Interview with Mary Gearin, ABC 24

Subjects: Queensland Floods, Foreign Assistance for floods

Kevin Rudd MP, Foreign Minister and Federal Member for Griffith

Transcript, E&OE, proof only

13 January 2011

MARY GEARIN: Now Kevin Rudd is not only the nation's Foreign Minister, he's the member for Griffith which is an electorate which has the Brisbane River as one of its boundaries and Mr Rudd joins us now from Brisbane. Mr Rudd thank you very much for your time this morning.

KEVIN RUDD: Good morning Mary.

MARY GEARIN: How did you spend the night?

KEVIN RUDD: In fear and in trepidation and with a lot of local people. We spent a lot of the early evening sandbagging. My electorate where we are at the moment borders quite a number of suburbs which go straight onto the Brisbane River from West End in this direction which is - which has been badly affected through to Bulimba in that direction which if it got any higher would be badly affected as well.

So we've been sandbagging in Bulimba to stop water coming up one of the main streets there which is Oxford Street.

MARY GEARIN: And we've been seeing on ABC quite a lot of vision of you helping out with that sandbagging and moving things and - for residents and so forth. How personally satisfying is that for you to do?

KEVIN RUDD: I don't know if it's satisfying, it's just the right thing to do. As your local member of Parliament what I've been trying to do is to go to each of what I know to be the flood affected streets.

I know my community reasonably well and just to go basically from door to door street to street, to see if everyone's properly attended to. Most people have looked after themselves pretty well but let me tell you every couple of streets to find some - you find somewhere where there's been a real problem where people have left it too late and that's when it's all hands to the pump literally to get people out the door and to get their stuff out the door and we've been doing that with great teams of people from the local community for the last 48 hours.

All I can say to your viewers today is that thank God it's stopped raining in the last 36 hours, that's been the huge change factor here.

MARY GEARIN: That will clearly help with the recovery effort in your area today?

KEVIN RUDD: Well no, it's not so much the recovery effort, what I'm talking about is the fact that it's stopped raining in the last 36 hours is there's no more new water coming into the catchment.

Had the rain levels kept up to what they'd been for many, many days prior to that then the flood projection levels that we had yesterday above the '74 flood would have been realised and exceeded. So the big swing factor in the last 36 hours, it's stopped raining in the catchment.

So we've very grateful for that but we've got to be very vigilant about further changes in the water as well as those people that are still dramatically affected right now.

MARY GEARIN: So what are your top priorities for the day?

KEVIN RUDD: I'm – I've started at one end of the community and I'll be moving to the other across all the riverside suburbs. Also the creeks which feed into the Brisbane River which often escape attention.

There's a very large creek system called the Norman Creek which feeds into the Brisbane River at a suburb called Norman Park. That's where I live and many of the lower areas in Normal Park, though not on the Brisbane River so much itself have been quite dramatically affected. I spent a lot of time yesterday at a street called Gillan Street which backs onto Norman Creek itself and waters came up there at a rate of knots and I'll be heading up there fairly soon to make sure that that's under control.

I think for the task we've got to then apply to - apply our minds to in the course of today is to - beginning to organise volunteer teams for the clean up effort for houses once the water levels recede in the days ahead and then try and do it as effectively and efficiently at a local level as possible.

MARY GEARIN: The cameras captured you today meeting a man who didn't want to leave his house and he was a veteran of the 1974 floods. Did you come across that a lot and are you concerned for those people?

KEVIN RUDD: Yeah – they kind of make you want to pull your hair out some times [laughs]. They've got water levels rising and you're having a Socratic dialogue with somebody about why they should be moving out. I mean struth.

MARY GEARIN: [Laughs].

KEVIN RUDD: The – any way, I [indistinct] the coppers onto him so we'll see what happens. I think - I think at the end of the day he thought, if this river does not rise any further he'll then turn around and say to me he told me so, so...

MARY GEARIN: Of course he will.

KEVIN RUDD: So - but I've got to say had we had rain for the last 36 hours then folk like that are going to cause or could have caused our authorities extreme difficulties. Getting people out in the dead of night from a house in pitch black with water levels rising is no fun.

