Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

You're right that the general way that the DRFA works is to repair infrastructure back to its pre-disaster standard, but as I'm sure you would recall, the DRFA also does allow for betterment funding, if you like, as a separate stream of funding. My recollection is that it's categories B and D of the DRFA that allow for betterment funding to be provided. That's the way that we have provided that betterment funding to New South Wales, and I think Queensland was the other state we've done it for since taking office. So there is still the ability to do betterment programs, but they have to be, if you like, separate to the usual repair programs. We may well end up doing similar things for these floods, but as I say, it's still fairly early days in actually assessing the scale of the damage across the number of different states that it's impacting on.