Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If ever there was a time for someone to step up and lead this nation it was the spring and summer of 2019-20. In fact, that is exactly what happened. But it wasn't the Prime Minister who led. The Prime Minister created a vacuum and that was even before he decided to escape the smoke and disappear to Hawaii. He left the vacuum. We all know that there is a vacuum, someone will fill it and they did. Let's look at a few of them. Greg Mullins, the former New South Wales fire chief and other fire chiefs, with their hundreds of years of experience, stepped up. They stepped up nearly a year ago. They had used their perspective to identify that we may have been under-prepared for a potentially dangerous and disastrous fire season. They were concerned about the capacity of emergency services to cope. They were concerned about the number of firefighting aerial facilities that we had. And they were concerned about our reliance on volunteers. They saw there was a need for things to change. They showed leadership.

I heard my colleague the member for Eden-Monaro yesterday acknowledge that during these fires the Leader of the National Party reached out to him and I have to say that the new National Party deputy stepped up and reached out to me. I think leadership means being willing to set aside self-interest and partisan politics to be able to address the very real issues that people face. Now, I'm not going to pretend that those problems have been solved yet, but the member for Maranoa was able to do something the Prime Minister and others have been incapable of, and that was to rise above party politics. That's leadership. Equally, our own leader, the member for Grayndler, ditched the politics and stood side by side with people to hear about their experiences with these fires, as firefighters and as survivors. It would have been easy—so easy—to simply attack the Prime Minister for his failures. But instead we had a consistent, constructive voice. Our leader offered workable solutions and a willingness to welcome positive steps by the government, slow and small as they were. Yet that was never acknowledged. I was very grateful that he understood, joined me and stood side by side with people as they went through possibly the most horrific fire season of their lives. That's leadership.

At a local level, many others showed leadership. Mayors and state and federal members of parliament in fire-affected areas joined together, irrespective of politics, to support their communities. Many of them did this while their homes were under threat or their family members were facing their own personal fire traumas. They put their communities' interests ahead of their own. That's leadership. Our emergency services personnel showed leadership. They focused on the job and they did not seek to glorify their role. That's leadership.

But the Prime Minister failed on every one of these measures. It extends to his inability to take responsibility for anything, his lack of judgement, his errors and his ignorance. The sort of thing we teach our children is that you have to own your mistakes. You have to accept responsibility and you have to be honest about it. The Prime Minister has failed on all those measures.

I think one of the saddest things was the day the ad came out, when finally we had some action from the government to support our firefighters with ADF support and with additional firefighting capacity. But the first thing that we saw of that was a flash ad linked to the Liberal Party donations page—that on a day when many people were facing catastrophic conditions, when ember maps were showing huge swathes of New South Wales potentially under attack. We got an ad; that really says it all.

The sad thing is of course that we need leadership from the Prime Minister urgently. We can't afford to sit around and wait for another leader to come along—although, who knows, we may not be waiting that long! Our need for leadership by this Prime Minister is urgent, and the thing he needs to lead on is action on climate change. He and Australia could show the world that we have learned from this summer. So let's be clear: this Prime Minister hasn't been missing in action just over spring and summer; he was missing long before then. It's his character that has failed us. It's who he is, and we really shouldn't expect— (Time expired)

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