Flood, fire or drought: PM has disaster response agency head on speed dial

"He called me on Christmas Eve to ask about the Kilcoy floods [in Queensland], what was the damage, what are we doing about it?" Mr Stone said.

It's been a busy start to the year for the National Recovery and Resilience Agency coordinator-general - floods in NSW and Queensland, Tropical Cyclone Tiffany, while the rail connection between the east and wests coasts was severed by flooding in central Australia.

READ MORE:

"It's easier for me to list what we don't have [responsibility for] - we don't have mice and we don't have grasshoppers," Mr Stone said.

"But we've got locust, you know why? Because locust swarm and cross state borders. You couldn't make this shit up."

Mr Stone and his department manage $20 billion worth of programs, in an "endless cavalcade of weather events and outgoing funding".

The Productivity Commission's estimate that 97 per cent of all disaster funding in Australia is spent after an event, with just three per cent spent on mitigation measures ahead of a disaster.

"The Prime Minister said to me 'we've got to flip this, otherwise we're going to have a massive damage and recovery bill over the next couple of decades'," Mr Stone said.

Under his tenure, Mr Stone said an ambitious but achievable target was increasing resilience funding to a third of all disaster spending.

"Flipping that equation is going to be intergenerational, and also requires a commitment to betterment," Mr Stone said.

"Too often we put things back as they were. We've got to build things back better, because if we don't, we'll just be repairing the same stuff over and over.

"A good example is the trainline between Townsville and Mount Isa, every time there's a big flood, over she goes."

Despite the $20-billion war chest and the desire to increase resilience funding, the NRRA has been criticised for not spending enough. Labor has honed in on the $4.7-billion Emergency Response Fund, of which $200m can be spent each year; $150m on emergency response and $50m on disaster resilience.

But since it's inception in December 2019, only $100m has been dished out - two rounds of $50m flood mitigation projects, none of which are yet to start construction - while gaining more than $700m in interest.

The government has defended the fund's lack of use, pointing out it is a future, so the interest earnt is what's available to spend. It's also a "fund of last resort", reserved for when existing support programs are insufficient.

Mr Stone was asked how the government could justify not using the full $200m annual allocation, particularly when people on the NSW South Coast were still living in caravans or running their business out of sheds after the 2019/20 Black Summer Bushfires.

Mr Stone said "hugely distinct" supply chain issues were hindering the bushfire rebuild efforts.

"They will continue on, they're not going to get solved overnight with additional money," he said.

"There's been $2.1 billion allocated to [support victims of] the Black Summer Bushfires. People still living in sheds and under canvas - which is not their fault - can't get tradies, they can't get materials. A roofing truss costs three times what it was two years ago.

"Just throwing money at something doesn't fix it."

Another "recurring theme" in disaster relief funding is chronic under subscription. Mr Stone said he was allocated $3.3 billion for the North Queensland flood, but spent less than one-third ($980m) because "the take up wasn't there".

"I recognise there is a capacity issue.... we've got to support people to be able to participate, otherwise at the bottom end of the food chain, they're going to continue to miss out," he said.

NRRA resilience programs range from increasing back up power to mobile phone towers so communities aren't isolated during and after disasters, to outside-the-box ideas such as smoke sensors at vineyards that save winemakers time and money by helping them make decisions about their produce earlier.

"If you're dealing with resilience, you're only limited by your own imagination in terms of what could I do to be better aware of what's coming, or what's on my doorstep," Mr Stone said.

"Whether it's smoke, sensors, rain gauges, river gauges, if you think that water diversion is more effective than dams - more and more we're seeing people have got their thinking caps on."

One area governments of all levels need to improve is supporting small businesses after disaster, Mr Stone said, particularly those that may not sustain physical damage, but are financially affected.

"We got really good at that in drought, we discovered some very innovative stuff that we've kept supporting," Mr Stone said.

The silver lining after each disaster is that the NRRA is better prepared to respond to the next one, Mr Stone said, because although every disaster is unique, the response and needs are often similar.

"We're learning after each disaster," Mr Stone said.

"A good example is our drought water infrastructure program, farmers were finding it really handy to scrap out their dams while they were dry. After all these floods, farmers needed to clean out the debris that had washed into their dams, so we revamped the same program."