Disaster relief.

Abstract

Throughout its settled history Australia has been amassing an experience of flood events that have been serious enough to do severe damage to river basin and coastal communities. While it is a highly commendable objective of the Commonwealth's recently announced Water Policy that losses and destruction caused by floods should be minimised, it is incontrovertible that floods in Australia still bring major loss and destruction in their wake. This paper describes how flood relief schemes have evolved, the ways in which they operate, and the forms of relief they provide and determines their distributional impact in the case of a particular disaster, namely the 1973-74 Queensland, Australia, floods.-from Authors