QUEENSLAND Senator Barnaby Joyce has missed the start of federal parliament for 2012 to roll up his sleeves back home in the inland town of St George and help the local community battle devastating floods.
On Tuesday, Senator Joyce told Rural Press the pressure was starting to ease for his home town with flood waters levelling at 14.5 metres; just below the critical 15m mark.
The senator has been working with other locals in the Disaster Management Group who stayed behind to battle the floods, sandbagging around homes, attending community meetings to help co-ordinate the local response and getting the message out to media about the challenges the town is facing.
St George was given an emergency evacuation order on Sunday with about 2000 locals evacuating the town.
Senator Joyce said many families were forced to flee the raging floodwaters, including his wife and family, but their home was spared from any damage.
About 400 people stayed behind, including farmers, the emergency response team and essential service personnel like medical workers, police and council workers.
The floodwaters reached record levels at their peak about 1.5m higher than the previous mark.
But with the water beginning to subside, Senator Joyce said attention was turning towards the clean-up, starting with fixing roads to help people to return to their homes.
Roads heading south of St George were "in a mess", he said, but those to the east were in better condition.
"We will start the clean-up operation soon, repairing roads and general maintenance and dealing with the insurance companies," he said.
"It sounds a bit strange but we’ll also need to start watering the cotton crop again - you have to keep the water off cotton during a flood and then water it again once things have cleared up.
"Spirits are good, as you’d expect when people get together and work together on a community challenge like this.
"We’ve all been working hard, having a beer together and then getting up early the next day to do it all again.
"Now that the water is going down a bit some of the pressure is starting to come off."
Senator Joyce said levee banks built by the local council had proven resilient during the flooding, but some of the private levee banks had failed to protect homes and properties.
The floodwater made its way into St George via storm drains and flooded homes that had never been flooded before.
"A lot of people put in temporary levee banks but the vast majority of them failed," he said.
Senator Joyce is also the opposition’s Shadow Water Minister and said the one thing the Murray-Darling Basin has right now is an abundance of water.
"There’s so much water now in fact, it’s causing damage and people don’t know what to do with it."
In referring to proposals to divert 2750 gigalitres of water from irrigated farming in the Basin towards environmental purposes, he said plentiful supply of water may not always be the case in years to come, "but there’s certainly plenty of water there at the moment".
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