Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, as I indicated earlier, I seek the leave of the Council to table Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment, which was forced out of the Albanese government by a resolution of the Senate last week, and the high-level summary report of Tasmania’s Risk Assessment for Climate Change 2024.
Leave granted.
Mr President, I move – That the Legislative Council –
(1) Notes the growing evidence of runaway climate change and the impact extreme weather events such as fire, flood and drought are already having on Tasmanian communities, the environment and economy;
(2) Acknowledges the Tasmanian Risk Assessment for Climate Change 2024 warns of future increases in the severity of acute extreme rain and flood conditions, acute bushfire and wind conditions, more frequent and/or intense periods of extreme heat, and declines in rainfall across the state;
(3) Further notes Tasmania’s Greenhouse Emissions Report 2025 confirms carbon emissions across all sectors are not falling and that it is business as usual, despite scientists warning us of a climate in crisis;
(4) Recognises the Report in a graph on page 8 further confirms the State’s claim to net zero status is the result of avoided native forest logging and burning from 2012, through the Tasmanian Forest Agreement;
(5) Expresses its disappointment that the Tasmanian Government is in breach of its obligations under the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008 to ‘reduce greenhouse gas emissions’;
(6) Notes the current review of the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008;
(7) Agrees the Act needs a substantial overhaul to deliver emissions reductions and prepare Tasmanians to adapt to the intensifying impacts of climate change;
(8) Calls on the Tasmanian Government to work with scientists, the community, farmers, business and industry leaders, and the Parliament, to ensure the Act is strengthened to reflect the urgency of the times; and
(9) Agrees this demonstration of leadership will give more young Tasmanians hope for a safe climate future.
I highly recommend that honourable members read those reports. There’s also a high-level summary report of the National Climate Risk Assessment which is available to members, because as we are elected to deliver on the public interest for each of us, we have to understand the impact that global heating will have on the communities that we represent.
The National Climate Risk Assessment report was sat on by the Albanese government for some 10 months. They’d refuse to release it. They offered senators a closed‑door briefing on the National Climate Risk Assessment, continued to refuse to release it, and it was finally a resolution put forward by the Greens in the Senate for the production of that document that saw its release.
Now, having read most of that report. I understand why a government which is continuing to approve new coal, oil and gas mines, and do very little to bring down our emissions in any tangible way as well as not investing in adaptation, would not want that report made public. What it tells us, in black and white up front in the report, is that by 2050 all regions in the country will experience severe climate impacts. Now I ask members to think about where they were in the year 2000. In the year 2000, I’d just given birth to my beautiful daughter, Stella. She’s now 25 years old.
Within 25 years, when Stella is 50, the Tasmania that we live in now will be almost unrecognisable. 25 years is not a great length of time. What the National Climate Risk Assessment report tells us is that within 25 years the west coast and north‑west and central plateau of Tasmania will be much drier. There will be far more heatwave days, many more days of high wind. We will have far more thunderstorms, dry lightning events, and therefore we will have a much higher number of bushfires. Those bushfires will threaten life, property, the environment that we rely on and, of course, the economy.
By 2025, areas that are low‑lying in Tasmania, such as Lauderdale and Port Sorell, will be subject to sea level rise and coastal inundation. The pictures that the National Climate Risk Assessment report paints of the future should be a wake‑up call to governments all over the country and to parliaments everywhere in the country. It is simply not tenable that we do that human thing where, because the problem is so big and hard to conceive of, we stick our heads in the sand and hope it will go away.
I don’t think we have that choice. I want Stella and all my children and all Tasmanian children to grow up in a community where they know that the government of the day understands the science, understands the risks, and is acting accordingly. The problem that we have, and that’s the subject of my motion today, is a very weak climate governance framework in Tasmania, a government that is not complying with the objects of the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008. That object, which the government continues to not comply with, is to identify, promote and support measures to reduce Tasmania’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008 was, remarkably, brought forward by former Labor Premier, Paul Lennon, and he initiated a change of culture in government agencies through an exercise called the Wedges report, where all government agencies had to assess what their emissions output was and put forward a plan for reducing emissions within their agencies.
