I come into this place at the start of each day fairly calm, focused and willing to be reasonable. But it only takes listening to one or two speakers opposite for my blood to be boiling about the games that get played about things that are so fundamental. There is no doubt that we support the principle of additional natural disaster funding. There can be no doubt about that. What is disappointing is to see that those opposite feel the need to play off the need for additional funding against the need for investment in education infrastructure. We should be at a point in this country where—guess what—we can do both.

I have also spoken multiple times already in the last couple of weeks about the extraordinary efforts that are being made by volunteers and our emergency services personnel. As someone who comes from what's been described as possibly the most fire-prone place on the planet, I absolutely understand how important getting this right is. We not only do fires in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury; we do flood too. So getting this right is fundamental for the future of my community. I'd remind those opposite that at times they're not quite so supportive of our emergency services personnel. I seem to recall them describing our Victorian firefighters as union thugs. So how about we all think about what this bill is about and try to get this bill right rather than play politics with it?

It is a fundamental responsibility of government to protect Australians, to make sure they are supported when they're faced with emergencies and natural disasters and to properly fund relief efforts when those disasters hit. But this Liberal government failed miserably to do that in 2013 when, on the day homes were burning down in the Blue Mountains, it changed the funding arrangements so that people isolated from their homes or experiencing severe power shortages couldn't access emergency payments. It changed the criteria. If your home was destroyed or damaged or you were injured, you could access the immediate payment, but not if you were in any other sort of disadvantage because of the bushfires. It was a heartless decision, and it impacted many people in Winmalee, Yellow Rock, Springwood and Mount Victoria six years ago. It leaves me just a tad sceptical about the legislation that we're considering today. So I think it's incumbent upon us all to try and get it right.

My view isn't helped by the lack of federal infrastructure investment in our community, or any investment for that matter, following the fires. My street and many others still bear the scars of cars that burnt to the bitumen. For six years, the marks from where my car and my neighbours' cars were destroyed are a still-present reminder of the more than a dozen houses that were lost in our street. One of the reasons for that is that funding for the clean-up and the restoration of services after a bushfire is an expensive business. Our councils didn't have spare funds lying around, and state governments—certainly in New South Wales—have been reluctant to provide additional funding beyond the immediate response. This federal government has done very little in support—no boosting of local government funding for this specific purpose. What's more, in the six years since our fires, it's hard to pinpoint anything the federal government has done to help us or the wider Blue Mountains community be more prepared and better equipped to deal with any repeat of the 2013 bushfires.

I think it is entirely appropriate that this bill be sent to a Senate inquiry for closer examination, because there are a number of issues that it raises for me. One is the role of the federal government in natural disaster and emergency response funding. Is it preparedness, mitigation, adaptation or simply relief following a disaster, or is it all of those? My underlying concern with this bill, as it's written, is that it ignores the recommendations of the Productivity Commission that the federal government should be primarily focused on mitigation, and that comes with a pretty hefty price tag. Another concern is the appropriateness of this mechanism, a fund essentially outsourced to the market with a specific amount allowed to be used each year: $150 billion. There are many, many questions that raises. My third concern is that we need to look at the consequences of this approach for the insurance industry and whether we are in some way letting them off the hook. How does this intersect with their responsibilities? So these are some of the issues I want to touch on.

In addition, we have to address the issue that the government's choosing to take from higher education to fund this. I feel very cynical about this chess move. While the rainforests are burning in Queensland and New South Wales and people are feeling the heat from the unseasonally early bushfires, this government's sneaking around with a tricky move, as if it's been waiting for the perfect conditions in which to bring this legislation on. Fancy someone saying to you, 'You can have an investment in university or TAFE, or you can have disaster and emergency relief funding—one or the other. You choose.' In fact, if this were a decent government, a government that wasn't slippery, we wouldn't be making that choice.
Let's talk about this fund. The explanatory memorandum talks about a lot of things that this fund is for: mitigation and emergency relief. The minister says that the design of the disaster response and recovery funding programs will be informed by advice from the director-general of Emergency Management Australia, but there is no mention of the work that the Productivity Commission did. It's basically been ignored. The Turnbull government rejected a call for a $200 million-a-year natural disaster mitigation fund. That was just mitigation, and that's well above the $150 million that this government says it will allow to be drawn out of this fund.

