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

As I was saying, it is because of the commitment I have to rural and regional Australia that I would like to see this reference go to the committee. Last year I moved a reference on oil depletion in Australia and Australia’s future oil supplies because of this issue; I am desperately concerned about it. I think it was an incredibly constructive inquiry. We had, I think, 190-odd submissions from around Australia and we met with a lot of people in rural and regional Australia who were looking at the opportunities that biofuels might be able to provide. That is an example of one way in which we need to look at what we do on the land. How can we change what we do on the land so that people can stay there? They may have to change their source of income from what they currently do to something else.

In that regard, a particular case I would like to highlight is what is going on in Western Australia with mallee. They are planting out mallee. It is great for biodiversity. It is great for salinity. It can be harvested. And, when it is coppiced, because the roots are still left in the ground you can use the biomass to generate energy and get oil from it. Once we get lignocellulose research, hopefully the breakthroughs from that will mean we can use it for biodiesel as well. It is a way of improving the land and sequestering the carbon as well as changing to a different source of income. What I am seeking to say is that we can work on this committee in a very constructive way, to go out and talk to people in rural and regional Australia about the changes that need to be made.

I would like to give a couple of other examples. I will start with the fishing industry. Tasmania has a distinctive coastline that provides a stunning backdrop for our commercial and recreational fishing industries. But the warming ocean waters and changes in local currents are now impacting on the profitability of fisheries. Now the east Australian current is coming further and further down Tasmania’s east coast, bringing with it the invasive sea urchin, which is attacking our kelp forests—the nurseries for the abalone and rock lobster fisheries. That in itself is the beginning of a serious impact.

But add on to that what is happening with Tasmanian Atlantic salmon: it is currently operating at the upper end of its temperature limit, particularly in sheltered estuaries where water temperatures are getting higher than in the open ocean. It is going to get to the point where the Atlantic salmon fishery has to change to breeding a species that is more tolerant of warmer temperatures; take its cages into deeper water, which is going to incur considerably greater costs; or bring them onshore, which again will be a considerable cost. That is an example of the need to talk about adaptation, with the fishery industries asking, ‘How are we going to deal with this and how are we going to adapt to it?’

It is exactly the same with stone fruit in Tasmania, as well as the apple and pear industry. At the moment apples provide a living for 120 families. The apple harvest is valued at over $70 million and Tasmania is responsible for over 65 per cent of Australia’s apple exports. The cherry industry is growing at an extraordinary rate. Valued at $5 million in the year 2000, it is projected to be worth more than $25 million by 2010. However, we are now finding that this industry is particularly susceptible to drought, pests and heavy rainfall events. Many fruit trees require cold winters and frosts, but the average higher temperatures in winter brought about by global warming may well lower yields and reduce the quality of our export fruit. In fact, last October we had severe frosts which cut by half Tasmania’s $120 million fruit industry yields—apples and cherries and other stone fruit. That is just an example. Of course, here in Canberra we have just had a classic example of an unseasonal, extraordinary weather event. Such events have a huge impact not only on urban life but also, as we are discussing in this reference motion, on rural life.

Renewable energy’s potential to provide jobs and income in rural and regional Australia is considerable. Concentrated solar thermal energy is a classic case. Solar Heat and Power could roll out a 300-megawatt power station at Moree at the moment. It would need six square kilometres of land on which to do that. The rural industry there is suffering because of drought. It is no longer sustainable for those farmers to continue doing what they have been doing, but there is an opportunity for that community to shift from what they currently do to getting more involved in a use of the land that helps to provide renewable energy, which they can sell, or maybe lease part of the land on some of their large stations. Of course, most vulnerable to climate change—well, all areas are vulnerable—are the marginal areas in the pastoral zone where they have large areas of land but not a high-value return per hectare. This is where concentrated solar thermal power is an option. In fact, the CRC for Coal in Sustainable Development has said 35 square kilometres of concentrated thermal energy could provide all of the baseload power that Australia needs.

