Five people died and more than 1200 buildings were left uninhabitable due to the record-breaking floods on NSW’s mid-north coast in May.
It prompted the NSW Government to offer $75,000 emergency relief packages to impacted primary producers.
NSW Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty has pledged to accelerate the processing of grant requests after a budget estimates hearing was told 58 per cent of 1510 applications had been determined since the disaster.
The hearing was told 549 of the grants, jointly funded by the NSW and federal governments, had been approved, while 290 were withdrawn and 32 declined.
“I have intervened, and the department has now doubled the resources to make sure that we can get on top of the situation, get money out the door to people,” Ms Moriarty said.
She defended the amount of information needed to access the payments, saying it was needed to “make sure that money is going where it’s supposed to go”.
“We are asking people to provide more information. I understand that ... it’s new for people who might have been through this before.”
NSW Nationals leader Dugald Saunders said “impacted farmers are literally losing their livelihoods and having their lives destroyed” due to slow processing by the Rural Assistance Authority, the state agency responsible for administration of the program.
The cuts, combined with “extremely complex application guidelines”, had left some primary producers waiting for payments more than 100 days after the disaster, Mr Saunders said.
“The entire response to these life-changing floods has been embarrassing,” he said.
The grants, launched to support rapid recovery and get farmers back producing as quickly as possible, are designed to help with things like clean-up and debris removal and restocking and replanting.
The severe weather in May, sparked by days of torrential rain, left thousands of farmers with crop and cattle losses, stoking fears many would be forced to shutter their operations.
– with AAP.
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