Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to join with Minister Littleproud in extending my deepest sympathies to the families that have lost loved ones during this horrendous bushfire season, and I also want to acknowledge the members of this place who, when their homes and communities were under threat, worked with the community to safeguard them. I know the member for Macquarie, the member for Eden-Monaro, the member for Gilmore and others performed such sterling work during the horrendous bushfire season. The work that they did is a credit to them. I also extend my deepest sympathies to Australians across our fire ravaged land who lost their loved ones, homes, businesses, crops, livestock or livelihoods over this awful summer, and I extend my personal appreciation to all the members of the parliament, some of whom I just mentioned, and to our brave, heroic firefighters, who gave up weeks or months and often gave up their personal income, their holidays, and time with their families to help save properties and lives. They did this for gruelling days, weeks and months—what must have seemed like an endless tour of duty—to fight these fires, protect their neighbours and protect people they didn't know. It was a horrendous summer, but it also showed the Australian spirit and how Australians will come together to support each other in times of need.

In particular I pay tribute to those who never returned home. We owe them and their children much more than our respect, much more than thoughts and prayers. We've actually got to help them. It is something that we must honour. It is of great concern to me that increasingly there doesn't seem to be that much respect paid to the words of government ministers. We find out that the things that they say they are doing are not backed up by the reality on the ground, and that is something that needs to change. That is something that needs to be addressed very quickly.

I don't think anyone contests that the level of destruction we have seen in the last six months was unprecedented. Certainly it is a bipartisan point of agreement, I would hope, that it was unprecedented. Any reasonable person would say that this summer was unprecedented, but that doesn't mean that this summer's horrific toll was unexpected. In fact, for many months the government was warned of an intense bushfire season compounded by climate change. For months former fire chiefs, with hundreds of years of experience between them all, asked our Prime Minister to meet so they could explain their concerns to him. For months they were ignored. When pressed on it, the Prime Minister said that he listens to serving fire chiefs and not the really experienced retired ones. That was a shame—not just a shame for the credibility of the Prime Minister, but a shame in that we were not as prepared as we needed to be for those expected catastrophic fires. It was in November last year that the leader of the Australian Labor Party wrote to the Prime Minister to say in a bipartisan way, 'Convene COAG and let's talk about Australia's natural disaster preparedness.' The fact that that was ignored is obviously a shame. For many years, as those opposite would probably like to forget—they won't be allowed to—experts like Ross Garnaut warned the government that this scenario was coming with near certainty. In fact, he even predicted that it would all come to a head in the year 2020, this past fire year.

Those warnings were ignored. What concerns me, even though I join Minister Littleproud in thinking about all that was lost, is that there was still this self-congratulating spin, this trumpeting of how well the government did, when the Australian people could see quite clearly—day after day, week after week and month after month, as this fire tragedy spread throughout 2019 and into 2020—that the government's lack of preparedness had left us at the mercy of enormous fires across our nation. It should have been expected. There were warnings. What the federal government needs to do is not congratulate themselves but lead. They need to not coordinate from behind and after the fact but actively lead a national response to the bushfires, floods and other crises, if not to avoid the horrendous loss of life and property, but—this may strike a stronger chord with them—so that they can prevent fires costing our nation billions of dollars.

One example of where it is costing us big time is in agriculture. As was pointed out by PhD candidate David McKenzie, from Charles Darwin University, in his submission to the current House of Representatives inquiry into how we lift agricultural production in this country:

The primary challenge to the growth of Australian agricultural output is that of the intensifying propensity of natural hazard consequence risks due to increasing frequency and accentuation of climatic variability oscillations.

Academic-speak! He continues:

The 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review foreshadowed serious impacts of climate change on the Australian agricultural sector (Garnaut, 2008).

As I said, it shouldn't be news to anyone that catastrophic climate change will continue to be a threat, not only to lives and properties in this nation but also to our economy. We are seeing that played out in spades.

One of the ways we can better manage the fire threat in our nation is to listen to Indigenous knowledge that has been developed over tens of thousands of years. I was proud to open the Savanna Fire Forum in Darwin on 18 February, which focused on the amazing work of the savannah carbon farming industry. I'll just quickly give you an idea of the potential. The savannah projects have reduced emissions by more than 6.9 million tonnes of CO2 since 2013. These projects have achieved the equivalent of removing 400,000 cars from our roads. It is going to be able to generate income. Our country's tropical savannah covers about 1.9 square kilometres, or close to a quarter of our continental land mass. These savannahs are highly fire prone, so active fire management by First Nations people over the last 60,000 years has obviously helped to shape those savannah landscapes and these traditional practices. The transition from those traditional practices to modern farming techniques had a big impact on our environment. As a result, I think there is a renewed focus on ways that we can work with Indigenous knowledge to actively manage fire and work on what we know to be the case—that the two-way seeing of First Nations Australians will give us a much better idea about how to manage fuel loads and about how to manage fires by managing fuel loads early in the season. I hope that we can do that to the benefit of our nation.

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