Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the report Lessons to be learned in relation to the Australian bushfire season 2019-20 together with accompanying documents. I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I think this a very significant report of the Finance and Public Administration References Committee. It was my wish that the inquiry would go to South Australia; the New South Wales South Coast and the North Coast; the Northern Tablelands; South East Queensland; the Tumut, Batlow and Tumbarumba regions of New South Wales; Gippsland; north-east Victoria and to Kangaroo Island to give those communities an opportunity to be heard. Sadly, COVID-19 outbreaks prevented us from doing so. I want to thank all those communities that we couldn't visit, and I want them to know that we've had them in mind throughout the inquiry.

We received 192 submissions and held 10 public hearings, mostly by video conference. We heard from some of the people most devastated by the fires. We heard from New South Wales South Coast communities where, in the darkness of New Year's Eve 2019, the Badja Forest Road fire tore through the Wandella, Cobargo and Quaama communities in a firestorm that nobody could possibly have previously imagined. We heard from communities in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury regions west of Sydney, where fires raged for 79 days until it rained. We heard of the experiences of communities like Walwa and Corryong in north-east Victoria, who made the best of the limited resources they had to keep people safe.

We heard from experts in emergency management, fire response, fire behaviour and forest ecology, and from local government authorities who are doing on-the-ground recovery work and whose knowledge and experience have persuaded us that there is no point in fighting old battles over hazard reduction and that a new consensus is required if we're to keep people safe.

Fires take their names from their places of ignition. Over the months of the Black Summer, the obscure names of remote places where blazes started—Currowan, Dunns Road, Postman's Track, Big Jack Mountain, Wingan, Green Wattle Creek, Myall Creek Road, Good Good, Ruined Castle, Long Gully Road and many others—became the names of unwelcome summer holiday visitors who wouldn't leave. The communities they threatened listened to their radios, watched their phones and received the escalating alerts of 'advice', 'watch and act', 'emergency warning' and the dreaded 'It's too late to leave; you must shelter in place.'

Communities along the eastern seaboard spent a summer in the heat and smoke, anxiously clearing away ignition points from around their homes, doing that long-overdue run to the tip to get rid of all those lengths of old timber and all the household rubbish. Now all they were good for was fuel. As people were prepared for the worst, the catchcry was: 'Hurry up and wait'. It is predominantly their stories that have led the committee to make the recommendations that we have. It's the stories of evacuation and stories of seeking help over and over again, and the stories of trauma and frightened kids that have shaped our recommendations around making the task of domestic disaster response and recovery more keenly focused on the humanitarian nature of what disaster response and recovery is all about. If Australian aid workers turned up in a foreign disaster zone with a competitive grant program, I'm fairly sure that we would be asked to leave.

The stories of people feeling helpless as fires that had burned remotely for weeks emerged from the bush to devour farms, houses and whole towns shaped our recommendation for a better national, aerial fire-fighting fleet. The stories of homeowners and businesses in fire affected areas who can't afford insurance have shaped our recommendation for the ACCC to investigate insurance affordability in bushfire-prone regions.

Ms Therese Kearney is a grief counsellor with CatholicCare. She described her experience of visiting schools in Gippsland after the fires. She said:

Last February I went into the primary schools around Orbost, Bairnsdale, Mallacoota—that East Gippsland area—and the feel that I got from entering the school was quite eerie. The children were very repressed and depressed. There was no children's noise in the playground. There was no joy there. Even in the play, it wasn't play.

She went on to say:

These children had such heightened levels of adrenaline that they didn't know if they were afraid, if they were angry, if they were just wanting to go away and hide or curl up in a ball, or all of those things.

Mr Graeme Freedman lost his house, along with everything above and below ground, at his home and property at Wandella in what he described as a 'fire tornado' on New Year's Eve 2019. He spoke to us about having to re-identify himself and his family every time they needed help from a different agency or charity. He said:

We are sick and tired of re-identifying ourselves as ''Bushfire Impacted''. Every program across all of government loses us half a day of our time and induces further trauma in the re-identification processes.

He said it breaks people mentally. It 'virtually takes you to tears every time it occurs,' Mr Freedman told us.

Tony Jennings has been a rural firefighter with the Candelo RFS brigade in the Bega Valley for over 45 years. He told us of his efforts to get post-trauma counselling for himself and his colleagues. He said:

I heard volunteers on the radio, because they were crying out for help. I decided to try and get help for them but I ran into a brick wall.

He told us he had had two phone counselling sessions. He said:

… I didn't realise that I needed counselling … it was because we lost two very good staff … and that really angered me and upset me … unfortunately, I couldn't arrange it for other people.

