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

I can. One minute will absolutely be enough time to outline the Albanese government's approach and how that compares to what we saw from the former government. In fact, I could really just mention the former government's approach very quickly because the answer is 'not much'. Who could forget the former government's infamous nearly $5 billion Emergency Response Fund. Established in 2019, in three years the coalition's emergency response fund didn't release a single cent in recovery funding and didn't complete a single mitigation project. What it did do was raise nearly $1 billion in interest for the former government while actually doing nothing to assist Australians with disaster mitigation or disaster recovery. Who knows what kind of damage could have been avoided or what kind of loss could have been avoided if the former government had used that fund in the way it was constructed to provide for mitigation. Unlike the former government, the Albanese government believes in planning for future events, not waiting for them to happen.