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

Let me repeat. Under the former government, 25 per cent of the funding for our national disaster agencies runs out on 30 June this year. Despite all of the floods, all of the bushfires and all of the cyclones, they just said: 'It's going to be okay. It's going to stop raining on 30 June 2023, and we won't need that funding beyond that.'

What does that funding uncertainty mean? What it means is that if it's not fixed by our government, our network of recovery support officers around the country is impaired, along with our ability to provide payments to disaster impacted communities and any national planning to build national resilience. They're the things that would have occurred had the coalition won the last election. It's almost as if the coalition thought that these events would just stop, everything would be fine, the sun would come out and we'd get precisely the right amount of rainfall in precisely the right areas and we'd never have to worry about natural disasters. This is the economic vandalism we inherited. We're fixing up the mess. (Time expired)