Nicolette Boele (Bradfield, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Immediately before being elected into this place, I worked in finance, at a venture capital fund, where I served as a member of its impact committee. My role was to evaluate the counterfactuals of an investment—that is, what would the cost or impact be had the fund not invested into a particular climate tech solution? What if we invested at series A and B rather than series C, or what if we didn't invest at all? When governments put their budgets together, you'd hope that they would also be asking these kinds of questions. What are the cost of and the likely return on investing in this policy over that one, and what if we invest in early prevention rather than coughing up at treatment time?

Let's turn our mind to defence, for example. The government has never really produced an economic calculation of investing in AUKUS. It's a key strategy to deter future aggressors and to defence our nation. Experts simply opine that, compared to the other options, it's the superior move, and hence we commit $368 billion to it over a full 30 years. Let's look at health care, where we are starting to weigh up the policy options. Health insurers offer members rebates to have regular dental check-ups, and governments do it for bowel and breast cancer screening. Why? Because their experts, generally actuaries, show them that investing to prevent harm early saves money over the longer term. It saves a lot of money.

But, when it comes to climate change impacts so far, we simply don't do these things. Instead, we do this. Firstly, we rely on volunteers such as those in the RFS to prepare us for wildfires by carrying out fuel-hazard reductions, and we rely on volunteers in the SES to help us with emergency response and recovery from storms and floods. We basically rely on the goodwill of volunteers in our communities. But, in a changing climate, we can't rely forever on the kindness of strangers. The second thing we do when things get really bad all at once is call in the members of the ADF and spread what is already very thin capacity across a terribly broad and complex response situation. When the ADF is called out to do this and assist state and local authorities with evacuations, logistics, clean-up and other critical support operations, they are not defending our country. Our ADF should not be deployed to clean up after climate crises. It's uneconomic, and it's unfair on the personnel. We can't continue to fail to internalise the externalities and appropriately cost a clean-up on climate. We need to get on the front foot, and doing so will help ready our communities to weather the onslaught of a changing climate, free up our ADF personnel and community volunteers to better serve, and save Australians money by investing in preventive measures upfront. That's why I find it extremely easy and pleasing to stand here today, second this motion put by the Member for Warringah and commend it to the House and chamber.

See this speech in context