Help still in demand almost a year on from 2022 flood event

By Murray Silby

Sep 14, 2023

**Flood review:** A state parliamentary inquiry into the 2022 flood event that impacted large tracts of the Goulburn Valley has heard from several local organisations and groups during a hearing in Mooroopna. Photo by Megan Fisher

A community centre that found itself in the middle of Mooroopna’s flood response last year says it is still being approached for assistance from victims almost a year later.

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The Moorooopna Education and Activity Centre stepped up to take a leading role in the town’s response to the devastating floods that hit the region last October.

It was one of a number of organisations to appear before the Legislative Council Environment and Planning Committee hearing into the 2022 flood event on Wednesday, September 13 in Mooroopna.

MEAC manager Jan Phillips told the hearing that the floodwaters may have passed by, but their impacts had not.

“We continue to provide services to our community,” she said.

“It is not over. In fact, it is as equally traumatic today as it was on the 15th of October.”

Ms Phillips said the centre was still receiving cries for help from people trying to recover from the floods and she called for emergency relief payments, which had since been stopped, to be reintroduced.

“That finished on the 31st of July. Now I know there has to be an end date. Oh my god. I’ve had at least 10 people in since then,” she said.

The Victorian Government’s website says emergency relief payments are provided to help meet immediate needs, including emergency food, shelter, clothing, medication and accommodation.

The centre’s evidence also called for clearer channels of communication, including details on a hierarchy of responsibility during emergencies.

“One of the things I will say to the inquiry is, ‘Who’s in charge?’. Because that was really difficult to know,” Ms Phillips said.

“One of the things that communities struggled with is where to get the information.

“So we took it upon ourselves to set up as a place of knowledge but also as an emotional and physical support to our local community once they could get to us. We demanded services and by God we got them.”

The centre also told the inquiry that food security needs had quadrupled in Mooroopna and an estimated 70 per cent of people forced from their homes during the flood still could not return to them.

Greater Shepparton City Council, the Committee for Greater Shepparton, Murray-Darling Association, Undera Flood Group, Ethnic Council of Shepparton and District/Neighbourhood Collective Australia and Shepparton Search and Rescue Squad also gave evidence before the hearing.