Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Thank you, Mr President. Other honourable members have observed that there wasn’t a lot of substance or vision for the future or even any particularly strong connection to reality in the Premier’s state of the state address, and it was a bit like someone in his office went and dusted off Will Hodgman’s 2014 state of the state address, his 2015 one, later ones that his successor, premier Peter Gutwein, put forward.
It was a state of the state address that was written for another time.
Totally disturbingly out of touch. We’ve got a world on fire, literally and figuratively. We’ve got war in Europe, war in the Middle East. We’ve got the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to the transport of fossil fuels that the world currently needs because it hasn’t got itself off the teat quickly enough, and really our future, both as citizens of the world and also as residents of this beautiful island, is being blighted by vicious, mad old white men.
That presents a particular set of challenges, because we’re a very small island with a very small population on a big and highly stressed planet. But what it requires of our leaders is courage and honesty.
We got, for example, a line in the Premier’s state of the state address: ‘There are exciting days ahead of us, exciting years ahead of us as well’- because, if you’re going to state a cliche, there’s nothing like repeating it. And that is one way to put it, but it would have been more honest to say we have some extremely challenging days and years ahead of us, but because we are a resilient, resourceful, highly connected island community, none of those challenges are insurmountable.
But we didn’t get that.
So, here we have an island economy that is very significantly dependent on imported fuels of all different kinds. And it’s been great to see that matter raised by a number of honourable members, either in their state of the state contributions or in questions to ministers, because one of the most pressing things that we can do that wasn’t raised in the state of the state address was ‘become energy self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible’.
And, remember, we used to be very significantly energy self-sufficient because of our Hydro system. Now we’re plugged into the mainland and some of the power we turn on is coal-fired power. We have many more cars on the road than we used to, so the impact of fuel shortages and fuel price shocks on our community, one of the poorest in the country, will be profound.
What we needed to hear from in the state of the state address was genuine vision for making this island more independent, more self sufficient, less reliant on imports, and more buffered from the kind of shocks that we are experiencing, which will only intensify.
We need to electrify our economy, and right now – because people are doing it so tough and it’s not going to get any easier – we need to look at measures like free public transport. Half price fares are a good start, but when people are making a decision about whether they can afford to drive to work, as legislators and on the part of the government, we need to make it as easy as possible for people to get where they need to go. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a revival of interest in, and use of, Metro services? If there was a revival in the way we view freight rail but also started looking a little bit more at passenger rail? I see you nodding your head very enthusiastically at that. It is, unarguably, one of the cleanest and most enjoyable ways to get around, so I encourage government to turn our lemons into lemonade here and have a look at what opportunities are presented to us by the current crisis.
There’s no question that out in the community, a lot of people are experiencing acute financial stress. Everything is more expensive and the sector that is dealing with that stress at the frontline are our community services. They’ve been asked to find savings for this year’s State Budget, because they too will be required to chip in for the Macquarie Point stadium. What government needs to do almost immediately is provide a cash injection to the community sector so they can support Tasmanians who are struggling, so they can support the people who we represent. When you lift people’s circumstances and take some of the financial pressure off them, there are flow-on benefits everywhere in our health system, in our mental health system, in our justice system, in our youth justice system. When you provide people with the basics, you strengthen communities. That is the way – the only way – we are going to get through what’s coming at us.
As a number of members have pointed out, the state of the state was glaringly obvious in its failure to mention First Nations Tasmanians: the Palawa people. There was no commitment to truth telling and treaty, no word about the return of lands – and there hasn’t been any land returned here for more than 20 years. Not a word about the need for stronger Aboriginal heritage protection. It was a very disrespectful speech in that way. Where it lets us down, when you don’t have a good connection between the Premier and First Nations people, is that it inhibits, in some ways, our capacity as a community to work with First Nations Tasmanians to help to deal with some of the enormous challenges that we’re facing. Of course, the single biggest difficulty we will be beset with, as an island people, is climate change. It’s really important that we connect to, and tap into, ancient Palawa knowledge about this landscape, how to manage it in a time of fire, increased bushfire risk. That is knowledge that we need.