He went on to say:

There was a young guy, who was about 17 and had not long ago joined the brigade. I don't know what's going to happen to him in the future—whether he's going to have some mental issues. Hopefully he won't. … hopefully he's okay, but we won't know.

Ms Sandi Grieve, CEO of the Walwa Bush Nursing Centre, told us of the stress and strain of communities having to make applications for financial assistance in the competitive grants process. She said:

Having to make grant applications, potentially missing out on those grant applications, having to change expectations and planning around what you get and what you don't get and then having to actually project manager … carries with it a significant degree of stress for a farming population who are already attempting to undertake three jobs.

Ms Grieve's evidence about the stress of traumatised communities making grant applications for basic needs was reflected in every community that we heard from.

These are just a few of the stories of the Black Summer fires. In all of these stories is a common thread: we weren't prepared and we should have been. The warnings were ignored or downplayed, not just the warnings of the winter and spring of 2019 but the warnings of the past decade. Had we been prepared, people probably wouldn't have been driven into the sea at Mallacoota and Broulee. The death toll would have been lower and property losses would have been less. As a country that will suffer the worst impacts of climate change, we need to lift our game to keep people safe. That's what this report is all about.

Finally, there is one thing that truly bothers me and, I think, bothered members of the committee. How is it that $4 billion sits in an Emergency Response Fund announced after the bushfires, with up to $200 million a year available for disaster recovery and resilience building, yet, two years on from the fires, a mere $17 million has been spent by the Commonwealth government? How is it that there are still hundreds of homes to be rebuilt on the New South Wales South Coast and people are still living in makeshift shelters? How is it that, with the vast resources of the Commonwealth and with billions of dollars set aside, these needs have not been addressed? Something is seriously wrong, and the next parliament needs to fix it.

Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I participated in the inquiry leading to this report, Lessons to be learned in relation to the Australian bushfire season 2019-20, and I wish to thank Senator Ayres for his work on this inquiry and for leading this inquiry. It was an incredibly important experience listening to people from around the country about their experiences of going through the trauma of the 2019-20 Black Summer fires. I wish to associate myself with the remarks that Senator Ayres has just put on the record—all the stories of how people were so deeply affected, the trauma that they experienced and how some of them are still experiencing that ongoing trauma. I won't repeat much about those experiences, but people should, absolutely, hear them and know just what a significant impact those fires had on people's lives, and understand what needs to be done so that we can reduce the possibility that such experiences occur again.

The report outlines a number of recommendations, including making sure that we can get into fires more quickly, get better aircraft support, have a better understanding of fire hazards, be better prepared for disaster and have better communications—a whole range of things that we can do better. Fundamentally, the point I make, and that the Australian Greens made in our additional comments, is that these sorts of disasters, these traumatic, extraordinarily awful experiences that so many people went through in the 2019-20 summer, are just going to keep on coming and get worse unless we do something about our climate crisis. The science is so clear.

I was briefed just this week by lead authors of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—the 6th Assessment Report, which brings together the knowledge of climate science from all around the world. These Australian climate scientists—leading climate scientists—covered a whole lot of things, and I was particularly interested to hear what they had to say about fire. The story is devastating. Essentially, even at 1½ degrees of warming, which we're trying our best to keep under, fires like those we saw over the 2019-20 summer are going to become more frequent and more intense, and the fire season is going to be longer. They told me in particular that the fire season is just going to keep starting earlier. We are going to be having more intense fires from earlier in the summer, earlier in the spring, and they are going to continue for longer. This is the reality.

The world is not on track for staying beneath 1½ degrees of warming—we are far from it. At the moment, we're on track for three to four degrees of warming, and Australia is completely complicit in this devastating scenario. That's what we're looking at. There's nothing that we can do—we can do all the pre-planning, and fight all the fires, but if we get to a world of three degrees or more of warming, the sorts of fires that we saw in 2019-20 are going to be like a walk in the park, and more of Australia is going to be subject to those fires. The fire weather that we saw occurring for the first time to any great extent in 2019-20—the pyrocumulus clouds; basically the fire feeding its own behaviour—was noted by the fire scientists studying the fires after they occurred to be unlike what had ever been seen before in most fires across Australia. This is just the beginning.

