Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, a vote will be required. I move –
That the House:
- Notes with grave concern the extreme El Niño event building in the eastern Pacific Ocean is the largest El Niño event in recorded history.
- Recognises the El Niño event is an indicator of increasing ocean temperatures caused by global heating.
- Understands this super El Niño foreshadows a very hot, dry summer and increased bushfire risk to Tasmania, threatening communities, ecological systems and the economy.
- Agrees a coordinated, appropriately‑resourced adaptation plan with genuine action must be an urgent priority of government.
- Further notes:
- the finding of the Independent Review of the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008 (the act) that there is a lack of an adaptation plan at a statewide level; and
- the review recommends the Tasmanian Government ‘Establish a separate adaptation planning process in [the act] that enables adaptation actions to be developed and delivered separately to mitigation measures.’
- Expresses disappointment in the government’s response to the Independent Review and apparent unwillingness to commit to strengthening the act, or its adaptation planning, in line with the review’s recommendations.
- Further agrees the northern hemisphere’s experience shows business-as-usual on adaptation response will not keep Tasmanians safe.
- Calls on the Premier, the Minister for Police, Fire and Emergency Management, and the Minister for Environment and Climate Change to lead the development of an updated statewide emergency response plan, with clear actions and communication strategies, to ensure Tasmanians are well informed and prepared for coming summers, and to table it in the House.
Today, I speak on a topic which I know is something deeply close to many Tasmanians’ hearts, which is the concerns about the changes we’re all experiencing in the climate and what the future will hold for us. There are many Tasmanians who have in their memories the experience of the 2018-19 summer bushfires, and as a member for Franklin who lives in the Huon Valley, I well remember it was three full months of smoke blanketing the Huon Valley communities – of course it went much further than that at many times – and the the huge threats to communities, particularly Geeveston in that area, and other places around the state. It’s an experience that people who lived through it are still bearing the scars of, people who were in close proximity to those fires, and the evacuation centre in Huonville was an enormous and outstanding community effort, but here we are again facing a much greater threat than we experienced in 2018-19, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
I note that people have in the past talked about the Greens coming in and speaking about climate change issues as though we’re doomsayers and prophets of a future which is unlikely to unfold. If that were so, I would be very happy, but the truth is what I’m reading now is the 11 August update from our Australian Bureau of Meteorology, which makes it clear that the El Niño is now firmly established, the excess heat in the upper ocean in the equatorial region, which is the signal for El Niño, started during July and it’s been the highest of all months since records were first started in 1979 for those sea surface temperatures. The Southern Oscillation Index, which is another measure of an El Niño, is strongly in the negative phase and the July average was the most negative July value for the Southern Oscillation Index that’s ever been recorded. Most concerningly, their forecasts are pointing towards a very strong El Niño event which has been called a ‘super El Niño’, and their expectations from their models is it’s likely to be peaking at levels above the warmest we’ve ever observed since records began in 1950.
This is seriously concerning information for Tasmanians and everyone who cares about communities, our environment and the ecological systems that will be impacted, but all the other parts of society, for agriculture, tourism, health care and our economy. The functioning of Tasmania, the Tasmanian way of life, and of course the natural world that supports us, is seriously threatened by the very extreme temperatures and very low rainfall that is also being predicted by the Bureau of Meteorology to occur this year. All of that is being fuelled, of course, by fossil fuels that are making the atmosphere hotter and driving us towards more extreme climates and more volatility in the climate system altogether. What’s going to happen in the summer ahead? Of course we don’t know, and we’re not here to predict an outcome that we don’t yet know will occur, but what we do know is that all the signs are there that this will be, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, some of the the hottest temperatures and some of the driest conditions we have ever seen.
