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

I participated in the inquiry leading to this report, Lessons to be learned in relation to the Australian bushfire season 2019-20, and I wish to thank Senator Ayres for his work on this inquiry and for leading this inquiry. It was an incredibly important experience listening to people from around the country about their experiences of going through the trauma of the 2019-20 Black Summer fires. I wish to associate myself with the remarks that Senator Ayres has just put on the record—all the stories of how people were so deeply affected, the trauma that they experienced and how some of them are still experiencing that ongoing trauma. I won't repeat much about those experiences, but people should, absolutely, hear them and know just what a significant impact those fires had on people's lives, and understand what needs to be done so that we can reduce the possibility that such experiences occur again.

The report outlines a number of recommendations, including making sure that we can get into fires more quickly, get better aircraft support, have a better understanding of fire hazards, be better prepared for disaster and have better communications—a whole range of things that we can do better. Fundamentally, the point I make, and that the Australian Greens made in our additional comments, is that these sorts of disasters, these traumatic, extraordinarily awful experiences that so many people went through in the 2019-20 summer, are just going to keep on coming and get worse unless we do something about our climate crisis. The science is so clear.

I was briefed just this week by lead authors of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—the 6th Assessment Report, which brings together the knowledge of climate science from all around the world. These Australian climate scientists—leading climate scientists—covered a whole lot of things, and I was particularly interested to hear what they had to say about fire. The story is devastating. Essentially, even at 1½ degrees of warming, which we're trying our best to keep under, fires like those we saw over the 2019-20 summer are going to become more frequent and more intense, and the fire season is going to be longer. They told me in particular that the fire season is just going to keep starting earlier. We are going to be having more intense fires from earlier in the summer, earlier in the spring, and they are going to continue for longer. This is the reality.

The world is not on track for staying beneath 1½ degrees of warming—we are far from it. At the moment, we're on track for three to four degrees of warming, and Australia is completely complicit in this devastating scenario. That's what we're looking at. There's nothing that we can do—we can do all the pre-planning, and fight all the fires, but if we get to a world of three degrees or more of warming, the sorts of fires that we saw in 2019-20 are going to be like a walk in the park, and more of Australia is going to be subject to those fires. The fire weather that we saw occurring for the first time to any great extent in 2019-20—the pyrocumulus clouds; basically the fire feeding its own behaviour—was noted by the fire scientists studying the fires after they occurred to be unlike what had ever been seen before in most fires across Australia. This is just the beginning.

I urge the Senate, the government and everybody in this place, no matter what party they're from, to take these warnings seriously. We've got to listen to the stories and the tragedies that people experienced in 2019-20 and learn from them. That means doing all the sensible pre-planning and mitigation that we can do, but to learn from them seriously we've also got to be serious about taking the urgent action of reducing our carbon pollution in line with the science. That means at least a 75 per cent reduction by 2030. Absolutely fundamentally, it means that there is no way that we can afford to continue to expand coal and gas mining in this country. For us to play our part of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees so we don't end up in a scenario where these types of fires are more and more prevalent, we need to be getting out of the mining, the burning and the export of coal, gas and oil. That is the fundamental reality. We cannot argue with the physics. That's what needs to occur if we are really going to be paying proper attention to the lessons that we learnt from the 2019-20 Black Summer fires. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.