CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr LITTLEPROUD (Maranoa) (10:31): I rise to speak on the government's recent announcement of changes to the national disaster recovery arrangements. This was unfortunately done late on a Friday afternoon on 6 June. This came about from the Colvin review, by Andrew Colvin, an eminent Australian, in fact, one who played a prominent role during the Black Summer.

He helped me while I was emergency services minister in that recovery process. He undertook a review of the arrangements with the states. They have become too complex.

And my only criticism of the minister is that, before engaging with the states in a constructive way reviewing those arrangements, the minister announced a fifty-fifty cut of those funding arrangements, which is a significant change from what had been done previously—instead of working collaboratively with the states in understanding the fit-for-purpose nature of some of those programs that are provided.

In fact, the federal government provides 80 per cent of some of those, right down to 50 per cent. When you take into consideration the weighting of it, some of those states will now be getting less than 50 per cent. Some, like my home state, Queensland, are getting around 64 per cent of federal funding from those arrangements.

So it would have been wiser to engage with state governments, rather than getting their backs up straight away, and constructively work through a fit-for-purpose model that does have disaster recovery arrangements that are nationally consistent, because that has been a challenge. And so I ask the minister to continue on that journey. But, also, the minister must understand—she is considering lifting the thresholds at which disaster recovery arrangements start.

At the moment, that's around $240,000. They are asking the states to lift that to over $2 million. To put that into perspective, in Maranoa, for the little regional councils that I have, where some have a rate base of less than $1 million, to have to come up with $2 million before you even get any state or federal funding is impossible.

Therefore, what we need to do is get back to first principles. The first principle is that this has always been a bilateral agreement between state and federal government, and it should remain that way; local government should never have to pay that. It should be an arrangement where the state and federal governments now sit down and work this out.

But I ask the minister to also consider bringing some competitiveness into the tender process, particularly for outback communities. For mine up in Birdsville, roads that are on the South Australian side, like the Birdsville track, the 'inside track', and the Cordillo Downs access road, actually wait on someone from Adelaide to come up 1000 kilometres to fix them to be able to give access to Birdsville, which is less than 10 kilometres from the South Australian border.

What we need to do is have a competitive process where local councils can actually engage and tender to fix those roads. That is what these negotiations should also include. When we don't have that, we see perverse outcomes like those in Birdsville now, where the tourists from South Australia aren't coming.

So I ask the minister to include that in her negotiations.