VIDEO INTERVIEW
PARLIAMENT HOUSE
THURSDAY, 29 FEBRUARY 2024
SUBJECT: BUSHFIRE RESILIENCE AP

My name is Susan Templeman, Federal Member for Macquarie and I’m very pleased to be following on from my colleague Fiona Phillips, the Member for Gilmore.

We both experienced within our communities shocking bushfires and I know my community is thinking of people in Victoria who are right now facing, and have been through a terrible time with bushfires.

I represent an area that insurers described as, the place in NSW with the most homes at risk from bushfires, and that’s the Blue Mountains. And that's why I'm really pleased to see that 355 homes have been accessed using the new Bushfire Resilience app to allow you to access your home and determine just how resilient is.

Now, I'm not someone who pushes something out to my community without having tried it myself, so I jumped on to this app myself to see when it was launched in October.

I think it's really important to remember that my community went through the terrible 2019 and 2020 bushfires, the Black Summer bushfire, but I also lost my home 10 years ago to a bushfire. So I now have a home that is built to the highest possible standard and I wanted to see how did this app rated my home and what would the consequences be.

There's nothing more I can do on the externals of my home to make it more resilient. I also, by comparison, got my mum to do her home, and her home is much older and it certainly came back with a whole lot of very practical things she can do that were easy to understand and clear.

This Bush Fire Resilience Building app has provided practical advice to people about the steps you can take that are shown to improve the resilience of your home.

The Albanese Government's $3 million investment in this app will already be paying dividends for people who are taking that advice allowing them to make their home more resilient for the next bushfire.

I think the other really key thing about it is as soon as I put in my details with my very resilient home built to what we call ‘Flame Zone standard’, I got an e-mail saying that National Australia Bank would like to talk if I was interested, about a special product, a mortgage product that would offer me a lower mortgage rate because of the resilience of my home.

Now that's the sort of next step that we're really looking to partner up with the banks and insurers so that this information is used to help people have a better deal when it comes to their mortgages and their insurers.

This is the really practical steps that the Albanese Government is taking to help people. Now, the app is not going to stop a bushfire, but what it will do is allow homeowners to get the information to know what upgrades to do. And perhaps things that they thought might be useful might be less useful than they imagined.

There are 18,000 people around the country who have trialled this app in its first few months, pretty much 1000 a week. Now we want to see more people use it. There are thousands and tens of thousands of homes around the country that would benefit from this. And not just in regional areas like mine. Any area that nestles against bush, like places I grew up in Sydney that are right on the bush, and they would also benefit from knowing what they can do to make their home more resilient should the worst happen.

I’d urge people to give this a go. It’s part of a suite of things the Albanese Government is doing – we’re not waiting for fires to come and we’re saying to people let’s get as prepared as we can, let’s get communities as prepared as we can.

Disaster ready fund – will allow funding for preventative and mitigation, betterment projects, our roads are more resilient to bushfires and other natural disasters. This is the stuff that is really going to make a difference to communities like mine, when the next fire or flood comes.

So, to anyone that lives near bush, get the app, download it – the Bushfire Resilience Building App, it’s easy to use, will provide you with practical advice and this is something practical that the Albanese government is delivering.