Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What we heard then from Senator Ayres was a masterclass in deflection. Can I say that the behaviour of the Labor Party in the past 12 months, in their response to the bushfire crisis last year, has been quite tawdry. I well remember the worst bushfires in my lifetime, which were actually in 2009, when 180 Victorians were killed on Black Saturday, six times the number of people who died last summer—with due respect to everyone who passed away. Throughout that year, when the Rudd government was in power, there was no partisanship from the coalition to make out that it was the Rudd government's fault for the loss of those lives. Yet, this year, we've had a nonstop barrage of blame from the Labor Party, as though Scott Morrison actually lit those fires himself. That is disgusting and tawdry behaviour from politicians who represent the people and should know better. I didn't hear one solution offered by Senator Ayres in that speech. It was all smear and innuendo, which is the modus operandi of the Labor Party. Bushfires and emergency management shouldn't be used as a football to score political points.

Senator Ayres' comments that the government believed that we had no role to play are an absolute insult to the Australian Army and military who participated so bravely through those bushfires in logistics, coordination, communication and helping people resettle. I really think Senator Ayres should apologise to the Australian military. The Australian government was more than willing to get the military involved, despite what Senator Ayres says. I think last year had a particular uniqueness, to the extent that the fires were widespread. There is no doubt that, when you have a national emergency like that, the Army should be involved. Talking about the fires, I notice Senator Ayres didn't mention the Black Friday of 1939 or the bushfires of the 1850s that burnt one-quarter of Victoria. So there was a bit of selective picking there as well.

But we have to get to the heart of the problem here. That, of course, is the state governments and their woeful management of their responsibilities. First of all, let's just have a look at the emergency services. Who's responsible for emergency services? The state governments are. And who's been cutting funding to emergency services for the last 20 years? It's the state governments. It doesn't help when we have retired bureaucrats, who were in that fire and emergency role in New South Wales, coming out and slagging off the government when this particular bureaucrat himself was actually head of the New South Wales Fire Brigade from 2003 to 2017. A lot of this stuff happened under his watch, and yet he was more than willing to come out when the bushfires were on and blame everyone else.

The second thing is—and this is something that's very close to my heart—the poor land management undertaken by states over the last 20 or 30 years, where farmers and, in particular, state governments have not managed their national parks properly. I know two areas in Queensland—one just near where I currently live. There are a lot of national parks there, and the parks are full of lantana. It is infested with weeds because the state governments won't get in there and clean it up. We have got a real lantana problem in our national parks in Queensland. The other thing we've got in Queensland is an actual lack of hazard reduction burning on overgrowth. We've got a big national park next to our property in Western Queensland, and it's just full of pests. Pigs come through. Goats come through. There are feral cats and wild dogs. It's not being looked after. And this is becoming more and more of a concern, because the land used by agriculture has dropped from 500 million acres in 1976 to 390 million acres today. A lot of that land is being either locked up or converted to national parks. Out in south-western Queensland, this particular part of Australia is punching way above its weight in earning carbon credits. That is, unfortunately, to the detriment of great towns like Quilpie and Charleville that are losing constituents in their shires because the Mulga is being locked up for carbon farming. That means that we're going to have more and more undergrowth, we're going to have more and more feral pests, because the farmers aren't there managing them, and we're going to have a much greater fire hazard. This is the price that is paid, as usual, by regional Queensland and the regional parts of Australia. They are the ones whose livelihoods suffer in order to fulfil the green dream. Unfortunately, one of these days, if it ever goes off out there, it's going to go on. So state governments have to do more hazard reduction.

The other part that state governments have failed to manage properly is zoning approvals. State governments will approve housing commission blocks in both flood and fire zones. It's becoming a very bad problem. I know in Townsville in the floods last year houses were wiped out, because they were built in flood zones, and I know that a lot of houses today are unfortunately being built among the gum trees. Where I live, I go the back way through Samford Conservation Park. There are houses in there that are literally amongst the gum trees. It's like if this seat were a house and every one of these seats around it were the trees. If there's ever a fire, I don't know how these people are going to get out. Why they are allowed to live there is beyond me. It worries me a lot.

The fourth failure by state governments is the fact they have all sold their state government insurance offices. If you ever wonder why we can't get insurance in North Queensland, it's because the state government sold the State Government Insurance Office. I think we can probably all remember the SGIOs in various different states. They were there to provide insurance when the private sector wouldn't. The neoliberals in the Labor Party—and I admit we have a few in the Liberal Party, but, believe it or not, in Queensland it was all done by Labor—flogged all that off to the private sector. So insurance there is another problem as well.

Rather than continue to peddle hysteria, what we need to do is look at preventive measures. Apart from the measures I have just talked about, one of the other things we need to do is stop planting eucalypt trees. It's hard to imagine, but Landcare love to go around and plant eucalypt trees. The last thing we need in this country are any more eucalypt trees. There are plenty of other Australian natives you can plant that aren't full of eucalyptus oil such that when you light a fire they are going to explode. So that is something I think we need to address. I have actually written a letter to the environment minister today, asking her to address that issue, because I think that's very important.

In concluding, the other thing I think we have to look at is this. The cause of that Victorian bushfire in 2009 was actually determined to be a fallen transmission line. Part of the clean, green dream is to have more renewable energy and, of course, that is going to require $100 million to be spent to build all the transmission lines to get the energy from all the disparate energy generation into the cities. More transmission lines is going to mean a much greater fire hazard because not only can you have fallen transmission lines but also those big towers are lightning conductors. So it's kind of ironic that we have the Left over here saying that we have to do something about fire while they actually want to increase the risk of fires by having more and more transmission lines. So I hope they've taken into account the cost of putting this stuff underground. I hope these transmission lines that we build for all these renewable power stations aren't going to be through towers, because that would increase the fire risk.

Then there are solar panels. We know there are a lot of shoddy, dodgy imported solar panels. I have an article here where a Victorian firefighter has discussed the fact that a large number of fires today are caused by shoddy solar panels on houses. So these guys need to take a good hard look in the mirror and come up with some solutions for a change— (Time expired)