Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] I join you today from Brisbane, but I can tell you that you don't have to be in Canberra to see that this government is becoming a complete shambles. What we've seen over the last week—with government members voting against the government and fighting with each other and rumblings again about leadership changes on the Liberal Party side—just shows how distracted the Morrison government has become, and Australians are paying the price for this distraction.

Let's take just one example: disaster management. Just this week, we saw the Bureau of Meteorology again warn that we face La Nina conditions, which means more floods and more cyclones across much of our country. We saw the first cyclone emerge just off the Western Australian coast, and, of course, there are terrible floods wreaking havoc in much of New South Wales and other parts of the country. This is a clear reminder that disaster season has begun.

This week I took the opportunity to spend some time in Cairns and visited the Cairns Disaster Coordination Centre with Senator Green and our candidate for Leichhardt, Elida Faith. We saw some great work being done by locals doing excellent things to make sure that the Cairns region is prepared for disaster season, but, unfortunately, their work is not being backed up by the Morrison government. This government continues to sit on what is now a $4.7 billion disaster fund that remains largely unspent. The Emergency Response Fund was announced by this government in April 2019—2½ years ago. It's been available to spend up to $200 million per annum on disaster recovery and mitigation. But, in the time that it's existed, it has earned the government $700 million in interest, and we learned this week that it has only actually spent $17 million on disaster mitigation projects. This fund shouldn't be a government cash cow. It should be keeping Australians safe. The failure of the government is leaving Australians exposed. (Time expired)