Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely, and very well deserved. I look forward to being under your leadership in the chamber, Madam Deputy Speaker, in future times. I rise to talk about the report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Primary Industries and Resources, which I was a member of for nine years before this parliament. I regret not being on that committee anymore, but with a largely agricultural seat like mine, the seat of Barker, I of course take a great interest in the work the committee does even though I cannot participate in it. So I was very interested to see this report, Farming the future: the role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. We all know that climate change is here; it always has been. We can argue about whether it is anthropogenic or not, but the fact is we do have climate change and farmers for centuries or millennia have actually been adapting to climate change. In fact, people in Greenland took up farming in the medieval warm period when it was about two degrees warmer than it is now. That is why it was called Greenland, because it became green with the warming that was happening there between the 11th and 14th centuries. So farmers do adapt, and it is important that as a committee and as a parliament we look at how we can help farmers adapt to climate change.

I think it is rather ironic that in the chamber on 19 February 2008 I talked about the importance of adapting. I have always believed that the more important strategy for adapting to climate change was always going to be through direct action, which the coalition of course have put down as their policy on climate change, and this report talks about adapting. On 19 February 2008 I talked about how important it was to adapt, so I was quite bemused when, a couple of weeks after that speech, the then environment minister, Mr Garrett, tried to make fun of that in answer to a question on 11 March 2008. He said:

The member for Barker went on to advise that the most sensible approach to climate change would be ‘to adapt’—

in inverted commas, as if this was some revelation that it was a really stupid way to go. That was very interesting because, a couple of questions later, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke, mentioned the importance for farmers to adapt to climate change. It really did make a mockery of the then minister for the environment, Mr Garrett, suggesting that I was somehow a bit loony to suggest that we should be adapting. That is exactly what this committee report is about. I will give you the title again: The role of government in assisting Australian farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. As a farmer myself, I have adapted all my life.

See this speech in context