David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Emergency Response Fund Amendment (Disaster Ready Fund) Bill 2022. While we're debating this bill, communities across New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia are experiencing record floods, with lives lost, properties destroyed and towns in shock after what has been a devastating 12 months. While we're here, major flooding is swelling and overflowing the Lachlan, Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers, amongst others. Residents in Forbes, Condobolin, Deniliquin, Eugowra—and just stopping on Eugowra, think about that tsunami that just swept through that town last Monday and the damage and the devastation that was caused. As Senator Sheldon pointed out, one-fifth of the town was rescued in boats in just one town, as the floodwaters washed down through the river system. But we've seen flooding in Bourke, Walgett, Hay, Albury, Echuca, Mildura, Wentworth—town after town either flooded or watching as those slow-moving inundations pour across the west and south-west of New South Wales into Victoria, into South Australia. People have lost everything, and we know this is the devastating impact of worsening climate change.

People who have lost everything deserve serious, considered support, they deserve urgent support and they need a government that's going to address this problem head on. Whilst this bill does do some good work, it does nowhere near enough. The government says that it's taking action on climate change, but we know, while we're debating this bill and talking about a $200 million annual measure, that governments across the country are handing out a staggering $11.6 billion a year in subsidies to fossil fuel companies—$11.6 billion making the problem worse, making the next floods more severe. The response is $200 million of additional public money to try and address a tiny amount of the damage. To get $11.6 billion a year in context, that's $22,000 every minute of every day for the entire year. Just imagine if that money were invested in preventing, mitigating and adapting to climate change, instead of making the problem worse. We know that this Disaster Ready Fund will provide some $200 million a year—not new money; repurposed money.

But to give some idea about what the cost of climate change is, let's look at what the Insurance Council of Australia says. They've calculated that the investment needed just to protect against coastal storm surges in this country over the next 50 years is some $30 billion. That's $600 million this year and every year for the next 50 years just to deal with one of the natural perils we face from exacerbated climate change. The response from the government is $200 million a year, in total, of repackaged, rebadged moneys.

The Disaster Ready Fund is peanuts compared to the crisis we're facing. It's floods today. Next month it'll be fires, droughts, storms and cyclones. We need the kind of investment and joined-together policy that will keep Australians safe from coal and gas and climate fuelled natural disasters. Again, to focus on my state, New South Wales, we've seen the flooding in the north of the state—the savage flooding in Lismore. I've been up there twice since the floods, once in the very near aftermath of the devastating rain bomb that destroyed Lismore in February. It's hard to think that was just nine months ago. I went there and the town looked like a mixture of a disaster scene and a film set. You could walk through the whole of the centre of Lismore, and they'd cleaned out the worst of the debris, but every shop was empty, for block after block after block. Lismore is a town that's been there well over a century, and it was destroyed in a climate fuelled rain bomb the likes of which they'd never seen before.

I want to give a shout-out to the Koori Mail for their work and for the organising work of the First Nations community up there, who formed the hub of the community response when government wasn't anywhere to be found. They came together, like First Nations communities know how to do. They don't expect government to help. They came together and formed the hub of that amazing community and the disaster relief up there in Lismore. They stepped up when governments failed.

I remember speaking to one of the employees of the Koori Mail. He was in a second floor apartment in an old shop in the centre of Lismore. They'd marked on the side of the wall where the earlier record flood from the seventies had been, and they knew that they could get above that and be safe. But, when this rain bomb hit, the waters kept rising and rising and the 1970 flood level just got inundated. He put himself and his partner and his dog on a surfboard, and they rose up inside their house as the floodwaters were rising. It was at night, in the dark. As they were rising up, they had to smash a hole through the ceiling to get into the roof cavity. They were pulling their dog up while they were on the rafters in the roof cavity, having smashed a hole in the ceiling. And then they had to knock a hole through the tin roof.

Imagine the chaos and the panic. That was repeated hundreds or thousands of times across Lismore. They knocked a hole in the tin roof. They were there on the roof and they got rescued by a bloke on a jet ski. Thank God he turned up. But where was the disaster relief? Where was the planning? Where was the acknowledgement that what we're doing with fossil fuels is creating that problem for Lismore and for towns and communities all across this country?

So, yes, let's talk about the $200 million, and let's say something has been done. But let's acknowledge the scale of the human suffering—the trauma that we're going to see from climate disaster after climate disaster. Let's be honest about it, and have an honest, genuine response. This bill does not get there. It doesn't tick the box of 'honest, genuine response'.

You can go back to the Brisbane flooding. Again, it's hard to remember that was 2011. The country had to pay—taxpayers had to pay—through a flood recovery levy. In the end, I think, it was some $5.6 billion to try to recover from just that one flood in Brisbane. Now we're making our children pay, again, for increased government debt. All the while, coal and gas companies aren't paying; they're receiving $11.6 billion a year in collective subsidies. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Labor's climate test—I think it's one of the big climate tests we've seen in this parliament—came just yesterday. And they failed that test when they voted against the Greens' disallowance to stop what I thought was the Morrison government's but is now the Albanese Labor government's $32 million loan to a gas company in Victoria to destroy part of that coastline. The Golden Beach gas project certainly fails Labor's own weak test on coal or gas projects, which apparently have to stack up financially and environmentally, although how the hell a coal or gas project could ever stack up environmentally is a mystery to me! But they're meant to stack up financially before they receive any subsidies. The only way this project gets off the ground is if the Albanese government gives a cool, sweet, interest-free $32 million loan to create more gas extraction, make the problem worse and drive the floods more. So, yes, we have the Prime Minister in Eugowra—good! Let's see him down at Golden Beach, talking to traditional owners and explaining how making the problem worse with public money is good public policy! I'm yet to understand how that works.

Labor's first budget included that $1.9 billion investment of public money—and I say the word 'investment' in inverted commas—as a subsidy to open up a gas export terminal and petrochemical precinct in Darwin Harbour. I note your work, Acting Deputy President Cox, in opposing that ridiculous project. You worked with First Nations traditional owners there. I note that when the government went to COP27 recently that that was the exact project on which the world was saying: 'Stop! Don't do that.' But there they are, the Albanese Labor government, enabling gas to be fracked and exported out of the Beetaloo basin against the wishes of traditional owners and against the rhetoric they took to COP27 and the rhetoric which we keep getting here in the chamber on climate action.

The Australian Greens support the principle of recalibrating the Emergency Response Fund's allocations to pre-disaster preparedness, and I do acknowledge the genuineness of Senator Sheldon and his work in trying to turn the beast around and get preparedness, mitigation and adaptation as public policy and get the funding we need. I acknowledge that; it's genuine work and it's hard work. But this bill does not come close to what is needed to prevent the coal and gas field natural disasters.

We're calling on the Albanese Labor government to end the handouts to coal and gas companies. Instead, make them pay, not taxpayers, for disaster preparedness and to rebuild and support devastated communities. It's those fossil fuel companies that are creating the problem in the first place. Communities suffering the deadly impacts—and they are deadly; we've seen that just this week—of climate change deserve so much more than what the Albanese government is offering them here. We should work together in this place. We have a new parliament, a new chance and a new opportunity. Between Labor and the Greens there's a powerful opportunity here to come together and keep coal and gas in the ground. We could make the fossil fuel industry, not taxpayers, foot the bill for the damage it causes. But we can only do that if we focus on the needs of flood, fire and drought impacted communities instead of cashed-up multinational fossil fuel companies. That's the test that matters, and that's the test that the Albanese government is failing with this bill.