Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very serious motion which deserves very serious action from the government and the coalition. But that is not what we are seeing. I have just been looking at the front page of today’s Sydney Morning Herald which says that the report from the House Standing Committee on Climate Change, Water, Environment and the Arts, following its investigation, enjoyed cross-party support. Under the caption ‘What lies ahead’ for New South Wales, the newspaper reports that 200,000 buildings are vulnerable to sea level rise this century because of climate change, 484,000 buildings are vulnerable nationally, up to $50 billion worth of property is at risk and 20 per cent of the Tasmanian coastline is under threat. In a specific case, looking at Narrabeen and Sydney’s northern beaches, with just a 20-centimetre rise—the level of rise being described by the previous speaker in the Senate—and a one-in-50 year storm surge, the coastline at Narrabeen would be pushed back 110 metres, causing $230 million in damage. We are talking here about people being removed from their living places and having to find elsewhere to live. We are also talking now about the increasing impossibility for people who are in climate change threatened properties on the Australian coastline to be able to get insurance. We know for certain that the insurance industry is going to get tougher, not easier, in deciding where it will not insure householders or business owners in Australia against storm surges of that variety that are, one must think on the average of probabilities, going to happen in the coming decades at Narrabeen.

The problem is that the head is still stuck firmly in the sand. We hear people like the previous speaker saying that climates have changed on the planet over many millions of years and, quite falsely, that scientists are equally balanced on whether or not they think there is going to be climate change et cetera. The fact is that we are in an age of climate change. We are now facing sea level rises, and they are accelerating.