Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, firstly, as a former emergency management minister, I want to congratulate the Labor government on continuing an investment fund that will ensure that our nation can invest in mitigation projects on the ground in local communities to really flip the traditional model in this country of droughts and flooding rains, where we spend 97 per cent of money on fixing up floods and bushfires and cyclonic activity and only three per cent in actually preparing for the future. It's one of the great legacies of the coalition government that we took the brave step of setting up this fund and setting aside portions annually to be supporting state and local governments to mitigate against future disasters.

I had the great pleasure of speaking at the AustralianFinancial Review NationalInfrastructure Summit this morning and caught up with the Lismore mayor, Steve Krieg, who had been speaking at the summit about the importance of exactly these types of projects. He thanked me for our government's commitment—and your government's similar commitment following ours—to provide the Northern Rivers in New South Wales every support to ensure that their community can build the types of infrastructure on the ground that will ensure that what happened in the Northern Rivers—and particularly to the city of Lismore—won't happen again.

I do have a couple of questions. My first is: how has this money has been raised? I had the opportunity to speak at the Australian local government roads seminar down in Hobart a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure a lot of local mayors have all contacted you and your office about the torrential rains and flooding that we're going through at the moment, but the ongoing La Nina situation has also wrought havoc on rural and regional roads. The New South Wales regional councils have come out saying it's a crisis. The Victorian regional councils have all similarly come out saying it is a crisis. Some are looking to the DRFA arrangements to really fund that recovery process; others are looking at similar times in our history when we've had to go to the infrastructure portfolio to fund the particular and specific needs of such unique situations that we're finding ourselves in at the moment with the flooding impact on regional roads in particular. Would you be able to give us an understanding of whether it's going to be DRFA? Is it this particular funding pool that will be able to be accessed or is it a matter for infrastructure ministers—state and federal—to come to an agreement on?