Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate will now consider the proposal, under standing order 75, from Senator McKim, which has been circulated and is shown on the Dynamic Red:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

That, in a cost of living crisis, and with climate-driven disasters rising in their frequency and severity, the government must make polluters pay to fund a transition, clean up the damage and lower the cost of insurance.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the request of Senator McKim—I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

That, in a cost of living crisis, and with climate-driven disasters rising in their frequency and severity, the government must make polluters pay to fund a transition, clean up the damage and lower the cost of insurance.

Everywhere you look in the country, there is evidence of climate ruin. It is only going to get worse. Last week Cyclone Narelle wreaked havoc across Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, with multiple regions experiencing their worst flooding in decades. Ningaloo Reef was torn up by Cyclone Narelle. Coral, sea birds, fish, sea snakes, eels, turtle hatchlings and dolphins have washed up on the shores—all now dead. This follows the worst coral bleaching event in the reef's history from rising sea temperatures last summer. In Exmouth, the cyclone ripped roofs, obliterated the airport, upheaved trees, toppled boats and flooded communities.

While so many communities are beginning a long journey of recovery, home insurance premiums have risen by more than 50 per cent in the last five years. The most expensive areas in which to insure a property are the ones hit hardest by climate driven disasters. Older Australians are really feeling the repercussions as the cost of insurance wipes decades off their retirement plans. APRA recently found that one in seven Australian homes is uninsured today, with that number likely to rise to one in four homes being uninsured by 2050 due to climate change. Members and senators here have heard so many times directly from affected communities about the impacts of climate driven disasters on their lives and livelihoods, yet governments refuse to act.

Every year climate disasters grow deadlier and more frequent. Every time ordinary people suffer. The home insurance crisis deepens while insurance companies get richer and coal, oil and gas corporations continue to destroy the environment, rake in massive profits and escape all accountability. It shouldn't be communities who are bearing the brunt of the cascading and compounding cost of living, housing and insurance and the climate crisis. It should be the polluters who are forced to pay to transition to renewable energy, to clean up the damage and to lower the cost of insurance.

Thanks to successive Labor and coalition governments—bought out by fossil fuel corporations—we are now experiencing climate whiplash. Across Australia this summer, we had communities preparing for catastrophic bushfires and heatwaves of over 45 degrees and then days later watching their cars be washed away in flash floods. There was snow in Tasmania over Christmas and, less than two weeks later, Victoria was doused in flames. Over 400,000 hectares burned and 54 homes were burnt down in Ravenswood and Harcourt.

With every coal and gas approval, the Albanese government is literally pouring fuel on the fire, engulfing the country in flames. In just the last three years, severe and extreme weather events cost $15½ billion in insured losses. As with any crisis, we know that it is vulnerable communities and First Nations people who will be hit the hardest.

We know that adapting to a changing climate is going to be expensive, and those who have broken the climate—the big polluters—must foot the bill to fix it. The Albanese government should start today by imposing a 25 per cent gas export tax, putting the pain where it belongs—on the big corporations. Instead, the Albanese government sticks to the same old rules: don't interfere with the big profits of big corporations and the billionaires, don't upset the ruling class, and, above all, don't upset your big coal and gas donors.

The Albanese government talks the talk about climate change, but it has sold our oceans, environment, wildlife and future in service of coal and gas profits. They have also sold out ordinary Australians to a war we never wanted. Ordinary people get crumbs while big corporations make a killing. Families, renters and retirees should not be paying for a climate crisis that they did not cause. The ones who should pay are the ones who caused the crisis and who are profiting from it every single day. We deserve a government willing to stand up to the climate polluters, the planet wreckers and the war machine.

Charlotte Walker (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to discuss Senator McKim's urgency motion. You don't need to look far to see what people are dealing with right now. It's there in everyday conversations, at the shops, at home and in every community we represent. You don't need a briefing pack to realise that people are feeling the pressure right now. You see it when your rent goes up and when your insurance renewal comes through and you have to double-check that it's not a typo. It's when groceries somehow cost more but your bag feels lighter. Insurance is a big part of that story, because what we're seeing isn't random. It's the reality of more frequent and more extreme weather events—floods, fires, storms. That risk is going up, and insurance prices are going up with it. This isn't theoretical; it's what people are living through.

