00:00Chris Minns says he's come to Broken Hill for a dose of reality.
00:06I've lived in Sydney my whole life, I don't pretend to be something that I'm not, but we do, we recognise that we need to be on the ground speaking to people directly.
00:14He's brought his cabinet out to the far west to listen to a community that he concedes sometimes feels forgotten.
00:22Last month was a case in point when a storm knocked down transmission lines and TransGrid's generators failed leaving thousands in the dark.
00:31Three weeks later a $200 payment is finally available for households to help soften the impact of losing food or earnings.
00:39They were very helpful, had to show some ID and tell them what happened and they were very receptive and I got a voucher so I'm quite happy.
00:51Some small businesses were saved by generators but many lost thousands of dollars worth of stock.
00:57At the moment just $400 is on offer to help them refill their fridges.
01:02That's ridiculous, that's no, $400, I lost about $480 worth of cold meat in my freezer, let alone all the stuff I lost in my fridge, it's just not enough.
01:13The Premier says he expects insurers to step up but he'll consider more support for businesses.
01:19I'm not going to close the door on future compensation, particularly for retail stores.
01:24I don't want to see them go out the door backwards because of no fault of their own.
01:28Broken Hill has a giant battery, a solar farm and these wind turbines yet none of them came to the rescue when they were needed most.
01:36The government concedes there's still a lot of work to do to get all the pieces of the power puzzle into place for when it really counts.
01:44It's giving over Crown land on a 65 year lease to build a compressed air energy storage facility on the outskirts of Broken Hill but it'll take five years to build.
01:54Until then people fear the next storm could bring the whole network crashing down again.
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