Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, it’s you that doesn’t get it. If you are sincere about being a voice then do it properly. Come into this place and bring people with you, because there are people who will understand and be sympathetic and who will want to assist you. But oversimplifying the issue and overdoing the rhetoric does not actually help your cause. You would be better off trying to find some of the solutions to the complex problems that are faced by people genuinely in need in that area. We all understand that. But you are just coming in here bleating about blaming government and saying, ‘If only we’d spend $22 million all the problems would be fixed.’ I think the problems are just a little bit more complex than that.

Trying to portray that this government is doing nothing is completely wrong. It is completely false. In fact, there is quite a bit happening. But before I get onto what we are actually doing let me say that I do not want to diminish or in any way simplify the very real problems that people in the Torres Strait Islands face. As we have all experienced recently, particularly in Queensland but in other parts of Australia—and for that matter the rest of the world—flooding devastation and other natural disasters are a real problem and they really do affect people in enormous ways. In my electorate alone, in a part of the world where we do not expect flooding, certainly not on a regular basis, the recent Queensland floods were an enormous thing to bear. So I can imagine what it must be like for the people up in the Torres Strait, where they face this flooding every single year—in fact more than once a year, as I understand it, with tidal surges and a range of other inundation problems.

But the problems are very different. In the member’s motion he states that there should not be any discrimination and people should be treated alike. Hear, hear! Absolutely. I completely agree, but we also need to recognise that we are facing very different problems. It is not a one in 100 year flood that we are facing or a very unusual and rare event caused by a whole range of matters in Queensland that we are still dealing with. In the Torres Strait, in the particular islands that the member mentioned, we are talking about regular flooding—flooding more than once a year, in fact, on a regular basis. So we need to look at the underlying issues. If I read it correctly, this motion talks about climate change. It really does look at what is happening with rising sea levels, what is impacting on those particular islands. I find it a little bit disingenuous. I understand the member is serious and is sincere about wanting to help people up in the north and in the Torres Strait—I do accept that. I do not challenge that. But he is being a little bit insincere in the way he portrays this and does not even address or deal with the issue of climate change.

If we are going to look seriously at these matters, something that the Labor Party has been talking about for many years is the real risk to low-lying islands and particularly the people in the Torres Strait, who will be the first people affected by climate change and rising sea levels. Yet it is only this government that is prepared to step up and make some tough decisions and tough choices about doing something about that for the long term. We are not just fixing a wall for the short term but actually looking beyond that, beyond what a seawall or other minor infrastructure changes might do today. We are looking to the future and looking at how we can actually do something about climate change more globally. To me, nothing speaks more of our understanding of the need to take some action, to help these people in the Torres Strait, than what we are trying to do about climate change. We are trying to at least pull back, trying to do our bit, because Australia will be the most affected country in the world. Australia will be the one that has the highest price to pay, and it will not be people where the good member lives who pay. It will not be the people living where he lives or where I live, particularly, who will pay, but it will be people on the low-lying outer islands, in the regions and in those coastal communities. Those who are at the lowest sea levels will pay the highest price.

The member used some very emotive language. He talked about a range of issues. I would say to him that I understand how difficult, how emotive it must be for people to be forcibly removed, but I do not know that this government was forcibly removing anybody. Perhaps he might want to rethink the forcible removal that he is proposing, because it is certainly not a policy of this government to forcibly remove anybody. We are there to assist people. There are a number of programs in place and we are spending some money to try to deal with these problems, but forcibly removing people? It might be the member’s idea or the member’s policy but it is certainly not this government’s policy.

He talked about the graves and the homes and Indigenous people’s rights, and I agree that I would be devastated if my home were in a low-lying region that is now being overrun by rising sea levels. You would want to be doing something about that, absolutely, and you would want to be working with that community, not against that community. You would not want to be forcibly removing anybody, but you would want to be working with that community, and that is exactly what this government is doing. We are more than aware of the problem of coastal erosion and inundation facing the Torres Strait Island communities and we have already funded work to assess the risks and identify adaptation options in some of those communities, because you just cannot go in with a heavy hand. You cannot just go in and forcibly remove people. That might be the policy of the coalition and of the member, but it is not the policy of this government. So while inundation is being experienced, and it is consistent with what we have been saying for a number of years about climate change, I do not see any support for asking: how do we start to pull that back? There are specific responses that can be made.

There is also a need to understand that a flood in South-East Queensland is nothing like and has no relationship to inundation, rising sea levels or other complex flooding experiences that occur in that part of the world. This government is addressing some key issues in making sure we better understand those sea levels and have proper projections so that, if there are to be seawalls, we know what height they should be. Perhaps we should not just go and build them to a certain height, whatever it might be, only to find out in a season’s time that it was actually the wrong height or in the wrong place, not where it was supposed to be. Of course, it is always easy for members to be very critical, to heap on plenty of rhetoric, to oversimplify complex problems and to say somebody else should pay for the issue. The government has already provided some $400,000 for new research into the impacts of climate change on the Torres Strait Island communities, to see how we can develop strategies to better assist those communities. The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs is also working jointly—that’s right, a foreign concept—with that community through the Torres Strait Regional Authority. We have given them a further $1 million for the operation and maintenance of regional tidal gauge networks. We are trying to better understand the things that are happening in those communities so we can actually deal with them properly, deal with them in a measured way.

I go back to where I started. I commend the member for Leichhardt for being a voice—and I say that genuinely. It is his community, it is his electorate and he ought to be doing that. That is his role. That is what he ought to be coming into this place to do. But, if you are going to do it, bring people with you. We feel for those people too. We want more to be done. But let us go through it properly. Let us make sure that we can organise it around what really ought to happen rather than just what the member thinks ought to happen. Then, if he is serious about helping those communities into the long term, he should look at starting to address the single biggest problem that those communities face in the Torres Strait, and that is rising sea levels as a matter of climate change.

These are recent events. These are events that have happened in the last 20, 30 and 40 years. They are complex problems. They are not problems that can be just washed away, as it were, by merely saying, ‘A little bit more money here and we will patch up a few tidal walls and the problem will go away.’ I am sad to say that the problem probably will not go away. It is a problem that will last for some time and we ought to do something about it in a serious manner.

I too think this is an important matter. I too think that the people of the Torres Strait, their homes, their graves, their communities and their rights are as valuable as anyone else’s in Australia. We ought to be doing as much as we can up there to assist them, but we ought to do it properly and we ought to do it in conjunction with the community and with the cooperation of the community. We ought to make sure that proper adaptation principles are used up there and that we respect people’s rights. Where we can be of assistance we should be, and we should make sure that we work with the local Torres Strait Regional Authority. That is the proper course of action. That is the way that this government will act to continue to do its work properly. (Time expired)

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