Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Right now bushfires are raging in nearly every Australian state and territory, and we're only halfway into spring. Tragically, bushfires are killing people, destroying property and ravaging fragile ecosystems rich in natural and cultural values. After three consecutive La Nina years, followed by what looks today likely to be a strong El Nino year, things are tragically likely to only get worse.

I want to be a very clear that the Greens have absolute faith in Australia's professional and volunteer firefighters and disaster responders, and we thank them for risking their lives to help keep us safe, but the Greens have very little faith in the level of resources that these highly skilled people are being provided with and the support that they need to do their jobs under the threat of increasing fires and floods, driven by a changing climate.

Disasters are national emergencies, and they demand national responses. The Greens believe Australia needs and deserves a dedicated national disaster response unit, and we've taken this policy to the last two federal elections. A national disaster response unit would allow a flexible and rapid response to disasters such as fires, particularly remote area fires, and floods. Such a unit could have its own dedicated aerial firefighting fleet of fixed-wing and helicopter aircraft to provide direct firefighting capacity and highly trained responders trained in remote area firefighting and flood rescue. Taken together, this would constitute a national, specialised remote disaster response capability that could be stationed and deployed rapidly across the country as needed.

The way you stop bushfires from destroying ecologies, destroying infrastructure, destroying homes and destroying lives at mass scale is to detect them early, hit them hard and hit them fast. If the Albanese government was serious about making this country safer from bushfires, it would stop green-lighting new coal, gas and native forest logging projects. That is what a government genuinely committed to making us safe from disasters would put in place.

As the Victorian Assistant Chief Fire Officer, Mick Tisbury, has said, 'There are no climate sceptics at the end of a fire hose.' But, what do you get from this government? A proposal to spend $370 billion on the AUKUS submarine killing machines that will make Australia less safe. But they won't spend anything like what is necessary to actually save lives from disasters like remote area fires, fires on the edges of our cities and floods right around this country that are being increased in number and scale by the breakdown of our climate and the catastrophe that this planet's climate is going through as we stand here and debate this today.

The other thing that this government needs to do is stop native forest logging, because, firstly, native forest logging actually makes fires more likely and worse. It makes them burn hotter and faster. And, secondly, the way that regime of native forest logging is conducted, certainly in my home state of Tasmania, which is a CBS strategy—clear-fell, burn and sow—it's the burn bit that's the problem, colleagues, because I have lost count of how many of these so-called regeneration burns have broken their boundaries over the years and started mass bushfires. It is institutionalised pyromania. That's what we are facing.

This government has got to get serious about building a disaster response capability in this country. It's got to be prepared to invest even a small percentage of what it invests into killing machines into actually responding to disasters that are killing Australians. It's got to stop approving new coal and gas projects, and it's got to end native forest logging.