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

I think it is worth pointing out that, had the Emergency Response Fund been used more by the former government, we may not have had quite as long a backlog of local government and mitigation projects. But we are where we are, and we do have that backlog. For starters, local governments are being consulted, and heavily consulted, about how these funds should be used. If ALGA haven't been consulted so far, then they are absolutely on the list and will be consulted.

I should say that the discussions and consultation we undertook with ALGA, with state based local government associations and with individual state governments were one of the reasons we committed to creating this fund. The feedback we were getting was that we weren't seeing the level of federal investment in disaster mitigation at a local level that we needed to see. That's one of the reasons that we've decided to go down this path and set up the fund this way. They will certainly be consulted if they haven't been already.

I would expect that we would see a substantial amount of this funding used to assist local governments to build those projects that are needed; I would certainly expect to see that. I've said already that, where possible, we want to see our funds matched by state, territory and local governments. I always say 'where possible' because we recognise there are some extremely remote local governments, for example, that might have only a couple of hundred ratepayers but have a lot of disaster resilience needs. There might be exceptions in certain cases. But we want to work with local governments and we recognise they play an important role here.