The Productivity Commission argued that investing in mitigation and preparedness was more efficient than spending money on recovery. It just makes common sense, to be able to invest and prepare rather than wait for it to happen. Yet none of the funding from this fund, from what we've been able to see, will be available prior to a disaster. You have to have had a disaster to be able to prepare for one. That is illogical and definitely needs to be looked at.
When the government responded to the Productivity Commission's recommendations, the then minister said that mitigation was the states' problem. I think those questions really need to be cleared up: what is this fund going to be used for, and what does 'post-disaster resilience' really mean? It's defined in a subclause. It's a shoddy piece of legislation without clarity around those really key issues. Are you telling me that in the Blue Mountains we could have used this fund for the suburbs that were hit in the 2013 bushfires—but what about the rest of the towns and suburbs of the Blue Mountains? Does Wentworth Falls miss out and does Warrimoo miss out, because they haven't had a fire in the last six years? When does it have to have happened? Is 2013 too long ago, and is the lower Blue Mountains excluded from this effort as well? They're some of the issues.

My cynicism comes from my lived experience of this government. There was a fantastic program developed by Gateway Family Services in Blaxland to help community services respond to a disaster, to help them prepare to respond to a disaster in their own communities. Community service organisations play a huge role when these things happen, yet they themselves are often not well prepared. The people who developed the Walk With program, developed by Gateway Family Services, said they did it because it would have helped them so much to have all the information, ideas, models and evidence in one place, in one program, to tap into. So they went out and developed this resource. That was thanks to a small amount of funding from the New South Wales government. But that funding's run out and there is nothing from this government that would allow that program to continue. There is nothing that would allow Gateway Family Services to continue training up other community groups around the country and providing a resource that, today, could have been accessed by people in northern New South Wales and Queensland. They're the sorts of things that are an infrastructure of a different kind, and I'm interested to see whether this fund will stretch to those.

When I look at the things that can be funded, I'm interested to see that it talks not only about tailored financial assistance to help people and organisations recover and build economic sustainability and resilience but also about primary producers or small businesses. Does that extend to home-based businesses? In the 2013 fires many of our business people who worked from home were completely excluded from any sort of support. So does this have a different set of rules? And what does it do for horticultural businesses that naturally get wiped out in bushfire situations? It also talks about economic aid packages, and, I can tell you, these are desperately needed. The tourism community of the Blue Mountains desperately needed support—on the one hand, to describe where tourism wasn't affected, and, on the other, to quickly let people know when things were back to normal. In principle, those things sound terrific, but, with the limit of $150 million a year that has been put on it, I just don't see how you can do all the things that need to be done. That $150 million won't be reviewed for 10 years, so we're stuck with this limit—this false limit, unless there's a basis for it. But the legislation doesn't indicate any way in which this figure has been arrived at.

For me, all of these things raise big questions about the actual operation of the fund. I have to say that I'm not filled with confidence that the amount is sufficient, particularly with the likelihood of increased unpredictable weather events as a consequence of climate change. I note that this mentions the issues of adaption, tools to better understand local climate variability and advice on climate risk applied to specific locations for future land use planning. I can see that there is some suggestion in here that this is possibly part of adaption, but what happens when the $150 million runs out? Assuming this runs for the July to June financial year, what happens if it runs out in September, or October, or January or April? What happens for a natural disaster in May? These are the sorts of questions this government needs to talk through—needs to explain if it already has answers—and find answers so that we are designing something that will meet the needs of communities like mine, who have been through this and know that we will go through it again.

The other issue relates to where this money is coming from. To take away money from education is a pretty heartless thing to do. We talk about long-term investment—I'm sure I hear those opposite talk about being sensible, long-term investors—yet I see absolutely no evidence of it. Labor established the Education Investment Fund so that we could invest the capital necessary for Australia's future. This government continues to fail to invest in the infrastructure and human capital needed in education so that we have growth across all our society—not so that those who already have can have more.

The EIF was a key plank in our move to transform Australia's education and research capability and to address the years of underinvestment that happened during the Howard years. By nearly doubling the former Higher Education Endowment Fund, we were able to broaden and make substantial investment in the renewal and refurbishment of universities and vocational institutions, as well as major research institutions. As the member whose electorate houses Western Sydney University, I know that those facilities always need upgrading. Our TAFEs need improvement. We have wonderful opportunities for horticulture, for really clever stuff that would allow us to be exporting to niche markets in Asia, yet our TAFE has a glasshouse that is decades old and doesn't meet the standards that employers would expect for people to be trained in. So, there is a huge need for this sort of investment. During the last election, I was very pleased to be able to commit funding to upgrade Richmond TAFE's greenhouses to make them state-of-the-art. It's very disappointing that this government won't be doing the same.

The decision by this government to take money from one sector to give to a very needy sector is a cynical exercise. It