Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, Mr Littleproud, I table a ministerial statement on disaster risk reduction.

Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

The statement that has just been tabled is, I think, identical to one that was delivered by the Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, Minister Littleproud, in the House of Representatives today. I obviously haven't seen the one that has just been tabled, but if it is the same as the one that was delivered by the minister this morning I have had an opportunity to look at that speech and a formal reply to that statement has been delivered by the shadow minister for infrastructure, Catherine King. But I did just want to take a couple of minutes to reinforce a couple of key points from the opposition's point of view.

We welcome the fact that the minister has made this statement about disaster risk reduction. As I understand it from his speech, it is the first of what are intended now to be annual statements about disaster risk reduction. That is a good thing—that we have a government willing to make a statement to the parliament about what it is doing to reduce the risk of natural disasters that our country faces. We know from advice from the federal government's own bodies—the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and other scientific bodies—that we do face increased numbers and severity of natural disasters in the future due to climate change. That's bushfires, floods, cyclones and droughts. All forms of natural disasters and extreme weather events are likely to increase as a result of climate change. So it's a good thing that the government has a disaster management framework and is intending to report on it every year.

But I have to say, having read the statement the minister delivered this morning, that it really is just another example of this government being more about its own marketing than about matching it with action and reality. We saw from this government that it comprehensively failed to prepare and plan for the bushfires that our country faced not just in the summer but back to around August last year. My home state of Queensland was dealing with bushfires, unusually, as early as August last year, and of course it's continued ever since. We saw the government comprehensively fail to prepare and plan for those bushfires. When the bushfires actually hit, we saw the government fail to respond properly. It engaged in denial and blame shifting to the states and refused to fund various things. Now, as I have highlighted on a number of occasions in the chamber, we're also seeing the government fail in its bushfire recovery efforts.

I acknowledge that it's still early days in terms of the bushfire recovery, and I genuinely hope that the government takes on board our suggestions about what can be done to assist with bushfire recovery. Only today I've been in meetings with people from affected regions who are saying the same things that I've been hearing and relaying to this chamber since the bushfires and since we resumed sitting this year—things like the fact that payments to individuals, to farmers and to small businesses are being tied up in bureaucracy, with people being told by one person from the government that they're eligible and by another person that they're not. Of course, there are a whole range of people out there who are not even eligible for funding under the government's current arrangements. So the failures that we saw from the government in relation to these bushfires are continuing into the recovery effort as well.

There are many worthy sentiments in the minister's statement: about the need to prepare for natural disasters, about things that we can be doing, about the need for cooperation with other levels of government and all sorts of other good sentiments. But, as I say, it is deeply unfortunate that those sentiments have not been matched by action on the part of the government. We all know that there were numerous warnings that were provided to this government as to the risk that our country faced from bushfires heading into this bushfire season. We got those warnings. We all saw those warnings from scientific researchers who were predicting above-average fire risk. Of course, there were the former fire chiefs who sought on numerous occasions to meet with the Prime Minister to talk with him about the risk and about things that could be done, but he refused and continues to refuse to meet with them. We learned that in the government's incoming government briefs when it won the election the Department of Home Affairs advised the government about the increasing risk of natural disasters as a result of climate change. Indeed, in relation to this disaster management framework that the government has put together and that is the centre of the minister's statement here today, we learned a few weeks ago that, according to departmental officials who had worked on it, that framework had been 'buried'. 'Buried' was the word they used to describe a framework which was intended to guide government action to reduce disaster risk and which the minister is now crowing about in his statement to the parliament. It's not enough for this government to continue with spin and marketing statements about how great it is and how much it's doing about the bushfires when the facts are plain to see: they haven't taken these risks seriously enough, they failed to prepare, they failed to respond and they're failing in the recovery effort as well. Overshadowing all of this is the government's continued do-nothing approach when it comes to climate change.

As I said earlier, we know it is not just a Labor view—this is coming from some of the best scientists in the land employed by the federal government—that climate change is increasing the risk of these types of events into the future. While we don't do enough as a country to deal with climate change or to reduce our emissions in the way that the government is doing at the moment, then all we do is expose Australians, our environment and our economy to greater risk. There is so much riding on this for the government to get right, so I genuinely do hope that this first annual statement is a bit of a turning of the page for the government and that perhaps they will finally start taking climate change and the disasters that are increasingly going to result from it seriously. As we have done throughout these disasters, we will work constructively with the government to make sure that Australians get the protection from these events that they need. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.