But I think where we need to be a bit careful is pretending that there is a single, simple fix that solves all of this overnight. There isn't. What the government is doing, and what I think really matters here, is focusing on the practical things that bring costs down and make communities safer, because the cheapest insurance claim is the one that never has to be made. That's why we've already committed $1 billion over five years to the Disaster Ready Fund, actually investing in resilience, in mitigation and in making sure communities aren't left exposed in the first place. That's why we've set up the Hazards Insurance Partnership—which sounds a bit technical, but what it's about is government and insurers finally sharing data properly so we know where risk is and where investment will make the biggest difference. It's why we're looking at things like standardising definitions in insurance contracts, because people shouldn't need a law degree to work out what they're covered for. These things might not be flashy, but they're what actually shifts prices over time.

At the same time, we're not ignoring the broader cost-of-living pressures that people are dealing with right now, because this isn't happening in isolation. We've delivered tax cuts for every taxpayer, with another one coming this year. We've backed real wage increases, especially for people on minimum and award wages, because your pay should reflect the value of your work. We've expanded paid parental leave. We're investing more into Medicare. We're cutting the cost of medicines down to $25 or less, which is huge for people managing ongoing health costs. We've got 30 per cent off home batteries to bring power bills down permanently. We're helping first home buyers get into the market with lower deposits. We're even freezing the excise on beer, which I know is getting a workout in some parts of the country. We've also cut student debt by 20 per cent. That is not nothing. All of this matters because, when we talk about cost of living, we're not talking about one bill; we're talking about the pile of them sitting on the kitchen counter.

On the climate side of this—because this is a part of the conversation—I don't think anyone seriously disputes that climate change is making these things worse. We had almost a decade of inaction on that, thanks to the coalition. That had real consequences, and we don't have the luxury of another decade of chopped legislation. Yes, there is a broader transition happening. Yes, there are questions about who pays and how we manage that fairly, but we need to get that balance right, because, if the goal is to lower costs for households, we have to be focused on policies that actually do that, not just ones that sound good in headlines but don't translate into lower premiums or safer homes.

I think Australians are pretty practical about this. They want action on climate. They also want to be able to afford their insurance, their groceries, their rent—all of it. The job of government is to bring those things together in a way that works in a real way in the real world, not pick one and ignore the rest. While I understand the intent behind this motion—and I think the concern is valid—the real test is: what actually delivers for people? What actually makes their lives more affordable, more secure and a little bit less stressful? That's what we're focused on, and that's what people expect of us.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Climate pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels is rewriting the risk book on our weather. The National Climate Risk Assessment warned of more powerful and destructive storms, and that's what Cyclone Narelle was—a historic cyclone. Cyclone Narelle hit Australia four different times, striking three states as a category 3. This is the second time this has happened in our history, the last time being 2005, and it was a much bigger storm. This cyclone was born in the Coral Sea off the back of ocean temperatures in the Coral Sea in 2025 being the warmest on record. The warmest summer on record in the Coral Sea—the warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded—was in February 2026.

Then it made its way to Queensland and rivalled Cyclone Yasi as the most intense cyclone to ever make landfall as a category 5 cyclone in this nation's history. It then crossed the Northern Territory after they'd had a horrendous wet season of flooding and then reformed in Western Australia, eventually heading south and cutting its way across Western Australia to end in the Great Australian Bight and be subsumed by a big storm from the Southern Ocean. This is what climate change looks like, and it's because we refuse to act on climate change in places like this parliament that this is happening.

I especially feel really sorry for the community in Exmouth, who scored a direct hit—200 kilometre-an-hour winds. A big shout-out to them all from the Australian Senate today. The community's coming together. There's incredible energy there to rebuild. They're under immense pressure, especially going into tourism season over Easter. It's, of course, one of the premier places in Australia to go to now. I would like to give a special shout-out to the community, who are not only cleaning up and helping each other out but looking after the precious wildlife that suffered so terribly from the storm. If any senators have some spare money through their electoral allowances or otherwise, please donate to Balu Blue. You can go online. The work they're doing is absolutely amazing—heartbreaking scenes of hundreds of turtles, sea snakes, dead dolphins and all sorts of marine life washed up on the beach.

