Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, but you could very well end up with a committee that is extremely heavily weighted in areas other than climate risk and drought resilience. From the Greens perspective, it is absolutely imperative—our ongoing drought is affected by and an impact of the climate crisis we're in. It should have been mandatory that there be on the committee expertise in the areas of climate science and climate risk, but it's not mandatory. Yes, it says, 'as far as practicable,' but I can see your ending up with a committee that, because of the people that the government wants to get on it, does not have expert skills in climate risk and so does not have represented on it a knowledge and an understanding of the climate crisis. The way that it's worded it says that there doesn't have to be. It says that as far as practical there has to be a range of skills and that each member has to have two or more areas. That means you could leave out climate risk or you could have somebody who has pretty low skills and just goes along with whatever the government wants to say on climate risk as the only person on the committee who has that expertise in climate risk, if they're there at all. That is what this legislation allows, and it is why we remain deeply concerned, particularly given, as you confirmed, that the government doesn't accept that we're in a climate crisis and that our increasing climate crisis is the underlying reason why droughts are getting worse, are getting longer and are being spread across the country. There isn't the recognition of how essential it is to have that driving the operations of this drought fund.