I urge the Senate, the government and everybody in this place, no matter what party they're from, to take these warnings seriously. We've got to listen to the stories and the tragedies that people experienced in 2019-20 and learn from them. That means doing all the sensible pre-planning and mitigation that we can do, but to learn from them seriously we've also got to be serious about taking the urgent action of reducing our carbon pollution in line with the science. That means at least a 75 per cent reduction by 2030. Absolutely fundamentally, it means that there is no way that we can afford to continue to expand coal and gas mining in this country. For us to play our part of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees so we don't end up in a scenario where these types of fires are more and more prevalent, we need to be getting out of the mining, the burning and the export of coal, gas and oil. That is the fundamental reality. We cannot argue with the physics. That's what needs to occur if we are really going to be paying proper attention to the lessons that we learnt from the 2019-20 Black Summer fires. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the Finance and Public Administration References Committee's report into the Urban Congestion Fund together with accompanying documents, and I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This afternoon, thousands of Australians will be stuck in traffic. Even as Australia recovers from the pandemic, the traffic has started again in our major cities. Before the pandemic, Sydneysiders spent an average of 71 minutes a day commuting. Those figures are highest in outer suburbs.

Rouse Hill, for example, saw its average commute jump by 60 per cent in the five years to 2019. That is time away from family, hours of our lives spent waiting, unproductive time in economic or family or community terms. At a campaign rally before the 2019 election, dripping with mock marketing sincerity, the Prime Minister said this about the construction of commuter car parks:

Yes, it's cement and it is bitumen and it's all of these things, but what it is really about is how we are really committed to families, to ensure that people get home sooner and safer in this big city of ours, or in the big city of Melbourne or Brisbane or over in Perth or wherever it happens to be.

This report outlines a broken promise to those Australians, how the government saw that desire to spend more time with our families and exploited it for their short-term political advantage.

Commuter car parks should serve a purpose, particularly in our outer suburbs, where bus links to stations are spread too far apart, and that makes long car commutes inevitable for too many Australians. But this government wasn't interested in achieving a policy objective. Mr Morrison was only interested in using public money to sandbag vulnerable Victorian seats. It wasn't built on a coherent plan to manage growing numbers of Australian citizens. They didn't consult state and local governments, which has left the federal government exposed to the full cost of these ventures, guaranteeing inevitable cost overruns and delays. Contrast this to the Victorian level crossing removal initiative. Premier Andrews said he would remove 50 level crossings by 2022. As of last week, he had delivered all 50.

The commuter car park fund was $660 million of taxpayer money for Liberal Party campaign announcements. The money was administered through a process in which coalition MPs and candidates canvassed now former minister Tudge's office directly. Former minister Tudge's office, with the direct involvement of the Prime Minister's office, then finalised announcements for projects based on the interests and the timetables of coalition candidates and campaigns. There was no consideration of a project's merits. There was no evaluation of a project's feasibility or costs. The only metric that mattered was votes. It was a rort. It remains a giant rort from a corrupted government that has learned nothing and shows every sign of doing it again next year. No wonder they won't deliver a real national anti-corruption commission with capability and teeth. But this practice wasn't limited to car parks. The evidence before the committee demonstrates that the entire $4.8 billion Urban Congestion Fund has been used as a vehicle for the selection of projects with the same process. As the Australian National Audit Office made clear in their evidence to the committee, the canvassing process that determined which projects were funded did not distinguish between car parks and other infrastructure. There remains $890 million of unallocated funds in the Urban Congestion Fund, ripe for rorting ahead of next year's election.

Several of the report's recommendations are for immediate action. The committee recommends an urgent ANAO audit of the entire Urban Congestion Fund. The report recommends that the department of infrastructure release the investment principles and policy objectives for the Urban Congestion Fund by no later than 31 January 2022. This report recommends that the Prime Minister table to the House of Representatives a full explanation to the parliament of the role that he and his office played in the allocation of funding under the commuter car park fund. That report should be tabled no later than Friday 17 December 2021. Prime Minister, you have 15 days to explain to the Australian people the role that you played and that your office played in the commuter car park fund with Minister Tudge and the Liberal Party campaign. Don't hide behind former minister Tudge. Don't hide behind Mr Gaetjens. Don't hide behind a self-serving interpretation of cabinet confidentiality and public interest immunity.

It is time for this Prime Minister to be straight with the Australian people about how he has spent their money. The Australian people should view this deadline as another test of this Prime Minister's honesty and of his truthfulness.