If people want to go to the Bureau of Meteorology’s website and click through to have a look at their maps, you’ll see that the south‑east part of Australia, and particularly Tasmania, is already identified as being bright red in three months’ time, meaning super-hot daily maximum temperatures and an indicator of very low rainfall. When we have those conditions confronting us, when we see those things that we’re staring down the line, when we’ve seen the stories and the images of what’s been happening in the northern hemisphere over the last three to four months, we are very concerned. We are speaking for Tasmanians today who want to hear that the government is doing everything it possibly can to prepare communities, to support local councils, to support volunteers in the Tasmanian Fire Service and the Tasmanian State Emergency Service who will be on the front line, defending communities if there are bushfires and helping people prepare for bushfires, to understand what people need to do to keep themselves safe and how they can prepare for increasing the safety around themselves and the people they love.
This is why we’re here, because we don’t have confidence that the government is focusing on this as a core issue, and the minister’s response this morning was deeply concerning. Two questions today were asked about the Climate Change Action Plan independent review and the government’s response to the independent review. It is woeful, distressing and extremely disturbing to hear such a flaccid, insipid, pathetically short response to an independent review. In the minister’s response this morning – the minister, apparently, for climate change – he made statements that puts him, unfortunately, in the category of being a climate denier, because how can you possibly prioritise talking back in the past about things that Tasmania has done instead of putting your full energy focused on what we need to do to strengthen Tasmania to what, by all expectations, is likely to be a hellishly hot and dry summer with conditions which are deeply concerning for everybody?
Honourable Speaker, our motion today recognises the findings of the independent review of the Climate Change (State Action) Act. I want to thank all Tasmanians who made submissions to that review. It’s a bit of a thankless exercise and many people in the community expressed their frustration at having to provide their views yet again to a Liberal government who, by the evidence so far, haven’t taken climate change seriously and aren’t acting to prioritise this as a critical and urgent issue that needs the efforts of the whole of government. I want to thank people who put the effort into making submissions: scientists, but also many people in the community who are really clear that what Tasmania needs is a coordinated, appropriately‑resourced adaptation plan, something that has genuine actions in it and has the resourcing to match the need.
That is an urgent priority for Tasmania. It’s an urgent priority for the government because what we need is a statewide coordinated response to support and lead local government, industry and community sectors in an all-in-together response. We need to do everything we can to strengthen communities. Instead, after the submissions that were made and after the assessment by the independent reviewers, what we find through the independent review of the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008 that I’m reading from now, is that the government has:
…a lack of adaptation planning at a statewide level that accounts for all affected sectors and stakeholders.
They found, disturbingly, that:
Tasmania’s Climate Change Action Plan 2023‑25 will lapse at the end of 2025 and a new plan has not yet been developed.
Honourable Speaker, that plan has now lapsed. Since this report was written, there is no state adaptation plan. There is no state action plan. They also found, formally, that there is – obviously in addition to the fact there is no existing plan – gaps throughout the planning that was done in the previous plan. They recognise that adaptation is a priority concern for all the stakeholders who made submissions. They understand that it reflects the growing exposure of communities and industries in the changing climate that we’re experiencing. They realise that adaptation is seen as not getting sufficient prominence by the government in the act that we have, and they also say there are concerns about effective implementation.
What they’re identifying is not just the action plan itself, or the lack of it, but the failure of the government to implement outcomes. The current approach, they said, has led to ‘gaps in delivery…a lack of coordination across agencies’ and relevant government capacity – by ‘capacity’ they mean resourcing and human capacity:
…constraints within both state and local government also limit the ability to plan and implement adaptation effectively.
This is a desperately serious situation, because what it points to is the government’s addiction to creating plans, strategies, processes. They’re shuffling papers, effectively, without the actions and the resourcing to match the actions on the ground and with communities. It is deeply concerning the way that they treat stakeholders. The reviewers made particular comment about how stakeholders are treated, and they found that:
Stakeholder confidence in the Tasmanian Government’s ability to deliver meaningful climate actions remains low…stakeholder engagement is seen as procedural rather than participatory…The lack of accessible and coordinated communication diminishes public awareness and trust, making it difficult to sustain engagement and collective momentum for action.
