Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for bringing this very important motion to the parliament today. More than 20 years ago, I spent six months as a paediatric registrar in Darwin. During that time, years ago, I spent some months in Maningrida, about 500 kilometres east of Darwin in the Northern Territory, running medical clinics. The main illnesses that affected the Kunibidji children in the community in which I was working were failure to thrive; infectious gastroenteritis; and ear, respiratory and skin infections. All of those conditions are common childhood illnesses throughout Australia, but they affected First Nations children far more often and far more severely than their urban counterparts. Twenty years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third assessment report found that indigenous peoples are most at threat to suffer the impacts of climate change, along with people from small island populations.

In the years since my time working as a doctor in the Top End, the Northern Territory has gotten hotter. The wet seasons are wetter, the dry seasons more dry. The number of days with dangerous weather conditions for bushfires has increased, and the frequency of extreme weather events has increased. More than 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people live in remote areas of Australia, mostly in communities in the north of the country. The National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation states that the impacts of climate change amplify the health and wellbeing issues faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities.

But, no matter where we live, our environment and our communities are all vulnerable to the changing climate. Five years ago, the Lancet's Australian Countdown study confirmed that all Australian cities are highly vulnerable to rising temperatures and the impacts of extreme weather events. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners followed up this study and found that Australia's current carbon emissions trajectory is projected to triple—yes, triple—heatwave related deaths in the cities of Brisbane and Melbourne in our lifetimes. If we don't urgently change course, within 50 years the city of Sydney's heat related deaths will increase fivefold. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has also identified climate change as a key public health issue. In addition to the suite of chronic respiratory, cardiac, cerebrovascular and multisystemic illnesses caused by changes to our climate, people subjected to extreme heat, catastrophic weather events and prolonged drought can experience significant long-term mental health impacts and psychiatric illnesses. So climate change is a health crisis.

Today, nurses, midwives, psychologists, the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians have issued a set of urgent recommendations to the Albanese government for a national strategy on climate, health and wellbeing, including a sustainable healthcare unit within the Department of Health and Aged Care. I wholeheartedly endorse this recommendation.

There is no scientific scenario, no economic scenario and no responsible medical scenario in which Australia can open any new coal projects. Right now there are more than 100 new coal and gas projects coming down the investment pipeline, each at a different stage of development. If these projects come to fruition, they will more than double Australia's carbon emissions, and these coal and gas projects will disproportionately harm Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The previous government handed out $55 million of grants to oil and gas companies seeking to extract fossil fuels from the Beetaloo basin. One of those companies was Tamboran Resources, which was awarded $7.5 million in taxpayer money to explore the area, despite having called on the Australian government to abandon its goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

I became a paediatrician to help sick children in my care get better. I came to Australia because I think it's my duty to do everything in my power to prevent the harm that global warming can cause. The people of Kooyong have sent me to parliament to say to the Labor government on their behalf that Australia must urgently transition to clean energy industries and to a net-zero-emission economy. We cannot in good conscience do anything else. To do anything else would be a betrayal of our children.

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