Some time, as I understand it, potentially even this year, the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf Glacier in Antarctica will split off from Antarctica. This is the glacier they call the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. The reason they call it that, of course, is that once the Thwaites Eastern Shelf glacier breaks off from Antarctica and heads out into the Southern Ocean, it will impact on ocean levels, on sea level rise. Our communities, our coastal communities, they will be impacted. They’re already being impacted by sea level rise, coastal inundation, storm surges. The problem that we have with a government that hasn’t taken climate change seriously enough, is that our adaptation planning to protect the people we represent is extremely deficient.
I refer honourable members to the report that was tabled today, which is the long-awaited review report of the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008. I want to again thank my colleagues in this place for supporting my motion recently, which agreed that the act must be strengthened. The reviewers agree as well.
I hope that honourable members will take the opportunity to have a look at the 2024-25 Independent Review of the Climate Change (State Action) Act. Recommendation 3 – and this came through very strongly, according to the reviewers in the submissions – is that the government needs to establish a separate adaptation planning process in the Climate Change (State Action) Act 2008 that enables adaptation actions to be developed and delivered separately to mitigation measures. What they found on the question of how adaptation is dealt with is that, and I quote from the report:
There is a lack of adaptation planning at a statewide level that accounts for all affected sectors and stakeholders. Tasmania’s Climate Change Action Plan 2023 2025 will lapse at the end of 2025 and a new plan has not yet been developed.[checked]
Here we are in 2026, as the United Nations tells us that the last 11 years have been the hottest in human history, and we don’t have a climate change action plan out of this government.
The Tasmanian government’s response to the statewide risk assessment, ‘Managing Tasmania’s climate risks and opportunities’ risk assessment response report, does include some new actions to address risks. However, the report says these actions are limited and the response doesn’t include an implementation plan. There is a gap in adaptation planning. The review says:
Adaptation was also a priority concern for all stakeholder groups, reflecting the growing exposure of Tasmanian communities and industries to a changing climate. Despite this, adaptation is seen as not receiving sufficient prominence in the Act and there are concerns about effective implementation.[checked]
I will let honourable members read this review report at their leisure, but it was revealing when the reviewers said this in their opening statements:
Stakeholder confidence in the Tasmanian Government’s ability to deliver meaningful climate outcomes remains low. While the achievement of net zero emissions since 2014 is an important milestone, it is driven largely by carbon sequestration from the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector, rather than broad based decarbonisation across the economy.[checked]
It points us to the need for stronger emissions reductions in other sectors, particularly transport, agriculture and industry, and notes that there’s been a lack of visible progress in these sectors which is contributing to doubt about whether Tasmania’s net zero achievement represents a real transition or a temporary accounting outcome from negative land use emissions.
It would have been terrific to hear from our glorious leader, the Premier, Mr Rockliff, that he understood the nature of the challenge and the risks, and that his government had a clear eye on what needed to be done and how it would engage with communities, including First Nations Tasmanians, to make sure that we are ready for the future.
One of the biggest challenges we will have – and this is not just from global heating; this is from the current fuel crisis – is in relation to our capacity to grow food. As I understand it, key components that come from the Middle East for fertilisers, including urea, are not coming through. Other countries, like China, are deciding not to sell nitrogen into the global fertiliser market, and right now in the US and Europe, it’s planting season. Again, it brings home how reliant we have been on imported food. What we need to hear from the Premier in a state of the state address is that this government is working with our primary producers, working with our incredible, amazing social infrastructure in our neighbourhood houses, child and family centres and other community organisations who already do emergency food relief. The Premier needs to work with primary producers, and the social circle that already does food relief, and communities, to work on a plan so that we’re growing more of our own food here. Exports are incredibly important we know that but we also have to feed our own people. We, the Greens, would very much like to see the Premier take food security much more seriously.
