Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is quite timely that Senator Moore mentioned the natural disasters that have affected the Philippines and a number of other countries in our region, because the issue I particularly wanted to speak about tonight was a report produced late last year from the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities that did not receive as much coverage as it should have. This roundtable heads its information with the view that we must act now to make Australian communities safer and more resilient to natural disasters. This is a group that came together in late 2012. It included the CEO of Red Cross; the CEO of Investor Property group; the CEO of Optus; the CEO of the Insurance Australia Group, IAG; the CEO of Munich Holdings of Australasia; and the CEO of Westpac.

It is possible to criticise the then government for the fact that this group felt that it needed to come together. Building resilience to natural disasters is something that has certainly troubled me for some time, because we go on doing the same things. There was the horrific example during the floods in Queensland a little while ago, where it was discovered that federal government funding would replace little country bridges with like-for-like—we were not going to do anything to make it better into the future. But, as this group has pointed out, it is just a given that we will have more disasters—and more extreme disasters—in Australia over the next few decades at the very least. We need to plan for how we are going to cope with those.

You just have to look at the reaction to the recent cyclone, for example, in Queensland, where we had the property owners on Great Keppel Island saying—quite reasonably, for them—'The government will have to build a rock wall to protect our investment.' The government, of course, can be local government, state government or federal government—they are all involved in this. Part of the problem with the area is that all three are involved, and there is no really clear view of who is in charge of what. But we cannot go on simply building more and building greater and replacing what we are doing. We need to say enough is enough. We need to stop now. We need to think about what will happen. The roundtable, for example, points out that the total economic cost of natural disasters in Australia in 2012 alone was estimated to be more than $6 billion. They think that this will double by 2030—so we are talking $12 billion—and go to an average of $23 billion a year by 2050. That is without even looking at the impact of climate change. It is simply the cost involved in replacement insurance and the like.

I have here a chart that should certainly concern you and me, Mr President, showing that by 2050 Queensland, of all the states, will bear the greatest percentage of the economic cost of natural disasters. Right now the round table is suggesting that if we had a program that was focused, for example, simply on building more resilient new houses in high-cyclone-risk areas in South-East Queensland, we would reduce the cost of cyclone related damage by about two-thirds. The building cost ratio of this would be up to three times—that is, you would get a return of three times the money you invested, so to speak.

Other examples include raising the height of the Warragamba Dam by 23 metres. And of course we have the problems right now in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia of bushfires and floods. We are simply not resilient enough.

It is estimated that we have invested $50 million each year in the past few years in mitigation measures to try to improve our community resilience to natural disasters. In contrast, the average annual spend on recovery measures has been $560 million over and above that. So, for every $10 we have spent on post-disaster recovery we have spent $1 prior to the disasters on measures that were designed to improve the safety of our communities. The round table says that we firmly believe this investment is unsustainable. I join them in saying that I agree with this. Unfortunately, one of our problems as human beings is that we are very good at reacting after the event but not good at acting before the event. Clearly, it is the job of governments to do something to change that and to change the views of people about how we deal with natural disasters and how we cope with them.

Using research that Deloitte did for them, the round table said that carefully considered investment in resilience measures now would reduce the Australian government's expenditure on natural disaster relief and recovery by more than 50 per cent by 2050. It seems to me that this is a whole area we really do need to put some more time and effort into.

The report looks at situations in New South Wales, Victoria and South-East Queensland—our home state, Mr President. It points out that the estimated cost of natural disasters in South-East Queensland in 2013 was $322 million; the average annual cost, by 2050, will be $1.2 billion; and the total cost from now to 2050 will be almost $26 billion. It is a cost that we (a) will find unsustainable, and (b) do not need to sustain, if we work at what we are doing now and if we spend sensibly now on ways to make Australia more resilient. For example, South-East Queensland is one of Australia's most disaster-prone regions. If you look at the graph, Queensland is the highest-spending state on disaster recovery. It is something that I suppose we should be proud of, but I wish we did not have to do it! We face significant risks from cyclones and floods. There are 40,000 houses in South-East Queensland that are exposed to high or medium flood risk. The argument is put that if we were to simply make those houses less prone to flood and cyclone risks the savings to the system would be immense.

One other area I think is probably relevant right now, given the bushfire situation in southern Australia, is that, based on the cost of vegetation management in the electricity industry, a five-metre clearance around a house that was monitored and insisted on by a government would cost about $200 a year, according to the system. They are saying that doing this to 71,000 houses in Melbourne, in the high-risk area, would cost about $15.3 million a year and reduce bushfire risk by 30 per cent and therefore lead to an annual reduction of $14.7 million in disaster costs in those areas. So it is an investment worth looking at. Just remember that the cost includes the monitoring of the five-metre vegetation barrier.

There are plenty of other things we could be doing in terms of water and housing. The issue is certainly not one that is going to go away. It is one that we need to put a lot more time and effort into than we do. I note that the Bureau of Meteorology said that they are going to begin to monitor heatwaves in the future. That is great. It is something we absolutely must do. It raises the further issue that, while the costs have been measured in here, a lot of work has also been done on the cost of the trauma and loss for people—not just for property but for people as well.

The suggestion is that cost of the most recent floods in Queensland continued for more than three years, according to figures produced by the Red Cross. That is, for every individual affected, the cost of the damage to their lives—the loss they dealt with and the trauma their families experienced—continued for three years. It seems just so obvious to me that we should have a proper look at this and take into account recent inquiries from the Productivity Commission which suggest that subsidising insurance or rebuilding like for like without serious consideration of whether these are sustainable things to do are not the answer. They are quick fixes that will not get us anywhere in the future.

I saw on a program on SBS last night that Chicago is putting in kilometres and kilometres of 23-metre-wide tunnel under its current sewerage and infrastructure systems, so that the city will never flood. This will cost over $1 billion for every half a kilometre of tunnel. It might be something that the good burghers of Chicago can afford—and who knows how long it will work for—but it is not something that is sustainable throughout Australia and certainly it is not something that is sustainable in our part of Australia, Queensland.

We need to think of ways in which we can live with nature, we can plan not to end up with floods that cause such devastation. Some of that is going to be a case of us getting out of the way of the flood, as much as anything else, but there are going to be political and capital costs involved in that. It is going take not just bipartisan support from politicians but a concerted effort from industry of all sorts, including the social services industry, and governments of all varieties for us to come up with sensible solutions that mean that in the future we can have sustainable responses to natural disasters, which are not going to go away, which are going to cost more and which we must do something about.

The round table report says that an annual program of Australian government expenditure on pre-disaster resilience of $250 million a year for all of Australia has the potential to generate budget savings of $12.2 billion for all levels of government, including $9.8 billion coming to the federal government. It would reduce disaster costs by 50 per cent by 2050.

I was disappointed that this report did not receive more interest and more coverage when it was published late last year. I suppose it got caught up in one of two other things that were happening at the time. I encourage all members of the Senate to look at this report and think about how we are sensibly going to sustain our spending on natural disasters in Australia into the future and, more importantly, build the resilience of our infrastructure—our things—and the resilience of the people in those communities.

Senate adjourned at 21:41