Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Back in 1992, with the help of a very friendly bank manager, I bought my first house, in a suburb called Alfords Point. I was about one house away from a road. There was a house in front of me with an easement up the side, there was a road and there was a bit of a strip and then in front of us there was a national park which went down to the Georges River.

I remember taking my old grandmother there to proudly show her the house that I'd selected and bought, and was going to do up, to see what her opinion was. At the time she was going a bit senile and she would sometimes make some very silly comments. She saw the place and said: 'Oh, you've got to be so careful with bushfires. That bush is so close to you. Your house could be at risk of burning down from a bushfire.' I looked at it, and it was a good sixty or seventy yards away. I thought to myself, as often young blokes do, 'Silly old woman! What would she know?'

In early 1994, about two years later, we had some catastrophic bushfire weather in Sydney. I'd left to go to a wedding, and I can remember the north-westerly wind howling at the church. A message came over the radio that there were fires at Alfords Point and Menai, so I left the wedding and rushed back to my place. I got as far as the shops at Alfords Point. I remember that the police had it blocked off. It looked as though the entire suburb had been burnt down. I can remember it to this day: at that time, the school fence was like half a telegraph pole cut off with a bit of wire wrapped around it—not the large green gates we have today—and those stumps had caught on fire. There was a palm tree on fire in the front of a house just opposite the shops.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:01 to 17:14

I was reflecting on my first real experiences with bushfires. As I was saying, I'd returned from the church service for a wedding of a mate and got back to the suburb of Alfords Point. As far back as I could get was the shops, which are at the top of a hill. Looking across Alfords Point, it looked as though every single house in the suburb had actually been burned to the ground. I can remember the posts in front of the school, which at the time were half telegraph posts, were actually on fire. There were palm trees on fire in front of houses backing onto the main road. I saw things happen that, in my life, I did not think would be physically possible. I remember that at that moment I thought back to what my grandmother told me. I thought about how little I knew about bushfire and bushfire activity. In that tragic period over those couple of days, over 100 houses were burnt out in the Como, Jannali, Alfords Point, Bangor and Menai region, and one life was tragically lost. I can remember there were houses that were burnt out that, in a million years, you wouldn't think would not be safe from a bushfire.

Since that time, when I realised how little I knew, I've done everything I can to learn about bushfires. Since I was elected to this position, with that area in my electorate—an area so fire prone and with such a history of bushfires—I've done everything I can both to support our local Rural Fire Service and to try to educate the public about how bad and catastrophic bushfires in Australian forests can be. Until I'd seen it with my own eyes, there was nothing I could have read and no photograph or TV image that could have made me appreciate how drastic, catastrophic and dangerous those fires are in the Australian landscape.

When we had those fires starting back in October and November, in one of my last speeches in this place before we broke up before Christmas, when we'd already seen close to 1.65 million hectares burnt out, I said, 'Our history tells us that there could be a lot more to come as this is well short of our record.' And we saw that over those weeks over Christmas and New Year.

We've seen, even amongst the tragedy, the best of Australians. We've seen the magnificent work of our Rural Fire Service. In the electorate of Hughes, we luckily had a very low number of fires in our area compared to previous years. We had one in the royal national park that was actually suspiciously lit right on the turn of the winds on the most catastrophic day. That is still being investigated. The only reason an investigation was made was that, by sheer chance, a Black Hawk helicopter was flying over the national park doing some standard observations and training and it was able to see someone acting suspiciously. The other major fire—when I say 'major fire', it was very insignificant compared to what we've seen—of any significance in the area was at Voyager Point—again, a fire that is under suspicion of arson. The magnificent work that we've seen of the Rural Fire Service, our volunteers and our communities coming together says something very special about our Australian community.

I would have liked to leave my comments on the condolence motion there, but during this condolence motion some members have taken it upon themselves to criticise the government, say the government is somehow to blame and try to use the tragedy of the bushfires to push their climate change agenda. We must deal in facts and we must deal in the science. We know that at the end of last year, 2019, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were 0.0411. That's around 411.85 parts per million. What is Australia's contribution? If Australia had adopted some carbon policy in the past, would this have made a difference, as people make out?

