Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Australian delegation to the 144th Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly, held in Nusa Dua, Indonesia, from 20 to 24 March 2022, and I ask leave of the House to make a short statement in connection with the report.

Leave granted.

I'll say at the outset that I did not actually attend the Inter-Parliamentary Union conference in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. That duty and responsibility fell to Senators Hughes and O'Neill. I'm just trying to work out how long my tabling statement is going to go for. Indeed, it might go for some time—we're just sorting out business.

The overall theme of the assembly was Getting to Zero: Mobilizing Parliaments to Act on Climate Change. The assembly was attended by 778 delegates, 404 of whom were parliamentarians, representing 101 member parliaments globally. As someone who was a delegate to the Inter-Parliamentary Union on behalf of the parliament in the last term, I think it's terrific to see that international gatherings are slowly returning post COVID. Those 101 states are not the full membership of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, but they do form a critical mass.

As one of those delegates, I can say that participation in the last term of parliament was not what we were anticipating when we signed up for this duty and responsibility, because it seemed to involve staying up, during parliamentary sitting weeks, from midnight to 4 or 5 am on the iPad and engaging with people in different time zones. Needless to say, for the benefit of the international community we had our cameras turned off most of the time, except when we needed to speak, because the visuals would have been frightening.

Australia, as I said, was represented by Senator Hollie Hughes and Senator Deborah O'Neill. I thank them on behalf of the parliament, because they had to go through quarantine in Indonesia. It was certainly no luxury trip to Bali. It was actually quite a difficult thing for them to feed into their schedule, but we took the judgement as a delegation that Australia's voice had been lost from all of these international forums for two years and that it was incumbent on us to find a way to turn up and participate. So, in the lead-up to the election, the two senators took the proverbial bullet.

Senators Hughes and O'Neill both contributed to the general debate. The general assembly at the IPU holds two major debates through each of the six-monthly international conferences. I know the member for Dunkley's deeply fascinated by this.

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