STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator McGRATH (Queensland) (12:44): Queensland is Australia's most disaster-prone state. Last summer alone, 74 of Queensland's 77 local government areas were impacted by disasters, including two cyclones and monsoonal flooding that lasted for five months. Communities across my state were devastated.
This is not an occasional problem for Queenslanders. It is a fact of life. Under current arrangements, the Commonwealth provides a majority two-thirds/one-third split of recovering funding to aid communities impacted by these disasters.
However, the Albanese Labor government now wants to move towards a fifty-fifty funding arrangement between the Commonwealth and the states. The Labor government calls this fair. Queenslanders call it something else, because Queensland will be the state most affected by these changes, with support slashed to local councils dealing with floods, fires and storms.
The councils least capable of absorbing these additional costs are the ones expected to shoulder them. Berkshire Council, Doomadgee Aboriginal Shire Council, Carpentaria Shire Council and Mornington Island's Aboriginal council recently travelled to Canberra to warn the government about what this means for remote Queensland. Consider Berkshire.
It has a population of around 550 people and generates around $3.5 million a year in rates. The cost of the 2023 floods to the council was more than $211 million, including more than $200 million just to restore roads. A council collecting $3.5 million in rates cannot possibly absorb a substantial additional share of a $200 million disaster bill.
In the 2023 floods communities were without supplies for up to six months. The road network was repeatedly cut off. The Burketown airstrip flooded, meaning fixed-wing aircraft could not land, and helicopters became essential for bringing in supplies and evacuating people.
The entire town of Burketown had to be evacuated by helicopter. Grazier stock was wiped out. The suffering was imaginable.
This is the reality of disaster in remote Queensland. Of course, the Prime Minister is yet to visit this particular shire. Carpentaria Shire tells a similar story.
Between 2020 and 2025 it received more than $496 million in federal disaster relief and resilience funding. A 20 per cent shortfall in Commonwealth funding over that period would have represented more than $99 million, yet Carpentaria's annual rates revenue is around only $9.8 million. These councils simply do not have the capacity to absorb costs of this magnitude.
It's not just the councils in north-west Queensland who are affected. I regularly work with members of the South West Queensland Regional Organisation of Councils. They are just concerned about what this means for them.
In just four days in March last year, parts of southern and south-western Queensland had more than their entire average annual rainfall. This caused widespread rainfall. Towns like Adavale were evacuated, and recovery efforts don't come cheap.
Labor says its reforms will simplify the system and reduce red tape, but administrative reform should not become an excuse for Labor to strip funding from communities. You can make the system simpler without reducing Commonwealth funding. Queensland's Minister for Disaster Recovery, Ann Leahy, along with the Crisafulli LNP government, are standing up against these cruel cuts.
Mayors from across Queensland have travelled to Canberra to make their voices heard, yet their pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Labor aren't interested and Labor ministers won't even meet with them. The reality is Labor's funding cuts will result in situations where communities are left stranded, essential infrastructure lies in ruin and the suffering associated with these disasters is prolonged.
Queensland's councils need certainty. The Commonwealth has a responsibility to support Australians when disaster strikes. For communities right across Queensland, that support cannot come with an unfunded bill they simply cannot pay.
Queenslanders pay their taxes; they deserve a Commonwealth government that stands with them when disaster strikes, and the current Labor government does not do that. In 1970, the Australian government began deploying troops to protect RAAF Base Butterworth in Penang, Malaysia. Over the following 19 years, some 9,000 Australians served as members of Rifle Company Butterworth, or RCB.
These troops had the responsibility of protecting the base from communist rebels during the second Malayan emergency. They were trained in counterinsurgency warfare. They were deployed with their weapons, issued live ammunition and given orders permitting the use of lethal force.
This was no walk in the park. Yet, despite the conditions and risks, the service of RCB veterans has up until this point been classified as 'peacetime' in nature. It is another example of what is wrong with Defence in this country.
RCB veterans are therefore not entitled to recognition or additional entitlements and compensation bestowed upon other Australian soldiers deployed to foreign combat zones. Meanwhile, New Zealand has got its act together and recognised the first Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment deployments to Butterworth air base as operational service. This is a cause that is close to my heart and one that I've spoken about in this chamber on numerous occasions.
I'm fortunate enough to know a number of RCB veterans from Queensland. They include Graeme Mickelberg, who served as a platoon commander in 1975. I've worked with Graeme and his comrades over many years on this issue.
These veterans have been fighting for recognition of their service for decades. They have commissioned their own expert advice, provided evidence, appeared before inquiries and repeatedly made their case to successive governments. Finally, they got the independent review they'd been asking for.
In 2023, the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal conducted an extensive inquiry into the service of Rifle Company Butterworth. The tribunal finally examined their service in detail and it reached a clear conclusion: their service was not 'peacetime'; it was 'non-warlike' and, therefore, RCB veterans were entitled to more benefits under the Veterans' Entitlements Act.
That finding is important, and it offered this government the opportunity to write an historic wrong. Yet I stand here, three years later, and nothing has happened. It's a classic case of delay, deny and die.
Last month, ABC Sunshine Coast reporter Jessica Ross produced a fantastic report into this issue. As part of her investigation, she requested an interview with the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Matt Keogh. The minister declined to speak to her.
Instead, he had a spokesperson do his dirty work. This spokesperson told the ABC that the recommendations of the appeals tribunal inquiry were 'being considered through whole-of-government processes'. How absolutely insulting to these veterans and their families.
There is no shortage of information before the government. There is a shortage of action. These men are getting older and many have died waiting because this government is putting in practice 'delay, deny and die'.
This government should be ashamed. This is why I say to the Albanese Labor government and the minister that enough is enough. Rifle Company Butterworth veterans served Australia with courage and distinction and they deserve better than another round of bureaucratic delays.
These men answered Australia's call when their country needed them. The least this government can do is honour its obligations and deliver the recognition and support these veterans have earned. We sleep safely in our beds at night because, for generations, men and women have left this country, gone overseas and put their lives on the line.
The least that this government can do, the least that Australia can do, is ensure that these men, the RCB veterans, are appropriately recognised for their service.