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

I'm pleased to see the member for Warringah raise the issue of air pollution in this chamber. It's something that I have long discussed, over a number of years, and something we need to do a lot more about. But the reality is we live with the Australian bush. The Australian bush burns. It burns regularly; it burns frequently. In fact, part of its health requires it to burn for regeneration. So, unless we are going to wipe out our bushlands, air pollution from bushfires is something we need to understand. We need to understand the risks and, especially during times of high particulate matter, we need people, especially vulnerable people, to shelter.

But that doesn't mean we should be misleading the Australian public. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, we saw a shocking example of deception and lies from none other than the United Nations themselves. Last week, the United Nations put out a report, which was titled The human cost of disasters: an overview of the last 20 years (2000-2019). They put out a press release with it titled, 'UN Report charts huge rise in climate disasters'. And we had the chief of the United Nations, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, state, 'Extreme weather events have risen dramatically over the past two decades.' The only problem with that is, when you go to their report, they've got a chart in there that shows the exact opposite. In fact, since the year 2000 the number of climate related disasters has actually been declining. And yet here we have the head of the United Nations saying something that is completely false and deceptive, and misleading the world.

Now, how did they actually come up with such a deceptive and dishonest statement? They went to what's called the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, known as CRED, and looked at the number of disasters between 1980 and 1999, so the last 20 years of the previous century, and the first 20 years of this century. They said that data showed the number of disasters in the past 20 years is greater than the number of disasters in the 20 years prior to that. But what they failed to mention was that the database itself admitted that, before 1995, it did not capture all the disasters, and that it was down to an underreporting. In a 2009 report it said: 'CRED is fully aware of the potential for misleading interpretations of figures by various users. This is a risk on all public datasets.' Before interpreting the upward trend in the occurrence of weather related disasters as completely unprecedented and due to global warming, one has to take into account the complexity of disaster occurrence, human vulnerabilities and statistical reporting and registering. So we had the United Nations, one of the most respected and trusted organisations, misleading and deceiving the population of the world on climate change. We had the head of United Nations himself, none other than the UN Secretary-General, making false and misleading statements, deceiving the world. This is simply not good enough.

It's not only the number of disasters that is declining. Let's look at some of the other parameters. Let's look at the number of deaths. Let's compare the number of deaths in the 20 years of this century to those in the last 20 years of the last century. What does that show? Even the CRED data and the underreporting shows a more than 50 per cent decline in the risk of death for someone living in the last 20 years than in the last 20 years of the last century.

When do you ever hear that reported on the likes of the ABC? Never. The public is misled with complete false information. It's exactly the same thing on the insurance data. Insurance losses from weather related disasters have also declined over the last 30 years. We are being deceived. We are having lies told to us by none other than the United Nations. This is a disgrace, and it needs to be called out.

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