This is coming off the back of a second major climate event off the coast of Exmouth in the last 12 months. Those ocean temperatures off north-west WA down to Exmouth last year were record breaking. They recorded temperatures of around 36 degrees Celsius in the water. To give you an idea, the temperatures in the Coral Sea this year were 30 degrees. Above 26.5 degrees, you can get a tropical cyclone. Off WA, at the Montebellos, last year, they got to 38 degrees in the ocean. And, of course, we had catastrophic bleaching impacts on the Ningaloo World Heritage listed reef—absolutely one of the treasures of our country, not to mention the Montebellos and a bunch of others incredible reefs off WA. By the way, at the same time, we were having a mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef—the seventh mass coral bleaching in the last 15 years. Do you think we might be waking up to the fact that something is happening to our climate? Don't take my word for it. Tale the words of the hundreds of scientists who put together the National Climate Risk Assessment and warned us that, if we didn't act on climate change, this was going to be the future—a future of danger, destruction and suffering for our community and our precious biodiversity and wildlife.

It beggars belief that the National Party—for example, Senator Canavan—is calling for more oil and gas drilling in our oceans and more fossil fuel. You would think Queensland senators like you, Senator McDonald, would understand the threat these cyclones pose to our communities and the damage they're doing to our economy and agricultural businesses. Yet you go out there, ignore the science and call for more fossil fuel development at a time when we know we need to be transitioning to renewable energy.

While we're at it, why don't we tax the big gas corporations and their exports, like we should—we've been pushing for 20 years to do that—and spend that bloody money on helping our communities? They are suffering from the years that those corporations have profited from polluting our environment and our atmosphere and causing dangerous climate change.

Josh Dolega (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We all know how tough things are for people in the community right now. Families, businesses and battlers in Tassie and across the nation are really feeling the pinch of the cost of living, but I think they know that their Labor government is supporting them. Throughout the country and throughout the years, we've also seen more climate related natural disasters. They are occurring more often and hitting harder. But this Labor government is taking action to fix and address climate change and to provide cost-of-living support to Australians.

We are working hard to reduce climate related harm, and we are delivering that relief to everyday Australians. And it's in stark contrast that our opponents, the Liberals, had to be dragged kicking and screaming just into accepting the science of climate change. To be truthful, I still don't know whether all of them actually do accept it—definitely not in the Nationals. For a lost decade, they sat on their hands. They denied the problem, they delayed action, and they left communities vulnerable. While fires rages and floods hit, they offered nothing. That inaction drove insurance premiums higher for everyone, and families are still paying the price for their denial, delay and neglect.

Meanwhile, One Nation continue as well to reject the science of climate change. They want to scrap net zero. They want to abolish the climate change department and pull Australia out of the Paris Agreement. That position would make insurance costs and cost-of-living pressures even harder for families. People need to have a look at One Nation, because what they say and what they actually do matter. While One Nation and the Nationals publicly talked down net zero and climate change, they are lining up and getting solar panels on their houses. They're doing one thing and saying another.

Extreme weather and rising insurance costs have been a global challenge, and here in Australia we've been rolling up our sleeves, getting on with tackling the effects of climate change and mitigating natural disasters. Labor has committed $1 billion over five years to the Disaster Ready Fund. The money is strengthening homes and towns, and it's improving evacuation routes and early warnings. We've established the Hazards Insurance Partnership, a collaboration between government and insurers to share data to better understand where to invest to reduce risk and insurance costs. At the same time, we're tackling the cost-of-living crisis, and it's still our No. 1 priority.

Labor know people are doing it tough, and we're working every day to deliver cost-of-living relief for them. That's evidenced just this week by what the Prime Minister announced after he convened National Cabinet. Labor is cutting the fuel excise by 50 per cent. That's taking 26.3c per litre off the price of fuel. In my hometown of Devonport in Tassie, the cost of fuel has today dropped down to $2.19 a litre. It's still too high, but it's a massive decrease from yesterday, when it was pipping over $2.50. And we've seen diesel come down to under $3. That is providing relief every time you fill up your tank at the petrol station.

We are delivering tax cuts for every taxpayer, with the next round coming up in July. That will be a tax cut of up to $268 per year, which was opposed at the last election by those opposite.

We are supporting pay rises for minimum and award wage workers. We recently made a submission to the Fair Work Commission to support that pay rise for those who are paid least. That means a lot for those people, who would not be supported by those opposite. Paid parental leave will now be paid for up to 24 weeks. It's world-leading legislation.

