ABC RADIO NATIONAL BREAKFAST - ERF
March 02, 2022
SENATOR MURRAY WATT
SHADOW MINISTER FOR NORTHERN AUSTRALIA
SHADOW MINISTER FOR DISASTER AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
SHADOW MINISTER FOR QUEENSLAND RESOURCES
LABOR SENATOR FOR QUEENSLAND
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO NATIONAL BREAKFAST
WEDNESDAY, 2 MARCH 2022
SUBJECTS: Scott Morrison’s unused $4.8 billion disaster fund that’s done nothing but is “operating as envisaged”; Government fudging figures by including COVID payments as natural disaster support; Lismore left off Government priority list for flood mitigation funding.
PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: Murray Watt is the Shadow Minister for Disaster and Emergency Management and he joins us from Brisbane. Murray, lovely to speak to you. There's almost $5 billion in the Emergency Response Fund, how much has so far been handed out to help communities prepare for natural disasters?
MURRAY WATT, SHADOW MINISTER FOR EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT: Good morning, Patricia. So far, and bear in mind we're now in our third disaster season since this fund was first established by Scott Morrison and his government. So far, only $50 million of what is now a $4.8 billion fund has been released by the Commonwealth to fund flood mitigation projects. And what we established at Senate Estimates recently is that not one of those projects that's been given money has actually begun construction. There's a handful that are in pre-construction negotiations. But as I say, we're now in our third disaster season and there's not a single disaster mitigation project where construction has actually begun, let alone completed under this fund, which is just a shocking lack of preparation for the kind of floods that we're seeing right now.
KARVELAS: The fund is an investment vehicle which allows $200 million to be drawn in any year for recovery and preparedness where other disaster funding is insufficient. The Emergency Management Minister Bridget McKenzie told us yesterday that it's “operating as envisaged”. She's right, isn't she? The fund is only supposed to be used once other sources of funding have been exhausted.
WATT: Well, I was pretty stunned by those remarks Patricia and frankly, I think it says a lot about the Morrison Government. I mean, it's only a Minister in Scott Morrison's government, Mr. Marketing, Mr. Announcement, who could say that announcing a nearly $5 billion fund that doesn't actually do anything means that fund is working exactly as it was envisaged. This fund was established to assist with major disasters, but anyone who's been paying any attention will have seen that in the last couple of years, Australia has gone through unprecedented bushfires. We’re now seeing regions in Australia that have faced unprecedented floods. If these types of disasters don't qualify for funding under the Emergency Response Fund, I don't know what does. Because that's the other thing about this fund, apart from not actually building a single disaster mitigation project in three years, it also hasn't released a cent for disaster recovery. There's $450 million that could have been spent under this fund on disaster recovery. Not a cent has been spent. The only thing that this fund has done is earn over $830 million dollars in interest for the government. That is not what it was set up for. It wasn't set up as a cash cow for the Morrison Government. This is just another phony fund that we've seen from this government who loves to make announcements and doesn't follow through,
KARVELAS: Aren't you overlooking the $12 billion in disaster recovery funding arrangements with local communities?
WATT: This is another thing that the government is exaggerating. They're actually putting out a figure now claiming that they've spent $17 billion on disaster recovery in the last few years. But what they're doing is including about $13 billion that they paid in COVID support. I don't think anyone in their right mind looks at COVID and thinks that it's a natural disaster. Certainly it's a disaster. But the fact that the government has to roll in COVID support payments to bump up their disaster support figures just shows that they haven't done enough to support people recovering from natural disasters.
KARVELAS: It’s emerged this morning the National Resilience and Recovery Agency omitted Lismore from its priority areas for flood mitigation funding just three months ago. It's always easy to be wise in retrospect, but how could funding applications from one of the most flood prone towns in the country be rejected?
WATT: Yeah, this is astounding, Patricia, that this has come to light and in fact, the Federal member for the seat that takes in Lismore, Government member Kevin Hogan, actually raised this in November when Lismore was first omitted from this funding program. So this is a new funding program that the government has set up for disaster preparedness, and Lismore, which everyone knows is one of the most flood prone regions in the entire country, was for some reason omitted as a priority region. And what that meant is that it didn't qualify for the kind of funding that would be available to prepare for the sort of floods that we're seeing. I don't know about you, but every few years I've seen Lismore goes under in a flood and I would have thought they'd be a priority. And I mean, I think that just goes to show that there's so much more that there needs to be done at the federal level in terms of preparing for natural disasters. And that's why one of the announcements that Albo made as part of his Queensland trip in January this year was that we would convert that Emergency Response Fund to being a new Disaster Ready Fund that is completely focused on preparing the country for disasters, investing in flood levees, investing in cyclone shelters, evacuation centres, bushfire prevention, those kinds of things that we need to see some genuine federal investment in, rather than setting up these phony funds that don't do anything.
KARVELAS: Murray Watt we're out of time. Thank you
WATT: Thanks Patricia.
ENDS