face above-normal numbers of cyclones and floods this year because of La Nina, and yet the Prime Minister, Mr Morrison, has a $4 billion fund sitting in a bank account that was established to help communities prepare for disasters but that he hasn't spent a cent from! The answer we always get from the government is that 'there are other funds available to assist people'. If that's the case, why are people still living in caravans in Cobargo? Why are people in Bega and Cobargo crowdfunding to build evacuation centres and toilet blocks? The fact is, this government isn't delivering on its announcements yet again. (Time expired)