Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this particular piece of legislation, the Telecommunications Amendment (Integrated Public Number Database) Bill 2009. There are a number of issues here that most members have canvassed, but I think some of those issues are worth repeating. Obviously any warning system that can assist people in times of disaster is very worth while contemplating. I understand that there may be some people—maybe not in this place but in the community—who do still have some issues with this legislation in terms of the privacy provisions. But I am informed that, under the way in which the legislation has been structured, the Attorney-General will keep a very close eye on the various agencies—the state and territory agencies that are actually given access to the database. So I do not share those concerns that maybe some people in the community would have.

I am also told that when an emergency does take place and the database is triggered the numbers are triggered and not the names of the persons holding the number, so there will not be any disclosure of who those with private numbers happen to be—they will get the message either through the normal system or through the SMS system. So I would just say that I do not have a problem with the legislation at all. Given the tragedy that has just occurred in Victoria and the possibility that a better system—an emergency warning system—may well have saved some lives, I think we should look very seriously at these arrangements.

Obviously COAG was looking at this issue some time ago. I think they agreed at the time that it was going to be fairly expensive and procrastinated or whatever. But now it has been brought to a head and it is good to see it coming before the parliament. I would not envisage that there would be any issues with this particular piece of legislation. As I said, this issue has been brought to the parliament very quickly, and so it should be, on the back of the Victorian bushfires. I think it is appropriate and I would just support some of the comments that the member for O’Connor made earlier today and in the Main Committee a few weeks back in relation to the broader debate about the severity of these fires and other emergencies that may occur from time to time as well and the need for a database such as this one to be triggered. This also goes to the heart of the issue as to how this particular fire became so ferocious.

I think scientifically we are well aware now that if you get various circumstances such as low humidity, very dry conditions, wind, very hot days and an amount of fuel in the understorey of a forest then you have the preconditions that will eventually lead to a wildfire. Irrespective of how that fire is started, whether it be by nature or by arsonists, the preconditions for those fires will always be there if we do nothing. There is a Victorian royal commission to take place. I have absolutely no doubt that they will revisit many of the decisions that were made in the past. I have a file with me, which I will not bother going right through. If people are interested in looking at the various commissions and inquiries—state based inquiries in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia; and in Victoria again and again—they will see that there has been any number of inquiries. The recommendations that have come back time and time again include fuel reduction as one of the main objectives to reduce that precondition—not for bushfires, we will always have bushfires, but rather for firestorms of the nature of that which occurred in Victoria the other day.

I particularly relate to an inquiry I was on back in 1994 in the New South Wales parliament. After some very severe bushfires in New South Wales that parliamentary committee was formed and we went out and spoke to the people. We came back with a whole range of new information and recommendations, some based on communications—not strictly this type of database that we are talking about today but nonetheless communications between the various agencies: the police, the SES, the fire people and whoever else was involved. There were real issues—the various agencies could not talk to each other because they were on different frequencies. Some of those things have been patched up and fixed. In New South Wales there was an enormous injection of money into fire sheds, fire trucks et cetera.

One thing that was not done adequately in my view was the reduction of fuel. There were recommendations in that particular inquiry and there have been recommendations in every inquiry since the 1939 Victorian episode, where there were heavy recommendations. There were recent recommendations in 2002 after the Gippsland fires. I know the Independent member for Gippsland East, Craig Ingram, made certain recommendations by way of submission and highlighted that even the targets being set by the Victorian government at that time had not been met at all. In fact I think that on average only about a third of the reduction targets being set at government level had been reached.

I do not think that is good enough, and I think we have to learn from this. I am pleased to see that the Prime Minister has taken a pretty prominent position on this, and he made the point at the mourning ceremony on Sunday—and I raised this in question time on Monday—that we should learn from the past, and that successive governments had, I think his words were, ‘let the communities down’. I think that is a significant point, and probably one of the most significant points that were made during that ceremony.

The other very important point, in my view, was made by an Aboriginal lady who welcomed the group gathered at the Rod Laver centre. She made a point about the fires that occurred in her area—she came from Healesville. Auntie Joy Murphy, I think was her name; her people originated in that area and she made the welcome on behalf of the Wurundjeri people. She made the point that, traditionally, her people would have burnt the land to ‘cleanse’ and to ‘renew’ it—I think they were the words that she used—on roughly a seven-year cycle. The other important point she made was that the fire that occurred in Victoria the other day was not natural; that it was, in fact, ‘torture’ to the land.

There is a significant point in this. And, while I know we will all have arguments about environmentalism, carbon emissions and a whole range of other things, if we are serious about trying to stop tragedies like the Victorian one occurring, I think we have to learn a little from the Aboriginal people and the history of the evolution of the vegetation in this country. We are trying to deal with the vegetation now by just ignoring it, and saying, ‘Oh, it’s natural’—if 40 or 50 tonnes per hectare of fuel builds up in the understorey—‘for that to burn.’ The Aboriginals did not allow that to happen. In fact, the type of bush that has developed over the last 40,000 years has really developed because of fire—but low-level fire, not wildfire of the nature that we saw the other day.

