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

I acknowledge the difficulty that people up at Stockton Beach are having, but we have to look at the facts of why they are having that difficulty. One of the experts in this area, a Professor Ron Boyd from Newcastle university, has said that it is not sea-level rise that has caused the problem at Stockton Beach. He said, 'It's a man-made problem through artificially manufactured infrastructure.' He said:

Before Newcastle Harbour construction, sand moved … north along the coastline and a large sandbar existed off Stockton which saved it from the wrath of erosion which is decimating it today.

He went on:

After construction of long breakwaters—

and a deepwater channel being cut in the harbour—

it's virtually impossible for new sand to enter the south Stockton compartment.

"People need to understand it is directly linked to the creation of the harbour and dredging, and extension of the break waters …"

That is what our scientists are telling us. Yet we have members of the Labor Party coming in here and exploiting what is happening up at Stockton Beach: 'It's all climate change. It's all climate change.' What an outrage! Truly, for them to come in here, to ignore the science that says it is happening because of changes to infrastructure at Newcastle Harbour and to blame us—'If only you'd vote for us we would do something that would change the sea level'—is the level of the debate we have degenerated to. The other side will not listen to the science and they will not listen to the facts. They just make it up as they go along.

What does the science actually say? I seek leave to table the peer reviewed article 'The State of World's Beaches'.

Leave not granted.

Of course leave is not granted! We know the other side don't want to know the science. They don't want to know what the science says. They don't want to read the peer reviewed reports. They just want to go out and create mayhem and chaos and undue concern in our community. Let me read what the peer reviewed science says. This is an article published on 27 April 2018. It is a review of the beach shorelines of the world through a 33-year period, from 1984 to 2016. It found that 48 per cent of the world's beaches are stable. It found that 28 per cent are actually enjoying accretion—they are growing in size—and that 24 per cent are declining and suffering erosion. They've also gone through and actually published a map of the world where you can go to your local beach and see if it's suffering from erosion or if it's enjoying accretion and growing bigger. I have gone to that map and had a look at all the beaches in my local electorate. I am pleased to report to my constituents that I went through a list of the local beaches in my electorate—Jibbon, Wattamolla, Garie, Marley and Era beaches—and also, not in my electorate but in the Sutherland Shire, looking at Boat Harbour, Greenhills, Wanda Beach, Elouera, North Cronulla, South Cronulla, Shelly Beach and Oak Park. For every single one of them, the peer-reviewed science says they have been stable over the last 33 years. Sure, when a big storm comes in they will suffer from periods of erosion from time to time, and then the sand comes back as an accretion. That is a natural process.

As I go up through the other beaches in Sydney—Bondi, Tamarama, Bronte, Clovelly, Coogee, Maroubra, Malabar and Little Bay—all of them, according to the science, have been stable over a 30-year period. Yes, they suffer at times from major storm events, but those major storm events are not getting any worse. So I would encourage members of the Labor Party not to go out scaremongering and misrepresenting the science, and, when you see an event like we had at Stockton Beach, make up that somehow climate change is to blame when the science is absolutely clear that it's not, because what we are hearing is stories of women aborting children because of undue fear of climate change—that is what that does. We are seeing maniacs gluing themselves to the streets. When members of parliament misrepresent the facts, when they see an incident like what happened at Stockton Beach and they blame climate change, they are only feeding that fear in our society.

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