Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

'I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.' Dorothea Mackellar wrote those words over 100 years ago, and very little has changed. Our history has been one of extreme weather and disasters. Her poem continued:

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When sick at heart, around us,

We see the cattle die …

…   …   …

Land of the rainbow gold,

For flood and fire and famine,

She pays us back threefold …

There's no doubt that the events over summer were quite catastrophic. I'm sure everyone in this parliament sends our best wishes to those in Townsville who are currently undergoing undue hardship and will continue to suffer hardship for many, many months, if not years, as they try to recover from that disaster.

But I am concerned that our response to these natural disasters must be based in science and facts so we can plan for them in the future. My grave concern goes to a year 10 history book called Pearson History New South Wales, which says on page 115: 'Climate change is noticeable in Australia, with more extreme frequent weather events such as the 2002-06 drought or the 2010-11 Queensland floods.' That is simply an inaccurate statement that is in a school history book. What chance do we have of forming the best policies in this nation to deal with fire, floods and drought if we have children being misled by incorrect information in our history books?

Let's look at what the peer-reviewed science says. Everyone likes to say they believe in the science. Well, here's some peer-reviewed science on cyclones from a peer-reviewed study published in Nature in January 2014. It says Australian tropical cyclone activity is lower than at any time over the past 550 to 1,500 years. That's what the peer-reviewed science says. In fact, if we look at the bureau's records, we find in the 1983-84 to the 1985-1986 cyclone seasons that, in those three years alone, we had 27 severe cyclones strike Australia. In the 2015-16 cyclone season there was not one single cyclone. You cannot look at that graph and then say that cyclone activity in Australia hasn't actually declined. But we will have major cyclones hit us again. We need to be prepared and we need to put our resources to it.

When it comes to that claim in the textbook about the floods in Queensland in 2010-11 being evidence of more extreme weather, that is simply contrary to the history of Queensland. One only has to look at the Brisbane floods. We find the largest flood in Brisbane was actually the 1841 flood. That is followed by the 1993 flood and then the 1974 flood. So to try to make out that the 2010-11 flood is some evidence of greater extreme weather is just simply contrary to the evidence in our history.

When it comes to droughts, many of us understand the severe droughts we're going through at the moment and the severe droughts we have had in the past. This has been standard throughout our nation's history. We should be prepared and we should be planning for continued droughts. When it comes to fires, what does the peer-reviewed evidence say? It finds that the global area burned has declined by 25 per cent over the last year. It says:

… many consider wildfire as an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence … the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived overall trends. Instead, global area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades …

That is the evidence. That is the science. We need to understand that we live in that same country that Dorothea Mackellar wrote about over a hundred years ago. That is why we need to prepare and help people recover from their resources instead of wasting money pretending that we can change the weather. We'll be far better off, rather than wasting billions of dollars thinking we can change the weather, putting that money into disaster relief to help people who are really suffering.

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