FIONA PHILLIPS, MEMBER FOR GILMORE: I'm Fiona Phillips Federal Member for Gilmore on the NSW South Coast. In October 2023 I stood here with the Minister for emergency services Senator Murray Watt and the Resilient Building Council and we launched the bushfire resilience rating app. This is a wonderful app that supports people in my communities and bushfire prone communities to actually assess the bushfire resilience of their household and their property and importantly provide a customised plan to help reduce Bushfire risk.
It's been really popular and I'm pleased to say that we've got reports out today which show that 18,000 people in 274 impacted local government areas have now downloaded and are using the app this is just amazing.
In my particular community that also trialed the app we have the National Australia Bank having a trial with people that are using the app to improve their bushfire resilience and actually providing discounted mortgage rates, this is tremendous news. I encourage more banks in my local area and around Australia to participate in that trial.
I am also really pleasingly encouraged by conversations with insurance companies about how we can actually use this app to actually reduce insurance premiums. I know the cost of insurance is a real issue in my community, but I am absolutely thrilled that more people are using this app, We know that it not only helps improve an individual households but the more people that utilised the app in a community it actually helps to protect our communities.
During the 2019-2020 bushfires it was a horrific time for people on the South Coast and we are looking for everything we can do to help mitigate. That is the difference between this government that is investing in Disaster mitigation. We are investing in this app we have the Disaster Mitigation Fund, the Infrastructure Betterment Fund to help fix pummelled roads and things like that. We are serious about mitigation unlike the previous government and Scott Morrison that just took off and wasn’t concerned about mitigation.
I encourage everybody to get on board accessing the app at resiliencerating.org