The only mention of the environment in the state of the state address was the words ‘a strong environment’. That was it a shallow, hollow reference to our life support systems. We still have a State of the Environment report that passed two statutory deadlines before it was delivered, that the government has provided no meaningful response to. It highlighted that the Tasmanian natural environment is under significant pressure, primarily as a result of global heating, but also poor land-use decisions and planning that we’ve made in the past and we continue to make to this day.
We are still logging and burning the habitat of critically endangered species like the swift parrot and the masked owl. People have different views on the value of the life of a swift parrot or a masked owl. I will always argue that those animals, equally, have an intrinsic right to exist. They have a right to a home, which is a habitat. We have a responsibility not to allow species to go to extinction on our watch. These are other life forms that demand of us respect, and it’s not happening right now.
We still have large-scale logging and burning of our native forest carbon banks. We still have a fin-fish farming industry which is out of control, but which is also being impacted by warming waters. As we know, these environmental pressures and the way government responds to them can have significant negative impact on our brand. Tasmanians deserve better than to have the Premier only say the word ‘environment’ once in his state of the state address, and then only fleetingly, with no substance around it whatsoever. Part of what makes this beautiful place the best place in the world to live is our natural environment. We have a responsibility to look after it.
The big black hole in the state of the state address was the Premier’s just glossing over the state’s parlous finances. Nobody in this place eviscerates and dissects a budget better than the member for Murchison, so I’m not even going to try, but the headline figure of potentially $146 billion in debt within a short 14 years is terrifying. That is a state that is bankrupt, but ‘Premier Pollyanna’ says all will be well. It’s all manageable, because we’ve done such a great job of it over the past 12 years, we’ll just keep doing what we’ve always done, and all will be well. While we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’re going to foist upon this community a stadium that it can’t afford, that will be carried by generations of Tasmanians.
We’ve had a statement from the Premier in his state of the state address that there’ll be no new taxes, so no attention given to how we might raise the revenue that we need to raise to cover the gap between our income and our expenditure as a state. I share the member for Huon’s bafflement at the Premier ruling out any new revenue-raising measures. That means that what we’re left with is job cuts and spending cuts, but don’t worry about the job cuts, because the Premier has reassured us that the government is fully embracing the AI revolution. He says, ‘We are harnessing it across the state service to drive efficiencies and improve service delivery.’ A completely contradictory statement. You might improve your cost bottom line of public sector wages, but there is no demonstrated link between the widespread use of AI by a company or a government and service delivery being improved or more efficient. What this is actually code for is job cuts. In the future, Tasmanians who pay through their taxes for services can potentially expect to have decisions about their applications or registrations made by a robot.
I’m not a Luddite. I’m not here saying that we shouldn’t harness this technology. But the test of its use should always be two things: does this deliver a public good, and is it sustainable? They’re the two questions we should be asking ourselves when we look at the widespread use of artificial intelligence in the delivery of government services.
They’re the same questions we should ask ourselves when a company wants to put an AI data centre here on our beautiful island. At the moment, as I understand it, councils can’t examine questions of power and water use of any particular development. If an AI data centre, like Firmus in Launceston or another data centre, goes to council with a proposal for a data centre, key questions can’t be considered about the impact on power use, power prices and water.
There’s a big AI data centre that’s been moved for the South Island of New Zealand. If it goes in, it’ll be the second biggest energy user in all of New Zealand. One data centre. It’s important to remember that these data centres are not what we once imagined data centres to be, which was like big electronic libraries. These data centres are AI generators, they’re not data storage centres. They’re creating artificial intelligence, and it’s a challenge that as an island community we are going to have to wrap our heads around.
People are going to start losing their jobs to AI. When the Premier refers in his speech to secure jobs for the future, we should view that with the greatest of scepticism, because a secure job in the future is looking more and more uncertain, given the onslaught of AI and the number of jobs it is already replacing
A 100 megawatt data centre, for example, can use up to 2 million litres of water every day, and that’s the same amount of water that thousands of households use. Microsoft’s data centre in the US is using millions of litres of water in the southern states during droughts. There have been protests in the US states of Oregon and Arizona against AI data centres because of their water use that is competing directly with households. About one tenth of the growth in global electricity demand over the next five years, according to the International Energy Agency, is expected to come from data centres.
