Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I want to place on the record Labor's voting position on this amendment: Labor won't be supporting this amendment. But I want to reiterate some of the views I put during the second reading debate. It is not as though this government has not been warned by insurance companies for very many years about the risks posed by climate change to the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. In fact, after our second reading debate, I went upstairs and had a bit of a look, because I remember when IAG—back in 2006!— took a national leadership role, undertook research and put a very public position about what climate change would cost, what it would mean for premiums and what it would mean for the economy. And what did the Howard government do? What did the Abbott government do? What did the Turnbull government do? What did the Morrison government do? Absolutely nothing of substance to address climate change. And here we are, 15 years later—15 years after the insurance companies first started ringing the bell about what climate change would mean for premiums, what it would mean for communities and what it would mean for the economy. Here we are, even in this term of government, with report after report having been provided to this government—privately commissioned and publicly commissioned reviews about the costs and risks, the problems of underinsurance that arise from that and the economic challenges that that presents to communities, particularly in northern Australia. Here we are, probably in the very last day of the Senate sitting before the election, and the government are finally getting around to legislating their promise, but not with any data on the public record, of course, and not with any data on the table—they just all voted against putting on the table the data that underpins their policy decision—but wanting this Senate to support their position.

Well, we will support the legislation; we'll vote for it. We want the relief that is promised by the government to flow through to communities as quickly as possible. We don't intend to hold up this bill by supporting the Greens amendments. The Greens amendments are a very, very significant change indeed to the scope of the program that's proposed by government. They are of uncertain cost. We have no information about what the Greens' proposal would cost for the scheme, and we've got no information about what it would mean for policyholders and consumers. We're not prepared to hold up the bill. Labor would look at the inclusion of flood coverage as one of the terms in the statutory review that will already take place as a consequence of this legislation's passage, but we do not intend to vote for the amendments today.