What I am arguing is: if we want to get real about climate change, if we want to get real about oil depletion, if we want to address the fact that rural Australia is suffering because of climate change, we have to accept that reality. We need to stop the awful annual situation where they are offered drought relief and there is a fight in communities in order to qualify for that drought relief. We are constantly going to have to change the parameters for drought relief. Saying that a drought is a one in 100 years event or one in 50 years or whatever is no longer applicable in terms of dealing with disasters because of climate change. What has gone before is not a measure of what we can anticipate may happen in the future.

At the moment the system for relief is very unfair because, whilst at the time of the event there is a lot of publicity around politicians turning up with cheques, afterwards rural communities are left devastated with long lag times before they get the relief and in many cases they do not qualify for it because of technicalities about the parameters for the relief.

I am suggesting an entirely different strategy. We can anticipate these disasters fairly accurately and we can anticipate fairly accurately where they are going to occur even in terms of weeds. The weeds CRC, which the government is no longer going to fund—and I think that is appalling—has done valuable work. We know, for example, that there are plants which are currently sleeper weeds. With climate change and changed conditions for growth, they may well become invasive. We should start planning and looking at all of the agricultural zones and identifying where the invasive species are likely to start moving from being sleepers to being invasive. We should identify the places where current invasive weeds are likely to expand their habitat and plan what we do about that. How are we going to help communities shift from the current kinds of agriculture they pursue to different agricultural opportunities or rural opportunities? For some it might be changing crops. In fact if we sign Kyoto—and even without Kyoto, as the farmers and landcare organisations have demonstrated today—we have an opportunity to change tillage methods and get credits for better maintenance of soil carbon and for maintaining forests, restoration forestry and improved retention of native vegetation. All of those things are demonstrated to be advantages in carbon sinks, and protecting forests instead of clear-felling forests is a major way you can address deforestation.

The point of this whole reference is to say that we believe this Senate is well placed, especially as we can give the example of the oil inquiry, to show how you can get a cooperative approach across parties, recognising that we have a national challenge on our hands with climate change. We have real distress in rural Australia at the moment. The rate of suicide in rural Australia is completely unacceptable, and it is hidden. The issue of mental health problems in rural Australia is also a major problem. Often men in farming communities find it really hard to cope with what is going on and the lack of predictability in their circumstances, and in many cases the women in those communities are now bearing the stress load of trying to manage the books as well as trying to keep families on track with a reasonable degree of mental health in view of the circumstances they are facing.

As a Senate, we can get involved in a cross-party apolitical approach to looking at what can be done about building resilience in the economies of rural Australia in farming communities. By working together we can give hope and lift the spirits in those communities, with politicians of all persuasions prepared to come and listen and think about how we coordinate the research from the institutions that are doing the work, the experience of people on the land and the realities of what climate is going to do. We can think about opportunities to shift to new income streams from renewable energy, from sequestering carbon, from different crops and different varieties of crops, with a reasonable lead time in developing export markets if necessary for those, and we can think about how we get over to less dependence on chemical based fertilisers, to a greater shift into organic agriculture, for example, which has been demonstrated to be very cost-effective in the context of climate change and building resilience in ecosystems and biodiversity.

I think this is an extremely sensible and proactive way to demonstrate that the Australian parliament can get beyond party politics in dealing with the challenge of climate change and oil depletion. We have shown that we can do it on oil depletion with our consensus report that we brought down. I think we can now do it with rural Australia. I think there would be an enormous relief in the Bureau of Rural Sciences, in the CSIRO, in the universities and rural communities and with farmers federations around the country in seeing that we want to bring it all together to start the process of planning for the future in rural Australia and getting beyond the mentality of bandaid measures addressing the problem after it has occurred. Currently, the lack of capacity to make the transition is what drives people off the land. You will drive them off the land if you give them no option but to become dependent on what they will regard as an arrangement whereby they have to put their hand out every time they are dealt an appalling hand by the realities of climate. So let us get on the front foot. Let us take a leap into some national leadership here on climate change. I would urge the government to support this reference and I cannot see any legitimate argument not to do so. At the moment we are not seeing the kind of leadership we need for rural and regional Australia.