ABC Brisbane
HOST: Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard joins me this morning. Prime Minister, good morning to you, thank you for coming on this morning.
Can you just give south-east Queensland a briefing on what sort of Defence Force services are assisting in the evacuation of the Bundaberg Hospital which is just underway now?
PM: I certainly can Steve, and thank you for the opportunity.
At every level, federal authorities are working with people in Queensland to help people get through. We have made Defence Force assets available.
Four Blackhawk helicopters have been assisting with evacuations in Bundaberg, obviously that's the centre of so much of the concern.
100 personnel will be deployed there too to assist in Bundaberg.
We also have aircraft - the Hercules aircraft people are familiar with - two of them that are assisting with the evacuation of patients from the Bundaberg Hospital to Brisbane, and they are journeying back and forth, so taking stuff from Brisbane that is required for efforts in Bundaberg as well as evacuating hospital patients back the other way.
We'll also be making available one of the huge aircraft - the C-17s - to transport equipment that is needed in Bundaberg for the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service and for the Queensland Ambulance Service.
HOST: Where does the C-17 come in, do you know?
PM: It's already being deployed, so I can't say to you it's in the air right now but it's on task.
HOST: I understand, so two Hercules, four Blackhawks, 100 Defence Force personnel and a C-17 [Globemaster].
This would be one of the more major civilian operations that Australian defence forces have had to do, at least in my memory of recent times. Do you know off the top of your head?
PM: Certainly in the floods of 2011 and then when we faced the cyclone as well we deployed considerable Defence Force assistance then.
So I can't do the stocktake in my head for you about how much was deployed then, but we've certainly made available helicopters and C-17s and Hercules aircraft before.
They're very useful when you've got search and rescue and you've got evacuations.
You would probably recall that in 2011 we had to evacuate a hospital and an aged care facility because of the cyclone, so in those circumstances we've turned out Defence assets in Queensland in the past.
HOST: How long will we have them for, Prime Minister?
PM: Well as long as they're needed. At every level we're working with Queensland authorities. Steve, I wish I could put this differently but the truth is our systems between us and the states and us and Queensland in particular have been tried and tested time and time again.
Because we've had to face so much in Queensland, so we know how to work together, we know how to do it well, we know how to start doing it.
We don't wait until there's a big crisis underway. We've got people working together in anticipation so that when you need to go, everybody's ready to go.
HOST: Just let me interrupt very briefly.
For listeners in Brisbane, if you have cars parked in Black Street in Milton, it's about to flood. You might like to move your vehicle immediately.
So this is for listeners in Milton in Brisbane City, if you have cars parked in Black Street, Milton, and in Hague Road in Milton, your cars may be flooded.
So if you've got those cars in those low-lying areas of Milton, there's a number of cars in the street there, you'd better move them quickly, they may be flooded.
I'm speaking with Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard. This - I assume this has been declared a formal federal disaster area - is there some sort of disaster funding available for residents of places like Bundaberg, Maryborough, Gympie and even up further north?
PM: Yes, this is a disaster so we have been doing disaster declarations, working with Premier Newman and all of his team.
What we've done already is working with the state government we've commenced what is called the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements.
They're active in 46 Local Government Areas. And to just give you a sense of how widespread that means it is, you've got 73 Local Government Areas in Queensland.
We're talking about 46 of them, so in those areas various payments have been triggered, including in a large number of them the Personal Hardship Assistance Scheme has been triggered.
So that does help people out when they're in very, very difficult circumstances.
We are also moving to trigger what is called the Australian Government Disaster Relief Payment. That is first instance money to help people through.
We are working through in Bundaberg on the absolute emergency response so we'll have something to say about Bundaberg and recovery in coming days, but we want people to be focussed there on the absolute emergency response.
HOST: In some of the regional areas further north of the southeast corner, it hasn't got the sort of prominence, but the number of dairy farms and others have been entirely washed away, farmers have lost everything, all of their crops, their equipment, their cattle and a whole lot more.
They're available to access this funding fairly quickly as I understand it?
PM: When we trigger payments under the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements there's assistance for personal hardship, there's also assistance that flows through for essential public assets, things that have been lost that the whole community needs.
And then we tend to work through too on assisting primary producers and small businesses with things like concessional loans. So as we move into recovery we will be working with the Queensland Government on providing this assistance.
Direct from the Federal Government is a hardship payment for families we have, this is the Australian Government Disaster Relief Payment.
We have triggered that for Gladstone, Gympie and the Fraser Coast, and of course we'll have something more to say about Bundaberg in coming days.
But right now in Bundaberg we're saying please, focus on the emergency. There are evacuations underway.
We want to keep everybody focussed on what is dealing with the immediate circumstances there and then as we move into recovery in the coming days we'll have something more to say.
