Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm so proud of the way that our community responded to Tropical Cyclone Alfred and ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred. As the cyclone was bearing down on Brisbane and the community started to face what could be the severe consequences of a cyclone making landfall in Brisbane, we put a big callout for volunteers across our community to help, at first with the sandbagging and knocking on doors to let people know that their houses may well be at risk of flooding. Frankly, the response was overwhelming in its positivity. Hundreds of people signed up in the course of just a few days, which allowed us and my colleagues, Elizabeth Watson-Brown and Stephen Bates, to coordinate one of the biggest volunteer efforts I've been involved in, mobilising hundreds of volunteers across our electorates—at first, just to pack and deliver sandbags. In fact, when the community volunteers got there, the lines for those sandbag operations were sometimes four or five hours long. We got them down to 30 or 40 minutes, and that's thanks to the incredible response from our communities across the Brisbane metropolitan region.

We met a lot of incredible people along the way. People who had lined up for four hours to pick-up sandbags for themselves had, by the time they got to the front of the line, decided to stay for another three or four hours to help pack sandbags for other people. A disability support worker, who was technically on leave, waited four hours in line to pick up a bunch of sandbags for all of the disabled people she was supporting and then drove around to drop them off across the electorate.

I could spend this entire time covering the incredible stories from our community, but what also became clear over the course of this crisis, as we moved from sandbagging to dropping off food to members of our local community who were particularly vulnerable and in the clean-up afterwards—hauling flood damaged furniture onto the street and taking green waste to the tip for the people who otherwise couldn't do it—is that, time and again, when these climate crises hit, the people most acutely affected are those that are most vulnerable, those who are already struggling in our society.

Three stories stand out for me to illustrate how dire the consequences are going to be for the most vulnerable in our society unless we do something serious about climate change—not just do something serious about climate change but also start to take the impacts of climate change seriously and spend real money and resources on mitigation and protecting our most vulnerable.

One person I spoke to was a single mum with a kid who was six years old, and that kid is disabled. She was already homeless and sleeping in a friend's room. That room flooded as a result of the cyclone, and she had nowhere else to go.

In another case, one of our amazing volunteers, Will, was knocking on people's doors to see if anybody needed help, when he encountered a completely overwhelmed single mum with three kids who couldn't afford to go to the supermarket, not least because her local one was closed. She was at the brink of tears, and all that her kids wanted was Macca's. I will shout out to Will, because out of his own money he went and grabbed Macca's for that entire family, and it was a lovely interaction. But, by pure chance, we knocked on her door. She could have been left completely overwhelmed and alone.

Finally, there was a disability support pensioner who had spent most of her income on rent. When we were asked to stockpile enough food to last three days, she realised she didn't have enough money to buy enough food for one night, so we ended up dropping off a food hamper for her, but, again, there are a lot of people that would have fallen through the cracks. Time and again it is our most vulnerable in our society that are impacted. This feels particularly unjust because the major driver for so-called natural disasters like this are the coal and gas corporations who continue to make billions of dollars in profit and do not suffer any of the consequences of the climate crisis that they're causing.

We know for a fact that one of the major impacts of climate change in Australia is going to see serious damaging events like Cyclone Alfred move further south. The Coral Sea temperatures where Cyclone Alfred formed in January and February were at record highs. The temperature that you need for a cyclone to sustain itself is more than 26.5 degrees and for one of the first time is ever those with a sea temperatures off the coast of Brisbane. We know for a fact that scientists say that, as a result of climate change, cyclones are going to be more intense, they are going to come further south, they are going to move slower, they are going to hold more energy and they are going to dump more rain. We know for a fact that warming temperatures are going to see the atmosphere hold more moisture and dump more rain when we have these events, just like Queensland may well be facing again as we speak. Again, the consequences are borne by the most vulnerable working people in this country while coal and gas billionaires and big corporations make off like bandits.

It bears repeating again and again and again: Australia is the second-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world. In this budget there are $50 billion of tax handouts for fossil fuels. Coal and gas corporations often get away with paying $0 in tax and this government has approved over 30 new coal and gas projects, directly contributing to the climate crisis that is going to make things like Cyclone Alfred more frequent and more common. What will it take, genuinely, for this government and both sides of politics to wake up to the fact that Australia will be one of the harshly hit when it comes to climate disasters and climate change and global warming? It is being driven by the refusal from both sides of politics to face up to the fact that it is coal and gas driving this crisis, it is coal and gas profiting off it, it is coal and gas donating to the major political parties and it is coal and gas that seems to run the policy of both major parties when it comes to climate change.

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