Just moving people's goods and effects out of a house in the middle of the night as we did the other night in Ryan Street in West End with water up to your waist, that's no fun because frankly it's very easy just to lose your footing.

MARY GEARIN: You talked before about organising volunteer teams now. How would you assess how well the three levels of Government have been combining?

KEVIN RUDD: You know the great thing about what I'd observed here just as a local member of Parliament is that the coordination between the three levels has been working really well.

I think the Council's been doing a great job. It's a Liberal council. State Government, obviously a Labor Government, has been working well and as has the Federal Government and through the ADF in particular but also Federal Government ministers who have direct responsibility for critical areas.

I think the Premier Anna Bligh has been very strong and not just in the leadership she's providing, but the core ask which people have at times like this is for very basic information and I think Anna's decision to roll out regular press briefings and just lay it on the table in terms of here's the information at hand, here are the suburbs now affected, this is where it's about to go, and not just for here but for elsewhere across the State and let's not forget what's just happened in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley and the Brisbane Valley.

This has been I think a very effective way of communicating basic information to the community and my experience of - in my community here is that what people want at times like this is that basic information. So I think the government side of things has worked well but the community volunteer stuff I think has worked just as well and has worked spontaneously and without people go out of their way literally to wade through mud for three hours for people they've never met to get their goods and effects out the door, it says something about who we are as Queenslander's.

It says something about who we are as Australians and I think this is a good message at a time of great difficulty.

MARY GEARIN: Last week before the flash flooding it must be said when the disaster was at a completely different level, there was a little bit of politicking.

The Opposition was suggesting dams policy, some people were suggesting that the Murray Darling Basin Authority plan be postponed to assess what the impact of all of this will be.

What do you think – if you have any reflections right at this point in time about the dams policy and about the Murray Darling plan?

KEVIN RUDD: Nice try. I'm not going there at all [laughs]. It's just not a day for it. If you were here in the middle of Brizzie, in the midst of what we're in at the moment and elsewhere in Queensland your priorities are a million miles from there.

There's a time and a season for policy and political debates about how things should be managed in the future and I won't be a shrinking violet from any of those debates at the right time. But right now let me tell you with thousands of people with mud and sludge through their - through their houses, there's a different set of priorities there. So I'm just not going there.

MARY GEARIN: Fair enough. Now with your Foreign Minister hat on though just briefly, have you been heartened and are you happy with the overseas response to these – these disasters?

KEVIN RUDD: Yeah I think it's important for Australians to know that, you know, when problems happen around the world two things happen in this country; (1) the Government stands up and says what can we do? And we help either through the military, through the United Nations, or through a whole series of other actions where it's earthquakes in Haiti, or whether it's tsunamis in Indonesia or whether it's natural disasters elsewhere in the world.

Another thing the Australian people always do is that they stick their hand in their pocket and they contribute extraordinarily generously to – to humanitarian disasters around the world. I think the rest of the world knows that about us. It's kind of the Australian spirit. I think for when the rest of the world see us in real difficulty, and we have been in Queensland in recent times, it's a pretty confronting time for the rest of the world.

This has been going out across BBC World Service and CNN and other networks world wide and both myself and the Prime Minister have literally been inundated with expressions of solidarity and support and expressions of sympathy from prime ministers, from presidents, from foreign ministers right across the world.

I was talking to the Indonesian Foreign Minister yesterday. Again they're in – receiving daily briefings on what's going on down here. They're making contributions to the Premier's Flood Relief Appeal here in Brisbane to help families who fall through the cracks.

It's that sort of stuff which is I think really heartening and uplifting for Australians and Queenslanders to know that when the chips are down for us we're not alone. So to the rest of the Australian family as a Queenslander I just say thank you.

But I think as Australians also just realising that when we do face trouble, that we're also members of a much wider human – international human family who are there to support us at difficult times as well.

MARY GEARIN: Kevin Rudd thank you very much for your time and on avery, very busy day. We really appreciate it.

KEVIN RUDD: Good, thanks very much.

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