HOST: I'm speaking with Australia's Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.
Prime Minister, I'm not sure if you've been advised but one of the issues that came up late Sunday, sort of north and west of Rockhampton right up to the Cape and the Gulf was that because of the flooding, one of the major Telstra cables was wiped out.
And this knocked out all of the emergency services - Triple 0 services - off of the Telstra system.
Is there any way the Federal Government can talk with Telstra to look at future-proofing, flood-proofing, disaster-proofing their cabling?
They knew about it but there was absolutely nothing they could do about it because the flood waters were preventing the Telstra guys from fixing it.
Now that presented some major problems when the Triple 0 service went down. You may or not have been briefed on this I don't know, but it was a major issue for people from Rockhampton North.
PM: I certainly was briefed on it and it was the subject of discussion between me and Premier Newman on the weekend.
So I've had the opportunity to speak periodically to Premier Newman. I've been getting very, very regular briefings about what's happening.
Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan's on the ground in Queensland and integrated into the efforts there and I will be coming to Queensland myself during the course of the week.
So yes, I was very well aware of this Telstra issue and very concerned about it.
When people can't dial Triple 0, that's a substantial problem.
My understanding is that the essential cabling is, there is a workaround now which means that Triple 0 is available to people across Queensland, perhaps some residual problems, but not the huge loss of Triple 0 that you're raising with me now and which was so concerning on the weekend.
We will follow up with Telstra about what happened here and what, if any, engineering solutions are available for the future.
I don't want to say to you I have those solutions at my fingertips now.
At this stage what we do through our emergency management people and Defence is working on the emergency situation itself.
And then lessons learnt are digested once the emergency's been dealt with.
HOST: I ask this because if climate change predictions are accurate and are related to these sorts of events, it's likely that we'll have this problem again and so we need to somehow future-proof the infrastructure of Australia.
PM: I agree with you that if there's a lesson that can be learnt here about the future and how we can make sure that Triple 0 services are available in the future, then let's learn it.
And let's make sure it and let's make sure it's in operation for the future.
Every time our nation has to deal with a natural disaster situation we learn something.
One of the big things, for example, we learnt out of the Black Saturday fires in Victoria was the need for mobile warnings.
And that mobile warning system has been tested now in bushfire and in these flood situations and is getting information to people in a way that wasn't possible before.
So we do learn, and then something else happens as happened this time with the loss of this Telstra facility, and we learn for the future.
HOST: It's like that Dorothea Mackellar poem about Australia, I love a sunburnt country.
You were inspecting bushfires in Gippsland a day ago and now you're coming up to inspect floods in the north of Australia.
PM: It's not lost of me Steve, that's for sure.
I said at the time of the bushfire emergency in Victoria that I would go and meet with people who had been affected and the firefighters who had done such amazing work, as well as talk to people who'd felt the pressure of it and who had lost their homes or lost part of their property.
So I honoured that commitment yesterday and was looking at blackened landscape, burnt trees, black earth.
I saw some homes that just were completely destroyed, some that were remarkably saved because the bushfire had encircled them, but the CFA, the local firefighters, had managed to save the house.
They were the images in my eyes directly yesterday, then whenever I saw an image coming from Queensland it's of wild weather and cascading water and that then causing lots of stress, lots of problems, flooded homes and tragically too we've lost a tiny young boy.
HOST: Yes, sadly four deaths from the floods here in Queensland and they've still got bushfire warnings in western Queensland as well.
PM: Yes, well doesn't that say something about Australia.
If you had the ability to take some water from one part and just put it on another part and put those fires out in Victoria then you would. But life's not like that.
But the way in which we do pull together in these times, whether it's fire or whether it's flood, one thing that's common around the country is the remarkable way that people pull together and look after each other in the most difficult of times.
HOST: ABC radio news just reported the comments made by your partner Tim Mathieson. Did you think his joke was funny or offensive?
PM: Tim's apologised for a joke that was in poor taste. I think that that was the right thing for him to do, to offer an apology.
HOST: Do you think we need to lighten up a bit and not be so judgmental about people who are attempting to lighten the mood, or just use simple levity to change the atmosphere?
PM: Tim's very passionate about men's health causes and he does go round the country talking to men about getting regular check-ups.
Men aren't necessarily all that good at taking themselves off to their GP and talking sometimes about pretty hard to talk about things.
So he does try and persuade people to make sure that they get the checks done that are recommended. So it's important to get that message across.
Obviously there's various ways of getting that message across, but he's certainly acknowledged that the joke cracked last night was in poor taste.
HOST: Look I really appreciate you giving me so much of your time this morning. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, thank you.
PM: Thanks Steve.
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