Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great and solemn privilege to be able to contribute to this motion, a motion of condolence particularly for the 33 lives lost so far over the course of this summer in unprecedented fires impacting pretty much every jurisdiction in our wider Commonwealth. Thirty-three lives have been lost, including the lives of nine firefighters who bravely put their lives on the line to protect in most cases their community and in some cases other communities—communities of which they weren't themselves a member.

We're having this debate—a heart-wrenching debate in many instances—at a time when we understand that the emergency is not over. The nation's parliament, even as we debate this motion, is again shrouded in smoke, as it was over the last couple of days. We know fires are still burning in the Monaro region. As a South Australian, I well understand that my state and the state of Victoria, which don't get the benefits of the summer rains that the more northern jurisdictions do, are really only coming into the peak of the fire season. We know in the southern states that the worst fires in our history have generally been in February. I well remember the warning sirens sounding on Ash Wednesday at my high school, Unley High, at the foot of the Adelaide Hills—the worst fire South Australia has ever experienced. I think that was the worst fire that Victoria had experienced, until Black Saturday in 2009.

This emergency is by no means over, as I think we in this House all understand. Others much more directly impacted, or whose communities are much more directly impacted by these fires than my own in Adelaide, have spoken just so eloquently through this debate. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition spoke beautifully yesterday in the chamber, but particularly members who have been working, day in, night in, day out, night out, right through the Christmas and New Year period, spoke so beautifully, so touchingly: the member for Gilmore, the member for Eden-Monaro and the member for Macquarie on our side of the House, but also the member for Gippsland and the member for Monash. I remember the member for Monash's contribution during the debate back in 2009; it was a powerful contribution, and the power of his contribution then was matched by the power of his contribution yesterday.

I don't intend to go through the horrors, the unprecedented horrors, of the fires that have impacted other states. They've been well detailed by members across the chamber who've spoken—and by those who've spoken, I gather, in the other place as well—about the impact of the fires, particularly in New South Wales and Victoria but also in Queensland and Western Australia. But my own state of South Australia has also been impacted by fires—by some that started as early as September, but most particularly by the fire at Cudlee Creek in the Adelaide Hills in December and the fire at Kangaroo Island, an utterly dreadful fire that burned for a very long period of time through January as well.

The Cudlee Creek fire took in a substantial area of the Adelaide Hills. That vibrant community, particularly known for its extraordinary wines and also its tourism, was devastatingly impacted by the fire. Eighty-six homes were destroyed. Five hundred sheds and other outbuildings were razed. Thousands of vehicles, livestock, pets and crops were lost. More than 25,000 hectares were burnt, just at the outer edge of the Adelaide region. There were hundreds of brave CFS volunteers battling the blaze along with, obviously, property owners themselves. The fire is thought to have destroyed up to a third of the vines that provide grapes for the vibrant, world-renowned winegrowing region of the Adelaide Hills, and the bushfire zone indeed covered about 30 per cent of the region we describe as the Adelaide Hills wine region. Most tragically, we lost a very well-known member of the community, Ron Selth, who died defending his home in Charleston in the Adelaide Hills. I want to put on record my deepest condolences to his family, to his friends and to his community.

After the Cudlee Creek fire, the Kangaroo Island fire also took hold and burned for a very long time indeed, burning over 200,000 hectares of land on that island, destroying 89 houses, about 300 outbuildings and hundreds of vehicles. Tens of thousands of livestock were killed through that fire, and as many as 25,000 or even more koalas were killed. Kangaroo Island is an incredibly important habitat for koalas, and many, many thousands of those koalas were killed. Experts have also expressed concern over the survival of a couple of endangered species on the island, including the dunnart, which is a mouse-like marsupial, and also the glossy black-cockatoo, which may well have been pushed into extinction by this extraordinary fire event.

Again, I'm very sorry to say, tragically, lives were lost in the Kangaroo Island fires, as the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition mentioned yesterday. Dick and his son Clayton Lang, two very prominent members not just of the Kangaroo Island community but of the broader South Australian community, lost their lives after fighting fires for a number of days on Kangaroo Island. Dick was a very well-known aviator, and his son Clayton was a well-known surgeon in the South Australian community. Their funeral was attended by hundreds back in Adelaide. Again, I place on record my deepest condolences to their family and to their friends and to their very wide ranging community, which they were such proud and loved members of.

