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

One thing I do agree with Senator Rennick on is that we need to take a lot more preventive actions around fire and fire risk. The most important thing we can do is act on climate change. I was very surprised that the Liberal Party would put up a speaker like Senator Jim Molan today, who is on record as being a climate sceptic or climate denier—whatever you want to call it. It just shows why we are in such a mess. While we have a government who refuses to take climate change seriously, we are never going to solve this problem.

I remember the day in 2016 that Senator McKim and I launched our double dissolution election campaign in Tasmania with a policy for the Australian government to buy water bombers. We did that because Tasmania had had a horrendous summer of fires in 2016. Senator McKim had initiated a Senate inquiry to look at those fires and the responses. It was made public knowledge in that inquiry that we couldn't get aerial water bombers when we needed them in Tasmania. In 2016, we had 145 separate fires that burned for over 63 days, destroying 126,800 hectares of mostly remote vegetation, 19,800 hectares of which was in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. In 2018-19 the bushfires burned for 100 days, destroying 210,000 hectares of mostly remote vegetation, 95,000 hectares of which was in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. These are the only forests in the world that are World Heritage protected. Some of them had vegetation that was thousands of years old that had never seen fire in their time as living, breathing plants on this planet. Both of these catastrophic fire events began with dry lightning strikes. Increasingly, rare dry lightning strikes have caused a lot of damage, not just in Tasmania, but elsewhere—another thing linked directly by the BoM to our changing climate. The year 2016 was, at the time, the hottest Tasmanian summer on record and the driest spring on record. The year 2019 was again the hottest summer on record, which eclipsed 2016, following, again, the driest spring on record.

We also initiated a Senate inquiry looking at the implications of climate change on Australia's national security. We took significant evidence right around this country on why climate change is the biggest threat to this country's national security and what we needed to do about it. We had a very productive discussion on buying our own fleet of aerial water bombers. The Greens worked this policy up. We took it to the 2019 election, just like we did in 2016. And I commend Labor for adopting another Greens policy. We see it all the time, and it's great. Sometimes I think our role in here is to get the Labor Party on board, and we succeeded with that. I hope we actually now get the aerial water-bombing fleet that we so desperately need in this country.

Very quickly, what we learnt in our Senate inquiry is that, with overlapping fire seasons around the world, we cannot rely on bringing planes in from overseas. We pay an exorbitant amount of money to lease these aircraft. We have no control over when they get here or when they're used. We should have our own fleet, even if it has to be housed in the RAAF. It doesn't really matter. We need to own these. They should be owned by the Australian taxpayer. They should be on standby for Australians. And everybody has seen that. The royal commission has recently reflected that. There's no reason that we don't have our own aerial firefighting fleet, except for ideology, both an ideology around privatising and outsourcing everything in this country to the private sector to make a big buck and the ideology we have seen on display today—disgusting, almost hard to believe—from a government that actually puts up climate deniers in this chamber to talk about preparedness and readiness for extreme weather events and the risks to Australians from wildfire.