Flood Recovery Funding

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (15:04): My question is to the Treasurer. Have all successful applicants for the River Murray flood recovery package received their funding, and if not, when will they? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr WHETSTONE: In January 2023, the Premier announced the River Murray flood recovery package, which included $65.2 million worth of funding for affected small businesses, primary producers and service reconnections. Recent documents retrieved under FOI show that despite all grants being closed, less than 20 per cent of the funding has been allocated.

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Treasurer, Minister for Defence and Space Industries) (15:05): In terms of all recipients or beneficiaries of the announced funding receiving their funds, I would have to take that on notice, but I would say that in the context that there are often circumstances where it has taken either businesses or households some time to work with the government agencies, which have often been led by the Department of State Development, to make sure that we had enough information and grounds to pay those amounts.

I am aware of the information, or some of the information, that the member for Chaffey refers to, but I should also be at pains to say that even when there were certain parts of that flood recovery package—the $194 million of financial support that was announced by the state government—which may not have been spent for that particular purpose, quite often that money was then repurposed to another area of flood recovery.

So I would be at pains to reinforce that there is not a situation where there has been an underspend and that has been an opportunity to claw this money back for the benefit of the Consolidated Account. We have sought, where possible, to redeploy moneys which have not been used up entirely on one particular stream of that flood recovery effort to bolster up other areas of flood recovery effort.

In fact, only in the last couple of weeks, I think, I have signed correspondence to a couple of the councils in the flood-affected areas where we have said yes to their requests and rather than fund the regular 75 per cent of flood recovery costs for a particular issue that they were entitled to funding for, we have changed that 75 per cent and given them 100 per cent of the costs. So that's an example of where we have taken the opportunity to dial up, in some areas, an amount of money that we had previously committed because we had some money left over from another area of flood recovery.

What I can do for the member for Chaffey—given, of course, that he and many of his constituents were directly affected by the flood event—is try to bring back some further information for him, and maybe for the member for Hammond and for other affected local members, setting out how all of that has worked.