Labor has used a pitch to the party faithful in Queensland to unveil its first tranche of spending from a federal disaster recovery fund to shore up homes in cyclone-prone regions.
Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Saturday said $20 million from the disaster ready fund would go towards extending the Queensland household resilience program for another three years.
“This will allow up to 1100 more homes in regional Queensland to be made more disaster-resilient, helping to limit the damage when storm season rolls around,” he told the Queensland Labor conference in Mackay.
Dr Chalmers used his keynote speech to spruik his government’s first-year achievements, saying it was making progress on all fronts and pointing to recent wage rises for workers on low and award wages.
“We are proud of the progress we’ve made together in our first year, but we know the job’s only just getting started,” he said.
“It will take more than a couple of budgets and more than one term to clean up the mess our opponents left behind.”
Dr Chalmers lashed the former coalition government’s record in front of the partisan crowd, while dismissing Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as the “leader of the leftovers”.
“Listening to Peter Dutton is like tuning in to an RSL cover-band of the Abbott-Morrison years,” he said.
Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt, who was in Mackay for the conference, said Australia spent far more on disaster recovery than preparing for weather events and that mindset needed to change.
“By making homes more resilient, we can help to reduce the impacts of future disasters, while bringing down insurance costs in the meantime,” he said.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the state was affected by more natural disasters than anywhere else in the country and many people in at-risk areas were uninsured.