Wednesday, 15 October 2025

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (18:28): (1995) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Natural Disaster Recovery, and the action that I seek is for the minister to expedite the processing and approval of outstanding flood recovery funding claims and certified estimates and confirm by what date these will be completed. The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office today released its report Relief and Recovery Funding for the 2022 Floods. The report reveals that the Allan Labor government dragged its feet on approving flood recovery funds for local councils, taking an average of 214 days to approve flood-related claims, and at one stage the average processing time hit a peak of 429 days – well over a year and in fact over 14 months.

Councils can make claims for reimbursement of the cost of relief and recovery activities following a natural disaster. Councils can also submit certified cost estimates for funding approval when they need to reconstruct damaged public assets like roads and bridges. For certified estimates, approval is necessary before the works can start, and we still have 33 of those outstanding. It is troubling that more than three years after the start of the floods in October 2022 there are 44 flood-related claims still in progress and there are 33 certified estimates still waiting to be approved – so the work cannot even start. Many rural and regional councils face very tight budget constraints and struggle to fund all the capital expenditure projects that they would like to deliver for the year. These councils desperately need prompt payment of reimbursement claims, and many are still seeking funding for repairs to roads that were damaged in the floods.

The report revealed that Emergency Recovery Victoria and the Department of Transport and Planning have an agreement that claims with all required documentation will be assessed within four weeks, but they have failed to track the timeline of when claims were first submitted and when all the documents were actually in. The report concludes that it is unlikely the standard is being met, and talking to people on the ground, it is clear to me that lengthy wait times in getting funding claims approved have been a source of great frustration in communities already struggling to recover from the devastation of the floods.

This report shows that Labor does not take flood planning and disaster response seriously and puts bureaucratic red tape ahead of rapid and efficient support to local councils who are trying to rebuild. Those of us who live in the flood-affected areas know how slow flood recovery has been under this government. Some of the important community facilities in my area that have still not been repaired or replaced include the Rochester pool, where residents are facing their fourth long, hot summer without a community pool, the Shepparton Swans Football Netball Club clubrooms and the bocce club in Shepparton.