The initial act that parliament passed in 2008 was much more robust in many ways than the act that is before us now. Numerous sections have been repealed out of this act, but the most damning happened in about August of 2014, not long after the election of the Hodgman Liberal government, when the first move made by the then-minister for the environment, Matthew Groom, was to abolish the Tasmanian Climate Action Council.
The Climate Action Council was an independent expert‑based body that was established to assess the science and provide advice to the government of the day, through the minister for climate change, on steps that needed to be taken to reduce emissions, but also to provide for adaptation. Adaptation matters because it is an investment in keeping communities and people safe. It is an investment in mitigating those safety risks caused by extreme weather events. We now have a climate change act which the government is not complying with, which has been gutted, so that there’s no expert advisory body that’s advising government on the steps that it needs to take. In 2025, when the government’s own climate risk assessment report says things like this:
The impacts of climate change are already being felt in Tasmania. Over the past 10 years, the state has experienced significant and devastating impacts, such as prolonged dry periods, flooding, bushfires and record marine heatwaves, chronic climate hazards such as seasonal temperature change, sea level rise and changing rainfall patterns and acute trends like heatwaves, floods, bushfires and coastal storm surge events impact the natural environment, health and wellbeing of communities, the economy, the built environment and emergency management. Future physical climate trends include more frequent and/or intense periods of extreme heat impacting on health and wellbeing. The Minister for Health needs to read the Climate Risk Assessment report.
Impacting on our energy systems, ecosystems, biodiversity, and that there will be economic disruptions associated with outdoor production, that is, primary producers who are growing our food. Overall, long-term increases in average temperatures are expected. Changes will be greatest in the northeast, coastal regions and islands. There will be a projected decline in rainfall on average across the state. There is a projected increase in the severity of acute extreme rain and flood conditions, particularly in the eastern half of the state. There will be increases in the severity of acute bushfires and wind conditions, particularly in the north of the state. This has direct health consequences and impacts on emergency services preparedness and disaster reduction. Like all climate extreme impacts, the state’s infrastructure – buildings, transport and roads – will be more prone to damages and disruption and insurance risks. We will see sea level rise, and storm surge extreme wave events are projected to become more frequent and severe. There will be continued warming of Tasmanian coastal waters and marine heat waves, along with chronic increases in ocean acidity.
This has the potential for major impacts on the natural environment, including the destruction of marine ecosystems, the incursion of more northerly species, and associated impacts for ocean aquaculture, fisheries and local communities. The summary report goes through a range of scenarios out to 2050. The consequence in climate risk terms for our healthcare and emergency services by the year 2050 are classified ‑ by a conservative consultancy like Deloitte ‑ as major; the risks to the built environment due to climate extremes by 2050, major; the risks to contaminated sites due to extreme events and chronic climate impacts, major; the risk to storm water and sewerage systems, major; risks to ports ‑ minister ‑ and coastal infrastructure by 2050 will be moderate and by 2090 will be major.
There will be risks to our national and international supply and distribution networks due to extreme weather events, by 2050, they’re classified as major. If your only concern is the economy, the risks to business through the implementation of new technologies, including emissions reduction through fugitive emissions, agriculture, industrial and fuel switching will have an economic impact. On it goes. Risk to our cultural heritage, our built heritage, significant impacts on health and wellbeing.
In Tasmania, as we know, in 2016, devastating fires went through the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. There are about 300 fires that burned 127,000 hectares of the central highlands, the west coast and the south-west; burnt through Gondwanan landscapes, cushion plants, pencil pines, king billies, Huon Pines; devastated them and they will never recover.
Also in 2016, many honourable members will remember those devastating floods. Where we experienced in some places the highest rainfall ever recorded. Tragically, two people lost their lives in the 2016 floods in Latrobe and the Derwent Valley, and the Blake report found that local authorities were not adequately equipped to deal with the human impacts, if you like, of those floods.
There were again floods in 2018 in Hobart, where our stormwater drainage system absolutely cacked itself and there were major economic impacts as a result of those floods, which at the time we described as ‘biblical,’ but they’re really just a taste of what is to come.
