Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the motion by the Australian Greens to refer a matter to the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport for inquiry. Essentially, the motion is about the need for a national strategy to help Australian agricultural industries to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The reason we need this is that, at the moment, we have no national strategy to deal with rural Australia and to help people in rural Australia to mitigate and adapt to climate change. That is not to say there is not a lot of really good work going on in places like the Bureau of Rural Sciences, in conjunction with the Bureau of Meteorology—there is—and in the universities there is a lot of work going on as well. But we do not have a systematic way of addressing the issue.

If ever there was an example of that it is the mentality that the government continues to trot out—that is, that we will deal with the impacts of climate change through a relief effort on an ad hoc, circumstance-by-circumstance basis. For example, there is flood relief, drought relief and fire relief. Of course there has to be assistance for people in rural communities, but you have to recognise that climate change is going to mean that extreme weather events will occur more often and will be more intense. We are going to have deeper-biting droughts, we are going to have more flash-flooding and we are going to have extreme bushfires, including megafires, as was evidenced by the cooperative research centre presentation in Parliament House this week.

It is no use putting on the Akubra hat and rushing out to those communities with a relief cheque every time this happens, when you can anticipate that it is going to happen. We should be having a strategy to build resilience and to reduce vulnerability in rural communities to these events. A classic example globally is the Red Cross. The Red Cross is an internationally recognised disaster relief organisation. Until recent years we could not have anticipated natural disasters, so it focused all its attention on disaster relief. The Red Cross now recognises that climate change means we know the disasters are going to happen—we can anticipate the disasters happening—so it is shifting a lot of its effort to building resilience so that, when the natural disasters occur, less relief is required and communities are less vulnerable. An example of that is that, instead of coming in to give relief after a tsunami, the Red Cross is now working with the World Conservation Union to replace and replant mangroves along vulnerable coastlines because the tsunami showed that areas where the mangroves were intact were far less impacted on by the surging sea than other places which had been developed and lost all their coastal vegetation.

This is the model I am suggesting in the Australian context. We need to recognise that climate change is real and urgent. We are going to have hotter temperatures, higher levels of evaporation and changed rainfall patterns and it is going to affect the way we live on the land. We have to move to a low-carbon economy. I will repeat that: Australia has to move to a low-carbon economy. We have to look at it this way: how do we generate our energy? We can no longer afford to depend on coal and oil. How do we move ourselves and our goods around? We have come to depend on oil for moving ourselves and our goods. How do we use our land? We have to rethink how we use our land in the face of these changed climatic conditions. We have to think about what we grow and how we grow it, because our fertilisers are largely petroleum based, and we have to look at what we grow and where we grow it. We have to look at tillage methods. We have to look at how we use water. We have to deal with and consider the role of native vegetation, not only in providing biodiversity but also in acting as carbon sinks. It is the same for our forests. We have to anticipate changed patterns for invasive species in rural Australia so that we can then build resilience in ecosystems and farming communities.

If we accept that we have to do these things, it is not good enough to simply have a disaster relief strategy, which is what we currently have in Australia—this pattern of rushing out and doing the disaster relief cheque. In my view we have to go the other way around now and ask, ‘How do we build resilience, how do we reduce vulnerability in rural Australia’—well, all Australia, but this reference relates particularly to rural Australia—‘and how do we do that for those communities?’ Clearly, we have to look at the three zones that we have: the pastoral zone, the wheat-sheep zone and then the wetter, if you like, horticultural zone on the coast. We need to overlay the climate maps and we need to identify where the transition zones are going to be—where it is no longer possible to go on the way we have been. Unless we do that now, we are not going to be in a position to help people make a transition so that they can stay on the land. They are going to be left in a situation where they are driven off the land, and that is what we do not want to happen. So, in order—