We came along in the last century and assumed that we were best to preserve and to let nature take its course, in the build-up of debris. But that is not natural. What we are doing has resulted in these very bad fires—and they have occurred in the Blue Mountains before and in other parts of New South Wales. And when they occur we actually do torture the land, and not in a natural sense. To go back to a natural sense of the land we would have to know what the land was like before the Aboriginals came, and I do not think anybody really knows that—or those who do make statements do not seem to suggest that it was very similar to what we have today. So I think we have to recognise the role that the first Australians played in the evolution of our landscape and learn from some of the technologies that they put in place, because it is not only the trees and the bush and the flowers that are being impacted on here, it is also the animals, which have learnt to live with and have evolved in that low-fire regime.

Towards the east of my electorate we have the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park and others, and there are a number of them with landscape which, in some parts, is not all that dissimilar to the part of the Victorian countryside that was burnt the other day. Historically, however, after the Aboriginal people, the pastoralists who leased that country used to do low-level burning from ridge to ridge, in the cooler months of the year, so that those fires would always burn themselves out. So when and if there was a particularly bad year, in terms of dryness, low humidity et cetera, and a fire did break out, there were these natural barriers that had been created in the times where there was a low-level risk.

So I would make a plea to the government—and particularly to the Prime Minister, because I think he did demonstrate the other day a genuine willingness to actually do something about this issue—to return to that low-fire regime. I know that the member for O’Connor was pilloried for the comments that he made. Well, I support what he said. And he did not say to anybody that all trees should be removed; I do not think he said anything of that nature. But if we are going to live in this nation and we are going to let people live in areas where there are trees—and I plant hundreds of trees every year; I am a bit of a tree lover—we have to make sure that the sort of disaster that occurred the other day cannot happen again. Humans can fix that problem; it is a fixable problem. And this regime that I suggest fits more with our landscape than the one that some people, particularly in the last 30 or 40 years, have said is the natural one for the landscape and the one that we should be going back to.

I highlight again the Blue Mountains near Sydney. Some of the fuel tonnages in parts of the Blue Mountains mean that a tragedy will occur in that area. It is not a matter of ‘if’; it will happen. There are areas there where nothing has been done. Why am I particularly concerned about that? It is mainly because it is near a capital city, and if it is near a capital city, it gets plenty of attention when something happens. If it were out in the middle of nowhere and only two or three houses burnt down then Channel 9 would not particularly care. So that event will occur in the future. And if we are serious about actually addressing this issue—and I think there has been due warning on this by many people in the parliament—then there are mechanisms that should be put in place to come to grips with those sorts of fuel loads.

There are other issues that I will briefly raise in relation to the bill we are passing today. This database will be very important, and I applaud its introduction. There are other things that we really do need to look at—not just in terms of a Victorian royal commission, because royal commissions have been held and have gone, and very little has happened. I would suggest that the royal commissioner could probably put that commission together very quickly and on a very low budget because it has all been written in dust covered books, inquiries and documents in the past, and the recommendations will be no different at all about what needs to be done. But the royal commission should look—as did the 1939 Victorian royal commission, as did a number of others—at the issue of bunkers in the high-risk areas where even with fuel reduction there may be circumstances where people will not be able to leave the area in which they live, particularly if there is a narrow dirt track that is surrounded by trees. And that is another issue that maybe we should look at. A lot of those people died the other day because there was not a road for them to drive on. If you allow the trees to grow right up to the verge, obviously, one only has to fall and you cannot get out. We have to look very closely at those areas, particularly at bunkers, where in that circumstance people could go to ground. Wombats do it. They do not race up the road and try and get away; they know where the protection is.

The other issue I would like to touch on—and a number of members did touch on this issue in their earlier addresses—is the role that the Australian Broadcasting Commission played in alerting people in those communities to what was happening as it was happening. We have seen it time and time again in all of our electorates. We recently had a flood in Tamworth where the newsreaders, Richard Standley, David Evans and others—the manager, Jennifer Ingall, for instance—all got up well before dawn and were on the radio telling people what was happening. A major cloudburst had occurred and a flood was coming down at a massive rate, and they were there to alert people. I note that the ABC’s budget is being looked at again, and I would support their budgetary requirements because I think they have shown on a number of occasions that they have probably saved many lives by being there and informing people. They have also placated the concerns of many individuals by just being there and telling people what is going on and by having the capacity through talkback et cetera to receive messages from people on the ground and let the broader community know exactly what is happening.

In conclusion, I applaud the legislation. I support the legislation. I say to those who are a little bit concerned about the privacy issues that they should look beyond those issues and look at the value that this sort of emergency database can give in terms of protection of the wider community.

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