Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

He intervenes, ‘Not in Perth,’ as if an extreme weather event in Victoria is irrelevant or an extreme weather event in South Australia is irrelevant. I would remind the member from Western Australia, whatever his electorate might be, that this is the national parliament. We have national obligations. He might not think we have a responsibility to nationally act on climate change, but he exists on a different planet with a shade cloth happily extended above it. This is what the data says. Furthermore, can I draw the House’s attention to this: Melbourne, last night, recorded its highest temperature for a November night since records ever began, and that outstripped the previous record set in 1901 by almost two degrees. It is 43 degrees in Adelaide today and, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, Adelaide has experienced the first spring heatwave ever since its records began in 1887. I presume that the interjecting members over there, the climate change sceptics up the back and the absolute deniers in the centre over there, would say all of these are merely unhappy coincidences. There is a string of unhappy coincidences in the data and you can either choose to embrace what the science says or simply deny what it says and therefore take no action. The Bureau of Meteorology said last night ‘the fire danger levels were into the severe range for a number of hours’. That was Mr Philip King of the Bureau of Meteorology. In these conditions I would encourage all Australians to listen carefully to what the fire authorities have to say.

Let us go also to what the science has said through documents, including by the CSIRO, in the period when the Leader of the Opposition was the minister responsible for the environment. The CSIRO Climate change in Australia: technical report 2007not ancient history, not even mediaeval history but quite modern history; in fact, only a couple of years ago when he opposite was in fact the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources—says:

Projections for Australia include increases in the frequency of heatwaves; increases in the frequency and length of drought conditions … and a substantial increase in fire-weather risk in south-eastern Australia.

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