Now some jurisdictions have recognised the community concern about the proliferation of these data centres. For example, the Edinburgh Council moved to ban AI data centre construction in the city when presented with a particular proposal that created enormous community unease for a whole range of reasons including power use, noise and water use, and it was primarily around environmental impacts.
The Premier talked in this state of the state address about ensuring appropriate guardrails for AI. Well, good luck with that, because we’ve already got AI data companies telling us that the AI they’re creating are breaking rules and making their own rules and finding ways around the explicit instructions they’ve been given by their human handlers. If the government of Tasmania, which can’t get the berths right for our two Spirits, thinks that it can ensure appropriate guardrails for the use of artificial intelligence in Tasmania, they need to patent it, sell that tech around the world at a bargain price because everyone needs it, and all our budget problems will be over. Because there is no government and no company on earth right now that has developed appropriate guardrails for artificial intelligence. We need to have some sort of control; some sort of understanding and oversight and some limits on the use of artificial intelligence inside government and we need to have better planning provisions around the construction of AI data centres in Tasmania.
I asked the question, for example, on the Premier committing to fully embracing the AI revolution, will there be transparency around the companies that are contracted to provide those services. One of the biggest AI contractors in the world is Palantir, which has supplied the technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in America that is enabling them to round up people who don’t have white skin and is enabling them to target minorities in the United States. It is Palantir technology that the Israeli Defence Forces use to target particular individuals in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Tasmanian government should be very thoughtful and careful to protect the public interest in who it provides access to our data to.
Honourable members may remember that four or five years ago the Tasmanian government, without any conversation with the Tasmanian people, provided biometric data from about 340,000 Tasmanians to the Morrison government. That was our drivers licence processes and the biometrics that come with that. Well, three months ago, on the request of the Trump administration, the Albanese government provided a whole lot of biometric data of Australians to the Trump administration. The question is reasonable: is the facial data, the biometric data of Tasmanians, because it was sent to Canberra and then a whole wad of it has been sent to America, is that sitting in Palantir databases in the United States?
We’re at a time in Tasmania’s history when there’s a huge question mark about what will be the skills of the future. What do we need in our people to make sure that we’re ready for the future? The latest AI that I saw, which was only released a couple of days ago, replaces marketing people, basically. I got a phone call from a constituent earlier this year whose partner had been sacked by her employer here. She was a designer and she’d worked for this small company for about four years. She designed all their creative output, all the look of their brand and their marketing materials. They said to her one day, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘thank you for your service. We are replacing you with artificial intelligence, and it’s so good that you did all that terrific design work because the AI will have something of high quality to work with.’ This is a story that will be repeated over and over again.
There’s a question here about the skills that will be needed for the future and where to point our young people to get the education, training and skills that they need in a future that is very, very different from the one all of us grew up in. And yet what we got from the government is $45 million in cuts to TasTAFE. Gutting TasTAFE.
Extraordinary. We were told when the TasTAFE bill went through a few years ago that this would improve TasTAFE, improve course delivery and teaching, and what have we got, $45 million carved out of our primary public vocational training provider.
And then, in an act of enormous cynicism, we get from the Minister for Skills and Jobs, Mr Ellis, a media release a few days ago to say that the government is really terrific because they’re putting $2 million into private training providers. We can all see what is happening here and that is the downgrading of TasTAFE so that it is not seen as so valuable by the broader Tasmanian community. It is much easier to dispose of and then you’ve just got private training providers who can charge Tasmanian students pretty much whatever they want.
The state of the state address made only passing reference to really critical policy areas for the Tasmanian people. Talked up the government’s commitment to the health system when we know it’s been run down. We know, if you talk to everyone who works inside the Royal Hobart Hospital and the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, that the Royal Hobart Hospital itself is near bursting. The capacity of the hospital is pretty much at its limit and we will need a new Royal Hobart Hospital. We simply will, and we’ll need it within the next 10 to 15 years.
But, because of the political choices that have been made over the past 12 years, that’s a conversation that it feels almost foolish to initiate, because people go, ‘We can’t afford a new hospital, we can’t afford it.’
