Australia says flood costs to top other disasters

Floods that have devastated huge areas of Australia's eastern seaboard, including the nation's third-largest city, look set to be the costliest natural disaster ever in a country known for climatic extremes, Treasurer Wayne Swan said on Monday.

The deluge last week in the Brisbane area and overnight in Victoria state, where 46 townships have been affected, would not delay a promised return to surplus in 2012-13, Swan said, but would force the government to make some difficult spending cuts.

"It looks like this is possibly going to be, in economic terms, the largest natural disaster in our history," he told Australian television.

"This is very big. It's not just something which is going to occupy our time for the next few months. It will be a question of years as we go through the rebuilding."

Flooding has hit four states since December and the death toll from the worst hit state of Queensland is expected to rise. The scale of the disaster has exceeded a 1974 cyclone in Darwin which left 43,000 homeless, although deadly 2009 bush fires in Victoria state claimed 131 lives, but caused less damage.

The estimated cost of rebuilding in northern Queensland state alone stood at $9.8 billion. It's reported that the damage bill is rising fast as record flooding moved south to northern and western Victoria.

The Victorian town of Horsham was bracing for a "one-in-200-year flood", Mayor Michael Ryan said, while the city of Echuca remained submerged after flooding blamed on a Pacific El Nino weather pattern, bringing heavy rains to Australia.

The influential Australian Greens party, which helps Prime Minister Julia Gillard's minority Labor government wield power, said on Monday that "coal barons" should pay for natural disaster damage using half of a planned mineral resources profits tax that has angered miners.

Queensland state Premier Anna Bligh was to meet with senior lawmakers on Monday to work on a flood recovery plan as a massive clean-up in flood ravaged areas continued.