Mr TRUSS (Wide Bay—Leader of The Nationals) (14:15): I rise to support the comments of the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in recognising the summer of fighting fires, cleaning up after devastating floods and mourning lost loved ones that has once again confronted Australia this year. Invariably, it is in regional areas that the biggest costs are counted. Fortunately, Ipswich and Brisbane were spared the worst of the flooding this time around, but I acknowledge there has been very substantial damage and loss of property in those areas too. On Australia Day I was officiating at a naturalisation ceremony at Sunshine Beach in my electorate, and someone read the famous Dorothea Mackellar poem about 'droughts and flooding rains'. There was light rain on the roof, but we were all warned what to expect as the day wore on. I thought back to just a week or two earlier, when I had been in Tasmania, as the Prime Minister mentioned, visiting people there who had suffered such severe loss of property and homes and the loss of life associated with the fires in that state. I was also thinking of the great heat wave right across Australia this summer—although when I was in Tasmania it was snowing on Mount Wellington. It demonstrates the enormous contrasts we have in our climate across the nation. Many of the people who suffered in the floods and fires this time around had been through the same emotional and financial wringer in 2010 or 2011, so for them it is difficult to put together the words that would adequately deal with their suffering and loss. It never ceases to amaze me, and it inspires us all, the way in which Australians come together to help one another in these sorts of circumstances. Others have referred to that already; people have come from interstate to help in the clean-up effort, displaying the great Australian hand of mateship, to work together to help get us through these disasters. The floods in Queensland claimed six lives, and the property losses are enormous. We mourn with the families of those who have lost loved ones. I mention in particular a 27-year-old, wheelchair-bound man who suffered from cerebral palsy and who drowned in Widgee Creek, in my own electorate. His parents were rescued some hours later. That is a particularly tragic example of how people with disabilities have much less capacity to deal with these sorts of climatic circumstances than others. But there were, of course, some remarkable examples of survival. I think of the story of Lucy Connolly, from Eidsvold, deserves to be told. She woke up just after midnight to the sound of gurgling water in the house on the farm where she was living. That was the first warning she had of the impending crisis. She called her parents for help; but, as she walked outside her house, she was swept up by the floodwaters. She was swept down the drive to the property gate, over the fence, over the highway and then into a wood plantation on the property across the road. While a lot of the timber had been flattened, she managed eventually to cling to a tree. She was not there long when she realised she was sharing it with a snake—but there was only water around her and nowhere else to go. Fortuitously and quite extraordinarily, an emergency beacon got washed up from a weir three kilometres away, with its light flashing, and rested in a tree not far from her. The rescuers, still in the dark of the early morning, saw this flashing light attracting their attention and then heard her screams, and she was rescued. What an extraordinary example of survival it is. So we mourn with those who have lost loved ones, but we also rejoice that so many people lived through this crisis and can now be part of the rebuilding effort. I want to acknowledge again the rescue workers. I am referring particularly to those in Bundaberg and North Bundaberg, which is actually in the electorate of Flynn. The member for Flynn also has areas like Gayndah, Mundubbera and Eidsvold, which were particularly badly affected by this flooding. The members for Wright and Maranoa have the Lockyer Valley and parts of the Scenic Rim—which were significantly affected—and parts of the South Burnett and of the Western Downs as well. They all worked hard to try and get through this disaster. I acknowledge that in Rockhampton there are still floodwaters that have not yet cleared. Electricity was out for many days. There will be no gas in Wide Bay, I am told, for several weeks. The phone services were lost, including, very embarrassingly, the triple-0 network. That is obviously an issue we need to address for the future. Central and North Queensland did not have the triple-0 network for several days. People who rely on wireless telephones or internet were similarly affected—indeed, the mobile phone network was also out—once the electricity was lost in most places. Without electricity, it only takes a day or two for the batteries to go flat and then all communication is lost. So there is a need to look at some of those issues. The final point I make is that there has been a lot of talk about betterment: the need to rebuild facilities to make them better than they were. I visited Gayndah, and the mayor showed me their water intake facility out of the river, which was destroyed in 2011 and rebuilt exactly the same as it was and has now been destroyed again. If it had been built just a couple of metres higher, that issue would not have arisen. So I think we need to work with the various tiers of government to find ways to make sure that we learn from the experiences of infrastructure being lost and do not allow that to be repeated. A couple of mayors have canvassed the idea of giving people the opportunity, if they want to, to move out of the flood-prone area to higher land, and I think that is commendable. It has been done in the past—it was done a bit in Grantham—and, if we can do it more in the future, I think it will stand us in better stead to deal with these crises in the future. I thank also all of those who helped with the disaster and acknowledge the assistance provided in my own city of Maryborough. My own office had floodwaters coming at it from both ends and we thought for a while that it might go under, but fortunately the flood did not go quite high enough for it to come into the office and so we were spared that inconvenience. But in reality many of my neighbours and a large part of the central shopping area did to go under. Those people face a huge fight back, and we as a nation and as the parliament have an obligation to stand beside them so that they can complete that task and get back to a normal life just as quickly as possible.