We can do the maths. We can go back to December 1999, before the turn of the century, and the fear of the Y2K bug. Every single Australian could have marched up onto high cliffs and jumped lemming-like into the ocean, and we could have had zero emissions of CO2 since 1 January 2000. Instead of the CO2 in the atmosphere being 411.85 parts per million, it would have been 411.2 parts per million. The idea that could have any effect whatsoever on global temperatures and therefore have a knock-on effect on bushfires is just preposterous nonsense. And yet this is what we hear implied indirectly and directly by members of the opposition and some people in the minor parties, as though there's some change that this government could have made to do it.

What we could also have looked at is the argument that maybe that increase of CO2 of 411 parts per million in the atmosphere did have some effect on the fires. There is some truth in that, because we know, if we read the science, that there has been a global greening—an increase in forest cover worldwide—over the last 20 years. The scientists put about 70 per cent of that down to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. So yes, it's highly likely that, because of that added CO2, our native bush is growing faster than it otherwise would. That is what the science tells us. Our response to that should be to ensure that we are getting those hazard reduction burns done. A seven-year cycle is recommended to make sure that you have some low-level burning on the inner faces close to communities. No-one says hazard reduction is a panacea or a cure, because we know that, in every single year that passes, the bush grows back and it becomes more hazardous. The leaf litter on the floor increases every single year after the back-burn is done.

Again, if we look through the history of our nation, if we look back to the 1939 bushfires of this nation and read through the royal commission report after it, we can see that the amount of hazard reduction burning being done was ridiculously inadequate in 1939. Then we come to the royal commission after the 2009 bushfires in Victoria. They recommended a minimum of five per cent hazard reduction burns of public land being undertaken every year, and yet in New South Wales and Victoria we've seen less than two per cent. In the Victorian forests, over the last five years something like a million hectares less of forest area is treated by hazard reduction than the royal commission recommended. That is not just my opinion; that is the opinion of some of the most experienced fire professionals and scientists that have researched this over decades.

Professor Robert Scagel, a forest microclimate specialist from British Columbia, said:

Fuel load rules. Spending resources and intellectual capital on climate change considerations are as effective at mitigating bushfires as changing the colour of the paper used in reporting them.

David Packham, one of our senior former CSIRO bushfire researchers, said the fires have nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with fuel loads. It is also arguable that the increased temperature we have seen—a one-degree increase in temperature over the last 100 years—has some effect on the bushfires. That is an arguable case. But, if you look at how we calculate the forest fire index and the mathematical equation for that, a one-degree increase in temperature has a very minor effect on our forest fire index. In fact, a one-degree increase in temperature is offset by a 1½-kilometre-an-hour decrease in wind speed. It is the variability in wind speed and the dryness of the environment that has the major effect on how intensely our forest fires burn.

Some may argue that the dryness of the environment is caused by climate change, and I've often heard that there's a drying environment and that this is climate change. They say, 'This is what the science says.' Well, that is not what the science says. The IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, talk about drought and the linkages to CO2, and I will quote directly from their AR5 report. It says:

There is low confidence in attributing changes in drought over global land areas since the mid-20th century to human influence owing to observational uncertainties and difficulties in distinguishing decadal-scale variability in drought from long-term trends.

They also say that there's:

High confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions.

So there is no link between drought and climate change. Even a peer-reviewed scientific paper released in August last year said:

… seasonal and annual precipitation over the last century is found to be stationary in most (but not all) regions. These findings suggest that the Australian precipitation has largely remained within the bounds of observed variability …

That's the science, yet we have people out there basically quoting what is nothing other than superstition to try to make a political point, take advantage and exploit these bushfires. That is a disgrace.

These bushfires are one of Australia's truly great tragedies. We owe it to those who lost their lives to make sure that an investigation is carried out so that we can do everything we can to try to minimise the impact of fire in the future. That requires following the science and telling the truth.

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