Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

You can have your say and tell me when we had two category 5 cyclones of the intensity of Cyclone Larry and Cyclone Monica in one year. The impact of those two cyclones on our community was enormous. People in the south even recognised it, because we did not have bananas for a year. But the impact on primary industries other than the banana industry was also felt by the sugarcane industry and the lychee industry. In fact, all of our primary industries were totally devastated. The economic impact was huge. There was an impact on our tourism industry because people were frightened of coming, even though they should have been. The invitation is there: please come to the north.

I want to talk today about the social costs. For the people whose houses were deroofed, the people who lost their employment, the people who had to relocate because they simply could not stay there as there were no jobs to be had, that cost was huge. I acknowledge that the Commonwealth government certainly did put its hand in its pocket to help out, but the reality is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that there will be an increased frequency of very intense cyclones. They say that on the one hand there will be fewer cyclones overall but on the other hand the cyclones that we have will be of a more intense nature.

Senator Macdonald and I have lived through cyclones; he comes from the north as well. A category 1 cyclone is actually good for the environment up there, as we get a good dose of rain, especially if it goes over the Great Dividing Range, and especially if it gets into the Murray-Darling catchment system. But if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is right, we are going to see fewer category 1 cyclones and more category 5s. I am not saying that Cyclone Larry and Cyclone Monica can be directly related to climate change, but the fact is that the intergovernmental panel says that we will get increased frequency of extreme weather events like those two cyclones. That is the reality; that is what we are dealing with. We are dealing with the impact of those sorts of weather events on our communities. I am sure that Senator Macdonald has heard, as I have, that our communities are rightfully worried about what we are going to do to mitigate that and what we are going to do to protect our communities from that sort of damage.

North Queenslanders know that climate change is real. North Queenslanders know that we have to do something as a community and as a nation—and, more importantly, as a global community. The Torres Strait islands people, tourism operators, reef managers and the managers of the wet tropics know that we have to do something. It is time for this government to really acknowledge and recognise the link between human activity and climate change and to join the efforts of the international community by ratifying the Kyoto protocol as a first step and then getting on with reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.