More floods in 2024, up in the Derwent Valley.
In terms of fire, we’ve had bushfires rage through the years. The 2013 bushfires. The 2013 bushfires on the east‑coast and Dunalley. 200 homes were lost in 2019‑20 after record low rainfall, we had a warmer and drier‑than‑average season and fires swept through Fingal and the Douglas‑Apsley and burned 36,000 hectares. February 2024, a 95,000 hectare fire caused by dry lightning strikes, which even Parks and Wildlife will tell you have increased in frequency and intensity, burned through the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area and the west coast.
We had a really interesting briefing the other day with Professor David Bowman from the University of Tasmania, a fire ecologist, and one of the primary reasons for the briefing was to understand the climate risk to Hobart. It is the most fire‑prone capital in the country and we do not have an evacuation plan for Hobart. We do not even allow here, for some reason that baffles Prof Bowman and us, provision for fire shelters. In Victoria after their devastating bushfires about 10 years ago, they changed the regulations and they allowed for people to construct fire shelters on their properties, which will, and have, saved lives. We are so far behind the eight ball here, which is why I know that, when I bring on these sorts of debates, some people internally just think, ‘Oh, here we go, she is going to have another rant; Cassandra, the prophetess of doom,’ but the thing is, it’s my responsibility as the member for Hobart to raise these issues and it’s my responsibility as a spokesperson for climate change, a former minister for climate change, to bring these matters to the table because this council will be needing to make some thoughtful and strategic decisions in the future.
Hopefully, there will be some amendments coming through as a result of the review of the Climate Change State Action Act 2008. On the government’s record, they will be flabby and weak amendments and, certainly, the Greens will be moving to strengthen the climate change act because, at the moment, it’s all we have. Within that act are pathetic things like the government legislated a net zero by 2030 target – well, we’re already at net zero. What the act needs to do is to set an absolute target for emissions reduction and, like the evolved jurisdictions on the mainland, set sectoral‑based targets and work with the industrial sector, work with the agricultural sector, the tourism sector, small businesses, so that they can bring their emissions down as well and I know it feels like an exercise in futility when we read such things as this, from a Stockholm Environment Institute, which showed that planned fossil fuel production in 2030 is projected to hit 120 per cent the level needed to hold warming to 1.5°Celsius and 77 per cent more than is needed to keep to 2°Celsius.
It is very hard to advocate for emissions reduction from a little island like this, but leadership has to come from somewhere. What we could do, and the science is really clear about this, is that, overnight, we could end the logging of native forests and by 2050, our forests would be sequestering an extra 75 to 80 million tonnes of carbon. Overnight we could make a substantial and positive impact on the climate and also demonstrate leadership.
In our greenhouse gas emissions report for 2023, what we see is how lazy this government has been on emissions reduction. It thought it could set a net zero by 2030 target knowing that our forests were doing all the heavy lifting, but if members can get their hands on a copy of the Tasmanian Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report 2023, there is a chart in there called ‘Changes in Tasmania’s Emissions,’ and it’s very telling. What it tells us is that from the year 2012, our emissions profile improved markedly, heading towards net zero. That was, of course, as a result of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement and avoided logging and burning.
The story above the line is the damning story. In direct combustion, transport, electricity generation, agriculture, industrial processes and waste, emissions are stagnating. There’s been no change to business as usual. What it tells us is that this government doesn’t understand the ethical and moral imperative of the times, which is to show leadership.
Even if it’s not within your philosophical view of the world to act to lower emissions because you don’t want to have any impact on businesses – and that’s through a very short-term lens of course, because the medium to longer-term impacts will be significant anyway – even if you couldn’t bring yourself to act to lower emissions, a responsible government would have strong adaptation planning in place. This government does not. The act itself, which is up for review, places no real responsibility on government to develop an effective adaptation plan.