Questions of transparency and accountability here are not limited to the Prime Minister. I would draw the Senate's attention to the department of infrastructure's failure to cooperate with this inquiry. It refused to respond to a number of questions on notice from the committee's inquiries, and it refused to respond to two separate orders for the production of documents, passed by this chamber on 23 August and 20 October, respectively. This reflects poorly on the ministers and public servants responsible for a department that is entrusted with billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

The administration of this fund by former Minister Tudge and this Prime Minister was corrupted. The Prime Minister deliberately perverts a critical distinction between decisions of government and the decisions of political parties seeking government in an election campaign. The government frequently raised Labor's election commitments on commuter car parks—another dishonest deflection. Those decisions were clearly those of a political party seeking government, still subject to the mandate of elections, the processes of government and engagement with delivery partners. The decisions in relation to the commuter car park were clearly decisions of government, authorised by the Prime Minister. Funding commitments were included in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, and they were referred to as government decisions in the department's own materials. The distinction between party interest and public interest is critical to our rule of law and to protections against partisan corruption. This is just one more example where this Prime Minister and this government don't understand that vital distinction. It is the basis for our Westminster system of government. It is what distinguishes our democracy from kleptocracies overseas.

Additionally, there are outstanding questions about how these decisions were consistent with the relevant legislation, particularly the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act and the National Land Transport Act. With another federal election around the corner, the abuse of caretaker conventions and protections against the misuse of public money to approve these projects is a particular concern. When this Prime Minister goes to communities and promises developments, voters should reflect on the corruption of these processes before.

Finally, the report recommends that the government establish an independent commission against corruption at the Commonwealth level. It's been vital in New South Wales to restoring public confidence, cleaning up the New South Wales Police Force and the Public Service, and rebuilding good political culture in the parliament and cabinet for Labor and Liberal governments alike. Today, it is being resisted by the same self-serving arguments that were levelled against the introduction of the New South Wales ICAC by then premier Nick Greiner. Those arguments were wrong then and are completely redundant now. As Senator Fierravanti-Wells asked this week, in her blistering and comprehensive demolition of opponents of a federal ICAC within the government, 'Are they conflicted?' The answer is: of course they are. That's why a decent, fair dinkum national anticorruption commission with teeth, with the capability to clean up government, will only be established by a fresh start with an Albanese Labor government.

Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just wanted to say three things which summarise the recommendations of this important report into, colloquially, the car parks rorts. The first, which is reflected in the first recommendation, is that the Prime Minister was up to his neck in it and that, as the report says, the commuter car park scheme and the Urban Congestion Fund were being used as a vehicle for a political purpose.

Basically we had a systematic, coordinated scheme—not just car parks but also going across sports rorts, community development grants, Building Better Regions Fund—to be spending taxpayers' money for political purposes, to buy votes. The Prime Minister was up to his neck in it and he needs to come clean. Hence, the first recommendation of the report, which says that we need to have a full explanation to the parliament of the role that the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's office, the Deputy Prime Minister's office and any other ministerial offices and staff played in the allocation of funding under the Commuter Car Park Fund.

The second really clear suite of recommendations here reflect the fact that, in terms of the overall purpose of the Urban Congestion Fund—tackling urban congestion—the whole process of determining where the money went did not come close to that. In fact there was double removal from urban congestion. First of all, the department has done zero work on determining what sorts of projects we should be funding if we're serious about tackling urban congestion. Certainly, there's very little evidence that commuter car parks are actually at all useful for tackling urban congestion. But, even if you accepted that, then the process of deciding where those car parks should go was not based on any assessment of their efficacy in tackling urban congestion. Essentially, we had coalition members of parliament being canvassed, 'Where would you like a car park?' Or basically, 'Where can you buy votes?' There is such clear evidence of that from the report and from the investigations we did, which, of course, were building upon the important work that the Auditor-General did into the car parks fund.

The third point is probably the most important point in terms of going forward: how are we going to make sure this doesn't occur again? Essentially, when we asked the integrity experts, 'What can we change to make sure this doesn't happen again?' they came back to us resoundingly with the same answer: we need a federal anticorruption commission, an integrity commission, that has teeth. That's what is needed to make sure that this sort of corruption, these rorts, do not continue into the future.

The Greens of course have a bill. We've had legislation that has gone through this place. It has been sitting down in the House of Representatives for two years now. We have a government that promised that in this term of their government they were going to introduce legislation for an anticorruption commission. But they've decided now in these last weeks of parliament that it just isn't a priority. We have had the priorities of moving on religious discrimination law that is going to increase discrimination against people, and an awful lot of other legislation, but the anticorruption legislation has not been a priority. Fundamentally that is what we need; we need an anticorruption body with teeth. Frankly, I do not trust that this government is going to deliver it. The only way that they're going to deliver it is to kick this government out.

This is my last speech in this place for this year, and I am looking forward to next year. I am looking forward to an election. I am looking forward to kicking this government out. Then what we would very much like to see, and what I think we have a good chance of achieving, is the Greens with a shared balance of power, pushing the next government to go further and faster on issues of corruption as well as tackling the other important fairness and sustainability issues that we as an Australian community face.

Debate adjourned.