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

Thank you very much, Senator Green. As a Cairns based senator, I know you have provided a lot of support to regional communities experiencing floods and other disasters in your time here. In the ten months that I've been Minister for Emergency Management, I've obviously seen a lot of floods. Every time I visit a different flood or storm impacted community, I hear the same stories over and over again. People keep saying, 'It's always flooded in the past, but never like this,' or they say, 'This exceeds anything we've ever seen before,' or, 'This isn't normal.' This pattern was evident all the way back in 2019 with the Black Summer bushfires when we saw unprecedented fires in Queensland rainforests, the entirety of Kangaroo Island under a bushfire warning and fires across New South Wales and Victoria burning for months.

It's been blatantly obvious for a very long time that long-term investment in disaster funding and taking action on climate change has been required. While those of us on this side of the chamber have acknowledged the impacts of climate change for some years, those opposite are still living in the dark ages. These ideological beliefs and climate wars have hamstrung their ability to prepare for natural disasters. The fact is that for nearly a decade the coalition failed to make our country more resilient to the impacts of natural disasters.

Despite all the evidence over all those years, they seemed to think that the disasters would stop. In fact, they even came up with a precise date that they thought the natural disasters would stop, and that was 30 June this year. I say that because it's on that date that nearly 25 per cent of the funding for our national disaster agencies runs out. That's right. The former government, under Senator Birmingham and Senator McKenzie, didn't fund their national natural disaster agencies past the end of this financial year. According to the forward estimates, if the coalition had won the election, our national disaster agencies could not have continued operating. (Time expired)