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

I'm very pleased to see all my colleagues here to listen to me during this most important appropriation bill speech. When I was at school, I remember hearing the story of the world's longest heatwave. The record was set in Marble Bar in 1923-24. For 160 days, it was—using the old measurement—over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That gave me a greater appreciation of the struggles and the efforts of previous generations of Australians, and the hardships that they went through to build this country up.

The Bureau of Meteorology used to have a whole page about this record, the Marble Bar heatwave of 1923-24, on their website, under 'Climate education'. It said:

The world record for the longest sequence of days above 100°Fahrenheit (or 37.8° on the Celsius scale) is held by Marble Bar in the inland Pilbara district of Western Australia. The temperature, measured under standard exposure conditions, reached or exceeded the century mark every day from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, a total of 160 days.

Surprise, surprise! That's no longer on the Bureau of Meteorology website. It has disappeared, maybe down a memory hole. I'm not sure. It gets more interesting. There's a gentleman called Chris Gillham, a researcher from Western Australia, who has found out that, as the bureau have gone about what they call their 'homogenisation of the data', or the adjustment of the data, that record—

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