Senate enquiry tells government to reduce its reliance on ADF for disaster recovery efforts

A senate inquiry has been told the federal government needs to reduce its reliance on the defence force to clean- up after natural disasters.

Transcript

00:00The inquiry has been told that the ADF has a finite capacity to respond to disasters

00:08and should only be used as a last resort.

00:11So the ADF told the Senate Inquiry that too often its personnels are being deployed to

00:18do rescues and to help with the cleanup and recovery and that's taking time away from

00:23national security.

00:25Now look here in Queensland, we're certainly no stranger to disasters and we've had our

00:29fair share of ADF help too.

00:32Just the most recently in 2022, South East Queensland was devastated by flooding.

00:37The Brisbane River here peaked above the major flood level at 3.85 metres and across the

00:44region, riverine flooding and overland flow and heavy intense rainfall just devastated

00:48thousands of property and displacing thousands of people and many lives were lost.

00:53And at the same time we also saw those terrible devastating floods in northern New South Wales

00:59and just to give you an example, during that time around 7,000 ADF personnel were on standby

01:06to provide help in both Queensland and New South Wales and with the impact of more frequent

01:12and more intense weather events, this Senate Committee has been looking at Australia's

01:16resilience to disasters and it's urging the Government to tell them basically their reliance

01:23on the ADF is unsustainable and that they should be looking at other options.

01:28One of the key recommendations was that the Government scale up Disaster Relief Australia

01:33which is a group of army and emergency service veterans who can be deployed to help with both

01:40you know the cleanup and recovery with disasters and that group since 2017 has deployed around

01:464,500 volunteers to help with disasters across the country but it only has funding until 2026

01:54so the Committee recommended that that be scaled up. Some of the other recommendations

01:59are streamlining funding and also finding ways to incentivise young people to join

02:06volunteer groups to ensure that there's enough people to volunteer in the wake of disasters.