Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to support the member for Leichhardt’s motion. He is a very dear friend and colleague of mine. He is well known for his advocacy and determination to ensure that the people of the Torres Strait Islands are not overlooked in their needs.

There is one thing I do want to dispute. The members opposite have called the member for Leichhardt a hypocrite. Anyone who knows the member for Leichhardt would know that that is absolutely not true. He is a person who stands on principle and there is nothing remotely hypocritical about the member for Leichhardt. He came into this chamber to highlight a very serious issue concerning the Torres Strait Islands, particularly the 48,000 square kilometres of open sea between Papua New Guinea and Cape York, a serious issue with infrastructure and a very old sea wall which is deteriorating. I am very happy to get up today and support him.

These problems in the Torres Strait have been occurring over a four-year period. The members opposite have highlighted it. Why did the member for Leichhardt not bring this up earlier? The sea wall has been deteriorating over four years and there has been constant flooding. Members earlier, including previous members on our side and the member for Oxley, spoke about the infections and high risk of disease that has occurred. The member for Leichhardt spoke of his own sighting of graves and the destruction that it is causing to the culture and to the community. These are problems that have been occurring over four years and this government has been sitting on its hands. It took the member for Oxley eight minutes to speak about the specific responses that were occurring, including $400,000 that is being spent to gauge and see what the tides are doing. The member for Leichhardt can tell you what the tides have been doing. The devastation and disaster is there for all to see and yet we have more delaying tactics in measuring the tides.

The people opposite are the hypocrites in this debate. They keep pushing out climate change. When we talk about low-lying Pacific islands, their own Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, Richard Marles, says that there are no climate change refugees. I want to reiterate that this government is spending money, particularly in the Pacific Island region, to help mitigate and to stop rising sea levels and yet closer to home, on its own shores in the Torres Strait, no serious money is being spent on this huge problem. What we are doing in the foreign aid budget is very admirable, but let us try to help some of our own people here in the Torres Strait Islands. Let us not bring out this climate change debate when your own parliamentary secretary says there is no such thing as climate change refugees.

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