Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

We think about climate change as though it's nothing, as though it's something that's happening to someone else, far away, a long time from now. It's easy to get focused on the day to day, to kick hard decisions about things like climate and emissions down the road. But it's happening now; it's happening here, to us. We're experiencing the effects of climate change in Tasmania. We've had floods this week—homes and businesses underwater, literally in an instant. But these are the latest in a long line of climate related disasters. While the rest of the country faced floods at the start of this year, Tasmania faced droughts. Some parts of western Tasmania had their most extreme droughts on record. Droughts dry everything out, and when you get lightning like we had you get fires like we had. We had fires burning through old-growth forests, destroying trees that have stood for more than 1,000 years.

Tasmania's experience is a story told at different scales, because we're actually at net zero already, but we're a small state, so our climate isn't decided by us alone. We're doing our bit, but we're at the mercy of the rest of the country, too. And, like all of Australia, we're at the mercy of the rest of the world. That's not to say that we don't have a role to play; we do. We've got a growing economy and we've got net zero emissions. We're a model for the rest of the country. It's achievable. We should achieve it as a country. But even if Australia reaches net zero tomorrow, our emissions reduction will not end climate change, because this is a global problem, and it's going to require global action. Every country that drags its feet undermines the ability for us to fix this. We have to set an example, because it's what drags others into action. That's why it's so important that we take steps to reduce our emissions here, because we need to be able to apply pressure to other countries, to say, 'If we're doing it, you have to as well.' Tasmania is setting an example for the rest of the country, and Australia should set an example for the rest of the world. But, in the meantime, climate change keeps on happening to us.

Two weeks ago I sat down and watched helicopter footage from over Latrobe. Half the town and surrounding area was underwater, and it broke my heart. It made me think back to 2016, when we lost three people to the floods in Latrobe. Hundreds of houses were damaged so badly that they had to be rebuilt. Launceston, our second-largest city, was half underwater. It was a one-in-100-year event, experts said. But it's just happened again. These floods weren't as bad as the last ones, and we're thanking our lucky stars for that. We learned a lot from the last time. But we still had houses hit hard for a second time. We've got businesses that have lost pretty much everything, and they don't know whether they'll recover. People who have lived in Latrobe all their lives are now thinking about moving. They can't put themselves through this again.

Natural disasters are a kind of trauma that most people will never recover from. For the people directly affected, it's months of clean-ups and temporary accommodation. It's years of rebuilding your home. It's the photos of your children and precious sentimental objects that you couldn't grab before you had to evacuate. There are some things you just can't get back and you can't replace.

For those indirectly affected, it's the concern for family and friends, not knowing if they're okay because there's bad phone reception and they can't get back to you. My older son had to evacuate his home two weeks ago. We were lucky, his place was fine in the end. But I remember the moment he called me to tell me his area might be in the flood zone. As a mama, knowing your child might be in danger is one of the worst things that can happen. It's not a feeling I will ever forget. It's a feeling we're coping with across the country. The recent floods will have long-lasting impacts in ways that we couldn't imagine. Roads are warped and bent out of shape. Some have potholes so they're barely roads anymore. They won't be able to be fixed in a day.

One of the biggest battles in the north-west coast has been the damage to the Cam River bridge at Somerset. This bridge is the only access point for people from Circular Head and the west coast to get to Burnie and beyond. You can take the back roads around, but I wouldn't recommend it; it takes a long time. It can be a trip of an hour and a half for something that should take only 20 minutes. This bridge has heavy traffic all day, not just people heading to work and appointments but we're talking about school buses full of kids and heavy trucks delivering loads.

Because of the damage from the floodwater, the bridge is sagging. One lane is too dangerous to drive on, so they've had to close it. To say this has caused chaos would be putting it mildly. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a medicine cup. You can have a crack, but it's never going to happen. What was once a 15- or 20-minute drive is now taking people two hours and more. One person on social media said they flew from Melbourne to Wynyard and then drove from Somerset. Their mum left Burnie at the same time they got on the plane, and they got home before their mum. It was quicker to fly from another state than to drive across the Cam River bridge. That's pretty hard to get your head around.

Expecting mums don't know what will happen if they're go into labour. Women stuck on the wrong side of the bridge are scared they'll give birth on the side of the road. The state government is telling people to plan and allow for their trip. Good luck planning your trip when you wake up in the middle of the night having contractions. Emergency vehicles can't get through to help people on the other side. People are missing vital medical appointments because they were stuck in traffic. Some schools told kids to stay at home because it would take them too long to get to and from school. The north-west coast has been divided into which side of the bridge you live on because of floodwaters we weren't prepared for.

Managing natural disasters involves immediate rapid response work. That's an emergency, and then there's the clean-up. The longer that takes, the harder it is, the worse the damage can become. Finally, there's the prevention. That might not be emergency work, but it's constant because it requires constant work to do what we can to disaster-proof the things that are most precious to us: the places, people and things that we love. To protect them, we have to do the work. It requires work all the time. It requires someone to do it, so who do we tap on the shoulder? Right now we're relying on emergency services, like state fire services, and in a pinch we call on the ADF, who do great work. But they do a lot of it. Don't forget: we relied on the ADF to help with the vaccine rollout. We deployed the ADF into aged-care homes. Every fire and flood, they are there too. We keep deploying the ADF over and over every time, but it's not their core business.

The recent royal commission into natural disaster responses found that the ADF does not have the capacity or capability to fight bushfires. It found there is a public perception that the ADF is always available and always has the resources to help with natural disasters. It found that neither of those perceptions are correct, but we do what we can with what we have. The ADF do an incredible job. This is not to criticise that work, but Defence itself acknowledges that what we're doing right now is unsustainable. We need a new approach. Like every other department the Department of Defence has to put together an incoming brief when there's a change of government. It is a lie-of-the land summary of what's going on, and a bit of an 'around the grounds'. Defence's incoming brief warned the newly elected Labor government it was under intense pressure due to the need to respond to near persistent natural disasters. Defence has pointed the finger of blame at the impacts of climate change as where this strain is coming from.

This is not core business; this is what we need to fix. We need to get organised and we need to get real. If what we're doing is unsustainable then we have to do something different. A permanent standby capacity of well-trained disaster relief workers would take a huge strain off the ADF, not to mention state emergency services. It could be deployed wherever it's needed and whenever it's needed. That's what we want to look at in this inquiry. Senator Lambie and I have ideas about how it could work—those are on record. We're keen to hear what everyone else thinks too. Let's get everyone in a room and thrash it out. Let's find a way to start doing disaster relief and to clean up better after fires and floods.

Minister Watt was right this week, when he said that our current system isn't going to work in the long term. Climate change is here; it's happening. That's not a question anymore. The question is: how do we learn to live with it?