We've got our solar batteries program providing incentives for people to be able to get batteries and to be able to store the solar energy that they generate, which will save them on their power bills. We've been providing $10,000 bonuses for tradie apprentices, which is making a difference to skill up the workforce for the jobs that we need to build the houses that we need.

We've been supporting paid placements for student nurses, teachers and social workers. We've got record funding for hospitals, and we've tripled the bulk-billing rate for GPs, which is resulting in more bulk-billed GP visits. We've lowered the costs for women's health care, which is absolutely fantastic. More first home buyers can buy their first home with just a five per cent deposit. This government is taking action to reduce the cost-of-living pressures on everyday Australians.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is what the climate crisis looks like in real time—not future climate modelling, not theory, real damage happening right now to communities across this country. Over the weekend, Cyclone Narelle ripped through Exmouth and straight across the Ningaloo Reef, leaving devastation in its wake. Volunteers walked the beaches and counted more than 300 dead turtles—baby turtles—in one stretch. It's not just a handful; it's hundreds of dead baby turtles. That is the reality on the ground after one storm hit an already-stressed ecosystem. This is the second hit in a year. Last summer's marine heatwave cooked huge sections of coral and turned parts of Ningaloo's reef into a graveyard. Whole systems were knocked out, and scientists are still trying to work out the full damage, but anyone who has been in the water can tell you that it's bloody bad.

Now, it gets smashed again before it has time to recover. That is the pattern: warmer oceans, harder hits and less time to recover. This isn't random; this is exactly what happens and is what the climate scientists have been warning about for decades. While that's happening, the same companies keep expanding under this climate-wrecking Labor government. Woodside Energy is pushing ahead with gas projects right next to these precious, priceless ecosystems. They dig it up, ship it out and book the profits. The public is left to clean up the damage.

We are talking about seagrass in Exmouth Gulf being wiped out, dead sea life up and down the coastline and reef systems that took thousands of years to build devastated beyond recognition. It's not just in WA. In my state of Victoria, we've had bushfire after flood after bushfire, all in the matter of a week. Last week was the one-year anniversary of the devastating algal bloom in South Australia. Fisheries were hit, tourism was hit and ecosystems were decimated. It was another signal that our precious environment is under immense pressure from heating waters. At the same time, companies like Santos are making billions and paying next to nothing in return for this destruction. I brought 100 dead weedy sea dragons into this place to illustrate just a small part of that destruction, and that's the deal right now: these big corporations profit while everyone else bears the brunt of their damage.

This Labor government is not only letting it happen but continuing to subsidise this disgusting destruction of our precious ecosystems. Labor keeps approving new coal and gas projects while talking about climate action—talking out of both sides of their mouth. Australians see through it. You cannot run both lines at once, and you need to pick a side.

The side that you need to pick is pretty obvious. Right now, the rules are clearly flipped in favour of Santos and Woodside—protect the industry, not the environment and not the communities. If we are serious about changing that, then we need to make the polluters pay. A minimum 25 per cent tax on gas exports could start to do this as a floor, definitely not a ceiling. It is a basic step to claw back some of the money being made off the back of this damage. Use it to fund recovery, to lower bills and to invest in getting off fossil fuels faster.

But be honest about this as well. If you keep approving new fossil fuel projects, you are pouring fuel on the fire. You don't have a plan. The real line in the sand is this: no new fossil fuel projects. Stop perpetuating the problem. Make the existing polluters pay, because what is happening at Ningaloo isn't some sort of one-off event; it is a preview of our future—more heat, more shocks and less time to bounce back. Once these ecosystems go, they generally don't return. I want my kids to be able to enjoy the beaches and the reefs. I want a safe climate future for them and generations after them.

So this comes down to political choices: keep backing those big donors to the major parties like Santos and Woodside and accept more of this devastating damage, or step in, tax them properly, make them pay for their destruction and start winding this industry down before they can wreck this planet even more. Those dead sea turtles on the beach are the real cost of delay, and it will only get worse if we keep letting Woodside and Santos take advantage of the free ride we are so willingly handing them.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion in the name of Senator McKim moved by Senator Faruqi be agreed to. A division is required. It being after 4.30, the division will be held over to another time.