I was listening to a climate scientist on the radio a few years back, and they were asked, ‘Where will be the safest places in the world to be?’ The answer was: the safest places will be where there are the strongest communities. That is what gives Tasmania an edge. As the world changes, we have a highly‑connected community. I mean, we all have our differences, but we’re islanders, and we share this little place in the world, and we do have a strong sense of community. This is something that government needs to tap into, so that there’s that sense of collective responsibility to each other.
The way to drive adaptation is to take communities with you, and that’s a really clear message in the National Climate Risk Assessment report. The way you do that is that you fund conversations, like the Hobart City Council’s Sparking Conversations, which was a broader conversation with people who live in the municipality of Hobart about bushfire risk, about general climate risks, and how we might mitigate those risks.
When I was the minister for climate change, we had access to some federal government funding. We did a project called Coastal Adaptation Pathways. We worked with the Clarence Council down at Lauderdale, we worked up at the Break O’Day Council, four councils around the state. There were targeted conversations with communities about the future and what it might look like.
In the case of Lauderdale, of course, which has already had swimming pools in backyards fall over onto the shore of Frederick Henry Bay, those conversations were hard, because at some level, there has to be a conversation about when you leave. I still have friends who live down at Lauderdale, right on Frederick Henry Bay, and I’ve sat in their backyard and the waves are at the foot of their garden.
This government needs to get serious about adaptation planning. We need to have a really clear picture of risk, and that picture has been created for us by scientists and experts. The government, as the Minister for the Environment herself said, is very good at assessments and reviews. That was the minister’s response when we asked, a simple ask, for an actual minister for climate change. Some of the material that’s coming out of government on risk, for example, is really good. It’s outstanding. What we need here is a government that’s prepared to invest and to act.
I don’t know if any other members have had a look at the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008. I would encourage my colleagues in here to do so, because it will come before this House. There will be some amendments to that legislation and, as I said, we will be moving for strengthening of the act and the reinstatement of an independent advisory council. There absolutely should be a minister for climate change. It’s ideological and short-sighted for there not to be. If you have a minister who is responsible for emissions reduction and adaptation planning, and it’s part of their accountability KPI effectively, it allows for a very specific focus on those tasks. We don’t have that now in this government, and it’s negligent for government not to be investing in adaptation planning at the very least.
By not doing that, it’s putting Tasmanians, now and in the future, at risk. Again, even if your only metric is money, what the National Climate Risk Assessment report tells us is that increasingly properties in hazard zones will become uninsurable. A report out of The Guardian in April this year says:
The climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism, a top insurer has warned, with the vast cost of extreme weather impacts leaving the financial sector unable to operate.
The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.
Global carbon emissions are still rising and current policies will result in a rise in global temperature between 2.2°C and 3.4°C above pre-industrial levels. The damage at 3° will be so great that governments will be unable to provide financial bailouts and it will be impossible to adapt to many climate impacts, said Thallinger, who is also the chair of the German company’s investment board and was previously CEO of Allianz Investment Management.
This comes at the same time the Tasmanian government has announced plans to set up an insurance company. I do feel like that was one of those scenes from Utopia during the state election campaign, where the Premier said we need a big idea, we need a big thing to sell, and they’ve come up with TasInsure. I would like to think it’s a great idea and that it will provide low-income people with a better opportunity to insure themselves.
During the floods that went through Lismore a couple of years ago, about one in four people whose houses were effectively destroyed, were uninsured because it’s really difficult for people on low incomes to have comprehensive insurance. Again, I encourage my colleagues in here to go and get a briefing from the RACT about some of the insurance challenges they are facing. I am so impressed with the work that the RACT is doing to understand the level of risk to communities and property, and I think that they’re far ahead of anyone in the government right now in terms of really grappling with the situation that’s before us, because there will be homes in and around Hobart that will increasingly become uninsurable.
We have government policy, which is the question I asked the minister today in Question Time, that is pushing out the urban growth boundary, pushing people closer to the bush and further away from emergency services. The RACT is grappling with how to engage people in that community conversation about being prepared, and it is a really difficult subject to talk about. It’s difficult for the climate spokesperson for the Greens to talk about without thinking, ‘Are people just going to think that I am a doomsayer?’ I am just reading out what the science and the experts tell us. It is human nature not to want to deal with big and terrible things that feel like they can be put off, but this is the mindset that has got us here, Mr President, where we have a totally inadequate response to global heating.
