Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Smith. Before addressing that, I might just mention that since January some 2.9 million people in Australia have accessed more than $3 billion in Australian government disaster recovery payments and $195 million provided through the Disaster Recovery Allowance program.

But you asked what previous governments could have done differently. Firstly, the coalition could have, at any point over the past decade, acknowledged that climate change is real. Instead, we saw 10 years of government led climate wars—we're into the eleventh year now, it would appear—that held our country back, exposed Australians to risk and made us an international disgrace. With Senator Rennick and Senator Canavan still in the party room today showing that they have learnt absolutely nothing and that they still don't believe the science, we know that the coalition will never come around on the basic science.