Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really grateful to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition for securing this time in the parliament for us to say something about this extraordinary disaster that occurred right around the country throughout this summer period. It was appropriate, of course, that the main contributors to this debate were those with electorates where there were immediate impacts of fire and loss of life. I thank the members for Gilmore, Eden-Monaro and Gippsland and the others who were mainly affected by these tragedies for their really incredible contributions in this debate.

I want to take the opportunity to say something on behalf of my community. This was a national tragedy, one that no Australian was untouched by over the summer. The first thing I want to do is express in the most sincere terms how devastated the people I represent were by the things that they saw over this summer, particularly the loss of life. We lost so many Australians. The fact that so many of the people who died were volunteers who died in the effort of protecting their communities is an extraordinary thing. I know there's not a single person in my electorate who wasn't affected by the news of those deaths. It was striking how many of the people who died had young children or had partners and wives who were pregnant. You can't imagine anything more terrible for a child than growing up without ever knowing their father. On behalf of the people I represent, I want to say how much we're thinking of the families that have lost a loved one. Our hearts are going to remain with you while you deal with this grief. Please know that the nation is so united in its gratitude to the person in your family who died trying to protect others. It's a thing of enormous honour.

One of the things that was a little bit unusual about this disaster was that, as I said, it was experienced by all Australians in different ways. One of the things that was distinctive was how much visual imagery and how many pictures were created. I think they will be forever associated in my brain with the disaster that befell our people over the summer. There were the images of Mallacoota: the eeriness of red blackness covering a town in the middle of the day; hundreds of people crowded on a beach where the only place to go to keep safe was out into the ocean. These are gut-wrenching images that I know all Australians will carry with them. I think of another image I saw of a mum on the South Coast of New South Wales. She was sitting on the footpath. Everything she had been able to take from her house was in a shopping cart. She had two kids with her. They were just running around and she was trying to look after them on this street. She was just absolutely spent, without any means of processing what was going on for her. There were the images of Allison Marion's son Finn as he steered the boat carrying his family members out into the ocean to escape the fire that was coming towards them. There were images of the charred remains of farm animals and wildlife that had been absolutely defenceless in the face of the walls of flames that they had faced.

When I spoke to my community about how this affected them over the summer, what they told me was that, even though they weren't in the line of fire, this absolutely defined the summer of 2019-20. It defined the quality of the time that they spent with their family. What a lot of people have said to me is that they were not able to enjoy summer in that carefree way that we love to do as Australians because they knew the whole time there were people in other parts of the country who were literally facing crisis. I know that so many Australians have donated to the recovery efforts. My electorate is no exception there. I just want to say how proud and grateful I am to every Australian who has dug deep and found a way to make a contribution to the rebuilding efforts.

Crises like this are horrible things. No-one would wish this on a country. They do show us some of the darker things about what we deal with as Australians, but, of course, it always brings forth the greatest beauty that exists in our community, and this was no exception. One of the things that I really noticed over the summer was this sense of abiding connection that Australians who live in the cities feel and share with Australians who live in the bush. I think there are people around the country, some of whom work in this parliament, who try to stoke division and make people feel like we can't be one country. But the truth is that the people I represent—I represent a city electorate—feel so much for country Australians. When there's a drought, we talk about it, we think about it and we worry about it. I think we really saw that in the way that people reacted over the summer. So it's really important that we remember that there is so much that unites the beautiful people that we represent, and this feeling, affection and care between the country and the city is very much a part of things.

One of the other very much abiding and recurring themes I gleaned from talking to my constituents was just how important our national broadcaster is to us in Australia. It was obviously something that my constituents relied on completely to keep in touch with their fellow Australians over the summer as they faced these incredible moments of crisis. I think, in a time of such polarisation, it's so important that we get to experience things like that and understand them as they're happening.

I know many people in my community who spent days and weeks—literally 24 hours a day—listening to the ABC. They were watching the coverage on the news and listening to the coverage on the radio. The quality of that service was just extraordinary—to share with the rest of the country the actual voices and the stories of people in these communities experiencing such crisis, and, of course, to fulfil that critical role of actual communication about what was happening around the country as the disaster panned out. It was an extraordinary thing that the ABC did. It gave us a way to walk alongside people who were in crisis. It was essential as a line of communication to people who were experiencing that crisis.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12 : 35 to 12 : 47

Again, it's a privilege to contribute on behalf of my electorate of Hotham to this important debate about the horrible bushfires that have affected the lives of so many Australians. I've talked a bit about the sorrow that my community has felt for the families and communities most affected by this disaster. One of the most important things that has come out of the conversations that I've had with my constituents has been in relation to climate change and how the bushfires have absolutely sharpened the urgency for us to take action, to take calm, clear action that sits right in front of us as a parliament, to address the issue of carbon emissions in our environment.

When I talk to my constituents, they don't talk to me about the Paris Agreement and different targets that may lie ahead for us. What they say to me is: 'Something has to change. We cannot go on like this.' We've had now almost seven years of continental drift on climate policy, and instead of going down, as our emissions were under the previous government, our emissions are going up. Some of the other speakers in this debate have talked about the need for us to be bipartisan in our approach to this. We are ready for that conversation. This is not about which political party you're in. It's not about which part of the country you represent. It is about the sort of country that we are going to leave to our children and grandchildren. It is absolutely the case that every politician of my generation is going to be judged on how we deal with this issue. Something has to change, and I'm very hopeful that we as a parliament are going to be able to have a better conversation about this.

One of the reasons for that is that if this last summer showed us anything it is how much we as a country have to lose if the world continues to do very little to combat global warming. One of the things that's been so clear in this summer is that the Australian summer is iconic. This is the time in the year that the families in my community live for. This is what we wait for. I think about the summers of my childhood when we played cricket on the beach. We went to the beach as much as we could. We just revelled in the natural environment almost every day, and I fear that my children and my grandchildren are not going to be able to experience that with their own kids. The truth is that my kids and my constituents' children couldn't have that sort of experience this summer. One of the reasons for that was the air quality. I don't in any way equate anything that we experienced with the horrible bushfire crisis areas. I'm not attempting to do that. I just want to make the point that millions of people breathed in air for over a month that was not good-quality air. In Melbourne, the world's most liveable city, there were days when we had the poorest quality air in the world. If this is not a clarion call to action then I don't know what else needs to happen for us to see the urgency of taking action on this issue.

I want to make the commitment to my constituents that, as I have been doing every day that I have been a member of parliament, I am ready to make a change and do something serious about this problem so that we meet our responsibilities as public leaders and as Australians and do what we know needs to be done to arrest this problem.

I want to finish by just expressing my deepest condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the fires. We're not going to forget that this happened to you and your loved ones. I just want those families to know that we're with them now and will always be as they deal with this grieving process.

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