I want to recognise that, yes, the government has made some commitments in their response to the climate change review report. Before I go to that, I will say that the main finding about adaptation in the report was that there should be a separate adaptation planning process to address the current gaps in adaptation that have emerged due to the way that adaptation is undertaken by this government. I want to go now to the government’s response, and you’d think at this important review of the Climate Change (State Action) Act they would have given it a fairly weighty measure. Instead, it is just 11 pages long. I suggest that possibly the response to the mop‑top outbreak might have been longer than 11 pages. Are there any other current issues that members would like to remind me of that could be longer than 11 pages? It is an appalling response by a government ‑ an Australian government, any government ‑ to what is one of the greatest threats that we are confronting as a society: to have an 11-page response.
Even more concerning, if possible, is that the majority of the recommendations that are made by the review committee, they only made seven of them, are very reasonable. Yet almost all of them are only supported in‑principle. The one that we’re talking about today is adaptation. There are many things to say about the government’s failure to appropriately respond to climate change. That’s not what I’m talking about today. I’m not talking about the entirety. What I’m talking about is the coming summer, the threat that’s been identified by the Bureau of Meteorology, and the government’s failure to appropriately support and resource and engage with Tasmanians to help people prepare themselves, be safe and have the resources they need to do that. Recommendation 3, which the government hasn’t fully committed to supporting, concerns adaptation. The government’s response was that the government will strengthen adaptation priorities in the next climate change action plan ‑ not now, but in the next one. We’ll just leave a situation in Tasmania before possibly the largest El Niño that’s ever been recorded in human history, but we won’t have an adaptation action plan in place because we’ll do it later. We’ll kick it down the road.
They also promised to increase an emphasis on adaptation outcomes in the next generation of sector‑based emissions reduction and resilience plans. Adaptation outcomes was another thing that the reviewers pointed to as not existing; outcomes that were unachievable, or there was no evidence of outcomes having been achieved. This is a government that is very good at writing plans and strategies, but when it comes to action and demonstrated action, it’s not there. They’ve also promised to strengthen engagement with local government and regional stakeholders on adaptation priorities. Well, good, because that is very important. I want to speak now on behalf of people in local government. I don’t know what other members feel when they talk to people in the community, but I’d encourage people to go and ask, randomly, anyone in the community if they feel they’re getting the support they need to properly prepare for bushfires this summer. I would reckon 100 per cent of people you talk to would go, I don’t know what to do. They’ll say, I know there’s information online, but I don’t really know what to do. It’s because there’s a gap between putting something on a website and paying and resourcing people to go and communicate it to the community.
The TFS volunteers do an incredible job, and I want to thank them, because they don’t get paid to do this work ‑ the paid staff, too, of course. The volunteers and the SES don’t get paid to do this work, but they’re on the frontline, educating people. They need support from local government, but local government are telling me they don’t have the support from the government; there isn’t a statewide coordinated approach. That is why, in this motion, we are calling on the government to recognise what’s happened in the northern hemisphere, understand the reality of the science our Bureau of Meteorology tells us, the evidence of what’s coming this summer. We want them to develop an updated statewide emergency response plan that has clear actions and clear communication strategies, so that Tasmanians are well informed and prepared for coming summers. We want to have it tabled in parliament, because we want to see what the government says it’s going to do. We want to see the extra money they’ve put into resourcing the TFS, SES and working with local councils to coordinate and strengthen communities.
This is what adaptation looks like. It doesn’t look like a plan, a plan that doesn’t even exist, sitting on the minister’s shelf, something that ran out last year, while we’re facing the worst El Niño summer we’ve ever had. I can’t properly communicate the desperation that many people in Tasmania are feeling when you talk about climate change. All I can say is that when you do talk about climate change or they bring up climate change, they can’t consider it. That means they’re not focusing on doing what’s needed to keep themselves safe. It is our job, it’s the government’s job, to provide the resources and to provide the support and the connectivity in the community so people know where to go and how to look after themselves, and industries and businesses have the response they need if and when disaster occurs. I implore the minister for Climate Change to take this matter seriously, and to please provide the parliament with this information before summer.