We have a government that will go into debt, to the tune of around $2 billion, for a stadium when the climate risk assessment report ‑ and this is one the honourable member for Launceston might be interested in ‑ makes a case study of the Kanamaluka/River Tamar. On page 69 of the National Risk Assessment Report, it says:
The Launceston flood risk will increase with climate change. The estuary is vulnerable to rising sea levels, which can lead to increased flooding, erosion and potential saltwater intrusion. The analysis in this compound flood assessment identifies the need to raise the levy heights to make them more resilient to climate change.
That is just one area of critical infrastructure spending where human lives are involved where there’s not even a conversation, as far as I can tell, within government. There’s no conversation with the people who live in and around Launceston. There’s no accommodation in our fiscal strategy for making sure that we are ruggedising our infrastructure, that we are getting it as ready as it can be for some of the changes that are here and will be here with increased frequency and intensity in the years ahead.
I bring this motion forward as a plea to us all; to understand that we really don’t have a choice here. I guess we do. We could consciously make a choice to pretend it will be some other council’s problem, some other parliament’s problem, but that would be an abrogation of our responsibility, because we now have before us the information that makes it impossible to say we didn’t know. It wasn’t that long ago that governments, local councils, for example, 20 years ago, could pretend they didn’t know. They could continue to approve subdivision in low‑lying coastal areas. We can’t do that anymore. The insurance industry is telling us we can’t do it. The scientists and the risk assessors are telling us that we can’t ignore it anymore.
One of the key findings in the National Risk Assessment Report – and it is threaded through each chapter – is the mental health impacts of inaction. This is particularly so for young people. Also, what is projected to be a significant increase in mental health suffering as people experience the climate breaking down around them. The best thing we can do to counter that is demonstrate that we are serious about the problem. The best message we can send to young people is to say there isn’t a single climate denier in the Tasmanian parliament ‑ and hopefully there isn’t. The message that should be coming from the Premier, but from all of us as community leaders, is that we’ve listened to the science. We have some understanding of the risk. We are motivated, highly motivated, to keep our communities and the people we love and the places we love safe. Therefore, on the basis of the risk assessments we have been provided with, we will strengthen our overarching climate legislation, we will get serious about emissions reduction and we will work across the economy to help industries adapt. We will work with communities to make sure that adaptation becomes almost second nature.
Sometimes, I wish my brain wasn’t like it is.
Ms Forrest – How would you prefer it?
Ms O’CONNOR – Honestly, sometimes I look at the dogs lying on the deck, not a care in the world, and I think, ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’
Ms Forrest – Wouldn’t you prefer to be a cat, with an attitude?
Ms O’CONNOR – No, cats are aliens. I’d rather be a dog. I have the sentinel brain, and so I see threat. It’s just in my makeup, but we all have a responsibility not to pretend this will go away.
We have some fantastic debates in here, but sometimes when we’re talking about things that seem to me to be relatively trivial in the great scheme of things, I become more worried. The fact that as a community, we’ve been fighting about a stadium for three years while there are fires and floods happening around us is maddening. That’s three years where government has not turned its attention to the need to keep communities safe, and has not turned its attention to our ageing infrastructure and the need to invest in it. A government which is just pretending that it’ll go away, or that it’ll be another government’s problem, in another day. It won’t, unfortunately. I’d like us to be able to give to young people, who are particularly terrified about the future, a lot of young people who pay attention, a really clear line of hope to a government that takes this seriously.
We’ll see whether or not this government, which refused to have a minister for climate change, will listen to the submissions that have come in to the review of the climate change act. Our submission was really clear: you need a minister for climate change. You need to set absolute targets and sectoral targets. You need to have principles underpinning the act about community safety, protection of the environment, protection of the economy, understanding of First Nations knowledge and tapping into First Nations understanding of the landscape in order to help us adapt.
