Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable Speaker, I move –
That the House take note of the following matter: Climate Preparedness.
We have seen extreme weather events over the past fortnight, lived through by all Tasmanians. We know these events are only going to increase, both in frequency and in severity. These are climate-induced events, which is why it is such a shame this government did not see fit to appoint a specific climate change minister. I, like many Tasmanians, am also keenly awaiting the Budget to see what investment this government is putting into mitigating climate change.
We must acknowledge the work of the emergency services personnel, the extraordinary job they did in frightening situations. However, how much stress are these workers, both employees and volunteers, going to be under in the future as we see these events increasing? We have to make sure the Tasmania Fire Service, emergency services through police and the State Emergency Service (SES) are all fully funded. As I touched on yesterday, we also have to make sure that they have a safe workplace to be going to.
It was the SES’s extraordinary work in flood preparation, the maps they prepared that were so accurate, that helped local governments such as the Derwent Valley Council accurately prepare for what was to come. We have to make sure they are fully funded to be able to do this moving forward. Having a minister such as a climate change minister could help with that.
It is good the government did appoint an IT minister because it is vitally important that Tasmanians can be connected when we are experiencing extreme events so they can access vital information via the TasAlerts app or look up road closures on the police website.
We saw power lines go down. We are going to speak more about future-proofing infrastructure with Mr Garland’s motion later today. There are many things we could do in terms of putting power lines underground. We do this for heritage values in towns such as Ross and Oatlands. We could be doing it to help future‑proof infrastructure against bushfires as well. The community of Dolphin Sands, in Lyons, has been calling for this for some time.
We also have to make sure telecom towers have a backup power source. Workers should not be going out in isolated situations, in frightening weather, trying to hook up generators. We can have on‑site backup power stations. As the federal government renegotiates deals on guaranteeing connections, which is not just on landlines, I hope the state government will be lobbying to make sure we have connectivity into the future.
Two of the most important things we have to do on the climate change front is to protect and restore ecosystems. We have to protect what we already have here in Tasmania. That is an intergenerational obligation. That means our carbon-sequestering native forest, but also other kinds of ecosystems that have a lot less promotion than the native forests, such as our endemic peat soils in the south west. Functioning wetlands and saltmarshes also, if they are intact, do a tremendous job of mitigating flooding.
This leads me to restoring ecosystems, because ecosystems in their natural state help build environmental resilience against flooding. In the Derwent Valley, we saw a perfect example of that through the Derwent Catchment Project’s work with their Willow Warriors, removing the willows from tributaries to the River Derwent such as the Lachlan and Tyenna rivers. Certainly, the Westaway Berry Farm, which is right on the Tyenna River at the forefront of the flooding, did not see the water level rise through their paddocks with the same amount of rainfall that they did when the willows were in place. We absolutely have to see an upscale in frequency and in efforts to restore ecosystems.
Funding is really important. The government has done a tremendous job in funding the communities that were affected, but one size does not fit all in terms of lump sum payments and there are isolated communities that are going to be extraordinarily out of pocket. Moving forward, we have to make sure we have a blueprint that can be adaptive so that Tasmanians are not out of pocket when we see climate disasters happen.
The greatest investment Tasmania can make for our future, indeed the future of the planet, is to mitigate the impacts of climate change, to rapidly upscale ecosystem restoration and to invest in future-proofing our infrastructure so that we as an island are prepared and our communities are kept safe and we all pull our way in our global duty of sustaining a liveable planet.
