Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Future Drought Fund Bill 2019. I want to start with the very simple point that we know, from all available science, that drought, the increased incidence of drought and the increased severity of droughts are linked to our changing climate. I totally understand that Australia has long been known as the sunburnt country. Droughts are part of our history. This country, clearly, is amenable to drought and all the consequences that go with it. We know the hardship that droughts cause and are increasingly likely to cause into the future, especially when we see record weather events and record droughts such as we have now in parts of our country, and droughts such as the millennium drought that we saw nearly a decade ago and, prior to that, the record drought in this country in 1982, 1983. We see the hardship it causes local communities and the government funds that are required to help bail out hardworking, struggling farmers.

I'm very shortly going to go through in a bit more detail some of the sad direct effects of droughts. It kind of beggars belief that we, a country so familiar with drought and its consequences, wouldn't be talking at this time in history about the link of drought to climate change and taking the strongest possible action on climate change. I don't think I've heard the words climate change or climate catastrophe or whatever you want to call it mentioned once in this bill by those on the other side of the chamber, yet surely it's the most important thing we should be discussing. There are scientifically established links between our record drought now, which no-one is denying is linked to climate, and the expected severity of extreme weather events in the future, which include drought.

It's fine to be taking taxpayers' money and giving it to this Liberal National government to dole out where they see it needs to be spent on regional communities—adaption measures have their place—but where is the imperative for mitigation of the underlying cause of these record droughts and all the misery that they bring our regional and rural areas? Where is the imperative for those mitigation measures? Like we've seen with the Great Barrier Reef, a so-called record investment of half a billion dollars given to a private foundation to help manage avoiding a World Heritage in danger listing for the world's largest living organism, we are just throwing good money after bad if we don't actually do everything we can to address and fix the underlying problem.

I'd also like to raise in my speech today—and I will be foreshadowing a second reading amendment—is how we fund any drought assistance packages. The Labor Party have given their speeches and talked about their concerns about the funds coming from infrastructure funding that had been allocated for projects. Not only am I concerned about that; I'd even be concerned that the funding for this drought relief package through this bill would be coming from general revenue. I've got a suggestion that I'd like senators to consider—and the Greens will be putting up an amendment around this. Why don't we take funds from the companies and the activities of those companies that are actually causing rising emissions, which we know are directly linked to the changes we're seeing in our climate, and actually have them pay for struggling farmers to help adapt to a future of drought?

We have clocked up in this country, in just one tax regime alone—the petroleum resource rent tax, which I have continually called in this place the petroleum rort rent tax—nearly $360 billion in tax credits for some of the biggest, wealthiest corporations on the planet, who have paid no petroleum resource rent tax. We have had a Senate inquiry into this. Everybody agreed it needed to be changed. We've seen some tweaks around the edges. But, if we put a 10 per cent floor in the petroleum resource rent tax—which funnily enough actually benefits those companies in the long term; it's actually less money they have to pay if they ever do pay a cent—then we can actually raise $2½ billion each year or $5 billion over the next two years to pay for this fund directly from the companies that are causing the problem in the first place.

I'm not even proposing, as Senator Cormann might like to use the turn of phrase, 'a new tax'. It's an existing tax that doesn't work that needs to be fixed. If we're going to find money to give to rural and regional communities that desperately need funds to help them adapt to a sad future and a dangerous future of increased severity of drought and extreme weather, let's take it from the companies that are actually causing this.

Of course, I would very much like to propose that we do that through a carbon pricing mechanism, which is being called for by not just the Greens. We had one in this country, but it got ripped up. It's actually the business community—the big end of the business community—that's calling for carbon pricing. Even companies like BHP, the big mining companies that are part of the brigade of big polluters on this planet, are calling for carbon pricing. They're calling for the certainty of a mechanism that prices their pollution. They acknowledge it's pollution. A carbon price could raise tens of billions of dollars and pay for the damage that's been done to our economy and our communities by climate change, not just drought. Instead, we're taking money from an infrastructure fund or we're taking it from general revenue rather than hypothecating it directly from sources that we know would link the causes of the problems we're seeing in rural and regional communities. Call it a polluter-pays principle.

We know from the science that climate change is making drought conditions in south-west and south-east Australia worse. I'm very proud to say that a lot of the scientists who do this work are in my home state of Tasmania. They're a very important part of the community, especially in Hobart. The Greens senator Rice and I and a number of other senators, including Senator Carr, chaired a select committee to stop cuts to CSIRO climate scientists. The jobs of 300 of them were on the line, and they're the ones who do the modelling and the observations—all the measurements that we need if we are to better understand how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Nevertheless, their great work tells us that fronts from the Southern Ocean, which typically in the past have brought rain across southern Australia during winter and spring have shifted southwards with the warming climate, leading to declines in rainfall in south-west and south-east Australia. That increases directly the risk of drought in these regions, even in my home state of Tasmania. Believe it or not, I was working on my vineyard the year that the north-east of Tasmania was officially drought declared.

Senator Dean Smith interjecting—

It shocked a lot of people that a place in Tasmania was eligible for drought funding. It hasn't got any better.

Since the mid-1990s, south-east Australia has experienced a 15 per cent decline in the late-autumn and early-winter rainfall and a 25 per cent decline in average rainfall in both April and May. The average annual streamflow into Perth's dams, in Western Australia—sorry, I missed your interjection, Senator Smith. In your home state of Western Australia the streamflow into the dams has already decreased by nearly 80 per cent since the mid-1970s. Climate change is driving and increasing the intensity and frequency of hot days and heatwaves in Australia, and this in turn is increasing the severity of droughts. Once again, the sad reality in my home state of Tasmania is that it is getting drier. We have seen wildfires in three out of the last five years in wilderness areas, some of which haven't seen fire for thousands of years. We know that because we know that the species of plants there aren't fire resistant. They won't come back if they're burnt; they're there because they have not seen fire. These areas are being ignited by dry lightning, which itself is very rare, but the root cause of it is a very, very dry state of Tasmania. The impact of these fires is not just felt by the environment community, the ecosystems and the biodiversity of these places, it is very much felt by communities around Tasmania who have to volunteer, with the disruption that causes to the volunteers who have to go and fight these fires. No-one has estimated the economic damage it did this summer, but I can tell you it would have been significant.

People come to Tasmania. We heard a speech today which did have some positive things in it. It talked about tourism in Tasmania and why it's a very important industry, but if every summer we're going to experience these kinds of wildfires it won't be high on the visitation list for much longer. A lot of businesses this year had bookings cancelled. We had entire areas, which were some of the most visited parts of the state, shut because of these wildfires. The smoke in Tasmania went on for weeks and weeks in key areas. This is a very serious matter. While it may not officially be drought, it has the same weather patterns and the same changes that we're seeing.