With those fires substantially under control in South Australia, and some across the rest of the country, our challenge is to remain vigilant over the remainder of this season. As I said in my earlier remarks, in South Australia we are only just reaching the peak of the fire season traditionally. There is still substantial danger ahead, as there is for many other parts of the country as well. Our other challenge is to help those communities that have gone through such trauma over recent weeks or recent months—to help those who have lost so much, whether it was property, loved ones, livelihoods or livestock—to recover but also to help those regional economies remain resilient. So much of that was spoken about yesterday, particularly by the local members representing the communities impacted by fire.

The state government, to their credit, launched the campaign #BookThemOut to encourage people to visit, to tour and to spend money in the Adelaide Hills region and the Kangaroo Island region. It was an announcement very strongly supported by the Labor opposition. I strongly support it as well in South Australia. I'm really pleased to say that on the day of the announcement of this campaign there were more visits to the local tourism website, southaustralia.com than there have ever been before—a really resounding indication of the intention of the South Australian community to support those regions.

At a very high level, we had the T20 Showdown on the weekend between Port Adelaide and the Crows. There were footballers trying their hands at cricket. It raised over a million dollars and, to put some icing on that cake, Port Adelaide won as well, as I'm sure you'd be pleased about, Deputy Speaker Georganas.

At a more local and individual level, one example in my own community in the western suburbs of Adelaide is a hardworking mum, called Karen, who started a program called Backpacks For Bushfires, asking for donations to fill backpacks for kids who'd lost everything but were returning to school, as they did last week. It's been an incredibly successful program. I've been really happy to help as a location for people to drop off their backpacks to be distributed to those kids. It's got great buy-in.

Regis Aged Care in Marleston, an aged-care facility in the western suburbs, had all of their residents contribute money and goods and pack the backpacks and deliver them to my office. There have been those sorts of local and individual efforts right across Australia, including in my great state of South Australia.

I want to commend the extraordinary effort shown by Australians in this most awful of summers, which unfortunately is not over yet. Obviously, the most startling contribution has been through our thousands of volunteers, particularly our firefighter volunteers but all of those volunteers around them, who create that ecosystem of love and bravery that keeps so many of us safe. Like every person in this chamber, I want to pay my enormous respect and gratitude to volunteers and, also as the previous speaker indicated, to our proud ADF personnel, including the reservists. Across the coast in Adelaide we've seen the Chinook helicopters going regularly from the Edinburgh base down to Kangaroo Island. There are ADF personnel and reservists right throughout our country supporting the effort of those many thousands of community volunteers who are keeping us safe and then, after the fire has receded or hopefully even ended, helping those regions recover. I pay my respects and my gratitude to them as well.

In closing, as the spokesperson for climate change for the opposition, it behoves me to make a few remarks about how climate change fits into this current emergency. As distressing, as destructive and as, in many cases, tragic as this long summer has been, in many senses the unprecedented nature of the fire emergencies should have come as no real surprise, because we have been hearing the lessons and receiving the warnings of our leading scientists from the Bureau of Meteorology, from the CSIRO, from the Academy of Science and from all of their equivalents around the world, that the Forest Fire Danger Index, a scientific index, which, as the name suggests, tracks the danger of forest fire—an index developed by a CSIRO scientist here in Australia in the 1960s—has been rising steadily now for many years in line with the rise in average temperatures. It's reported every couple of years through the State of the climate report, which is published jointly by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. I remember in their 2016 report, for example, them showing that the FFDI, the Forest Fire Danger Index measurement, around Melbourne airport, which is one of the measuring stations—very close to the member for Lalor's electorate—had increased by around 50 per cent since the 1970s, in line with increases in average temperatures.

We have been receiving the warnings for many years now that the fire season would start earlier; that it would be longer; that when fires came they would be more intense; that they would come more frequently; and that areas of the country that had not traditionally burned would be burning. We have seen all of that come to pass. It does behove us, as the Australian Academy of Science has said over recent weeks, to start to come together and consider stronger action on climate change, because what we've experienced over the last summer is not necessarily the new normal. If average temperatures continue to climb, the new normal will be significantly worse than what we have seen in the course of this summer.

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