But they know the government has chosen to afford a $1.13 billion stadium that, of course, by the time it is finished, will cost a whole lot more.
It might not be this government, it might be the next one, but in the not too distant future a Tasmanian government is going to have to come to grips with the fact that we need a new Royal Hobart Hospital so that our hospital can serve the health needs of Tasmanians in the future.
On housing, there is no clarity from the government about the future of Homes Tasmania, and this state of the state address had one big idea in it. Okay, I exaggerate; it had one small to medium size idea in it and that was taking apart the Department of State Growth to create Building Tasmania. Now in principle that could be a very good thing. Don’t get me wrong, because we always thought the Department of State Growth was a folly.
But we need to understand what is the future of Homes Tasmania.
Now, I am somewhat comforted by the quality and the heart of the current minister responsible for Homes Tasmania, and I mean that genuinely.
Members – Hear, hear.
Ms O’CONNOR – I know that minister Vincent takes a deep and compassionate and strategic personal interest in these matters.
But we still have people who are sleeping on the Domain. We still have 25, 26 and 27 year old children living at home with their parents because they can’t afford to rent in the city.
We still don’t have enough medium density housing in this beautiful city I represent. There is still too little invested by both Commonwealth and state governments in the provision of social housing, because if you invest in high quality, affordable social housing in your communities, as Tasmanian governments did for decades, then you provide opportunities throughout the rest of the housing market. You’ll take pressure off rents. It may well be easier because the demand pressure is not so high for young people to afford to buy their own home. These again were the matters that were just glossed over in the state of the state address – in an address, unfortunately, that read like it had been spat out by ChatGPT and delivered by a premier who was just dialling it in.
That is a theme that’s come up in responses to the state of the state in this Council. I don’t know if Jeremy Rockliff is here for the rest of this term. I don’t know, but I read this state of the state address, and I felt as if he’d lost his drive for the job, because it was so depressingly ordinary, so untethered from the reality of the times, so glib about the challenges that he did mention, like the Budget, so little attention paid to the kind of future that all of our children and grandchildren – all the children in our communities – are facing because it’s not an easy one. Yet here we are in an incredible position to do something about it to make it better.
In a world degenerating into chaos, what we really need here is strong, honest, courageous, farsighted leadership. We didn’t get that in the state of the state address. I do hope that the Premier – in fact, I doubt he has – but I do hope that the Premier pays at least some attention to the contributions in this place on his address. It’s all easy downstairs when it’s very noisy and everyone’s shouting at each other and sometimes contributions aren’t that considered. It’s easy to ignore that as white noise if you’re a premier or a minister. This place is different. Many of the contributions on the state of the state have, in one way or another, nailed it. I hope the Premier is listening to some extent. It’s always good to be hopeful in life, so, I’ll end on a hopeful note.
What is it that gives me hope, for example, about this place? What we have that a lot of places don’t have – and it’s a magic thing – is a highly connected community. We have our arguments. We don’t always agree. But in the end, we’re always an island people who are deeply connected. It is those community connections that will help to keep us safe in the future. When you talk to climate scientists, they will tell you the safest places to be are where they have the strongest communities.
So, we have to do everything we can to strengthen those community ties. That means really looking after people – back to where I started in a way. That means making sure the people we represent are a focus of government and that at this time when life is really hard for a lot of people, the government’s got their back. In our wonderful New Town office, we’ve just set up a community pantry. I have to say demand is high. I’ve been quite surprised. I’m pleased that people know there’s some food relief around, but there is a lot of stress in our community. To make our community stronger, we need to be investing more in food relief. We need to be making sure we’re not carving up the capacity for people to learn extra skills, for example, through TasTAFE. We need to be making life as cheap as it possibly can be, for example through free metro travel, and at the same time investing in our towns and cities so they’re cooler. We really need to do that.
I am hopeful, despite being more tethered to reality than the Premier was in his state of the state address, I am hopeful about here, and how we will tackle the future, and I’m hopeful because of our people. I note the address.