There needs to be accountability within that act. If a minister fails in the objects of the act to help to deliver emissions reduction or proper adaptation planning, there needs to be actual accountability for that failure. In the same way that secretaries of departments, for example, are accountable when they don’t meet the KPIs that the minister has set them. The now minister for the environment, unfortunately, but the minister responsible for administering this act should be held accountable when the objects of the act are not being met. When it is manifestly obvious that there’s not been enough preparedness for natural or unnatural disasters, whatever you want to call them these days, there does need to be accountability for that.
I’d like to believe that the Premier, Mr Rockliff, who is a very intelligent man and empathetic, understands that of every challenge that he’s ever faced in politics or as Premier, this is the greatest one – this is the greatest ethical and moral challenge that he will face as Premier, and it is the greatest challenge that we will face as Tasmanians. I’m not sure Jeremy Rockliff will take the Liberals to the next state election. That would be totally understandable given that he was elected in 2002. Say that is the plan, and he has another three or four years. I would encourage the Premier to understand that his greatest legacy won’t be a stadium that drives us into massive debt and causes resentment amongst the people of Hobart and Tasmania more broadly. That is not a legacy that, overwhelmingly, people will look at and feel love and thanks to him for. Certainly, not in my city, in my experience of door‑knocking during the last few election campaigns.
For young people, Jeremy Rockliff should get serious about this, read the risk assessment report, and make sure its chapters are partitioned up and given to each minister to whom they relate. I will put ministers coming before Estimates committees on notice now – in the House of Assembly and in the Legislative Council, we will be taking apart this report as it relates to portfolios, and we will be asking each minister whether they’ve read that chapter and what their response is to the findings and recommendations of the National Climate Risk Assessment Report, but also to our own state‑based climate risk assessment report.
I remember asking the then infrastructure minister, Rene Hidding, in 2014-15, ‘What’s your plan for infrastructure?’ ‘Oh, what do you mean?’ I said, ‘You’re going to face more extreme weather events, our infrastructure’s ageing. Would you do an audit on vulnerable community public infrastructure and assess risk and invest where you need to?’ I was fobbed off. I was fobbed off that year. I was fobbed off the year after, the year after. Continually fobbed off, on a key issue.
You’re not just minister for infrastructure for four years, not really, because you’re dealing with infrastructure here. The decisions that you make as minister for infrastructure will be there, in our faces, 20 or 30 years from now – or not, if you don’t do it properly. I encourage all honourable ministers to get to those chapters of the National Climate Risk Assessment report and read them, and as you read them, remind yourself that the Albanese government did not want to release this report. The reason they didn’t want to release it is because it is terrifying. It does demand a response from all governments at all levels: federal, state, and local. It points to disastrous land use decisions which have created greater risks to communities. It encourages community adaptation planning strongly and it encourages transparency and openness with people about the risks and the choices that we’re going to have to make.
We need to ask ourselves, are our emergency services adequately equipped to deal with what is coming? Is our legislative framework that governs our emergency services sufficient? I would say not. In the past, over summer when there have been extreme fires, we have been able to call in VLATs, very large air tankers, either from the mainland or from Canada and North America. Well, the fire season’s lengthening, and those planes won’t be available to us for very much longer. They won’t, and that is a fact.
What are we doing? What are our conversations with the Commonwealth like about how to keep people safe in the future? how to protect our Gondwanan wilderness? How to make sure that our economy, fragile as it is, can withstand these shocks? What are the conversations that we are having with the Commonwealth about disruptions to food security? I would say there is not very many.
I do encourage honourable members – you can perceive the nature of the challenge in any way that is comfortable to you, but the facts are the facts. Most of us here have children in our lives that we love very dearly. I’m not just motivated to talk about these things out of love for my own children. It’s a love for this island’s people, for the community that I represent, for the kids I see playing soccer on the weekend, for Gondwana vegetation like nowhere else on earth, and for our primary producers who produce some of the best food in the world. This is an expression of love for Tasmania and its people.
We can’t pretend it’s not happening. I can assure honourable members that as long as I’m in here, you won’t be able to.
I commend the motion to the House.
