Page 21 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 11 February 2020
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People without houses or without adequate air conditioning, or with asthma or other medical conditions, must have had it even worse than us. It must have been particularly hard for parents with kids on holidays—not much of a holiday. I think that a lot of us were really pleased to go back to work in a nice air-conditioned office.
We must remember that at least 34 people in Australia have not gone back to work after the fires, wherever they worked. Some of them were firefighters; some were volunteers. Some were Australian and some were international. Some of them were people who just had the misfortune to be in the wrong place when it happened. Many more will die as an indirect result of the fires.
The fires this summer were unprecedented. Beekeepers smoking their bees early in the day to reduce any risk led to the fire by the airport. Lights from an army helicopter in Namadgi led to the fire in Namadgi. Neither of these things would have led to fire in normal conditions, but this is not normal. As Mr Gentleman said, the conditions were such that basically anything burnt.
Our response to the fires has also been unprecedented. I want to join with all the other speakers before me, and I am sure all the other speakers after me, in thanking the Emergency Services Agency—ACT Fire & Rescue, the ACT Rural Fire Service, the ACT State Emergency Service and the ACT Ambulance Service—plus parks and conservation, ACT Policing and lots of other public servants in the ACT government.
In the ACT we are very lucky to be part of Australia. We have had support from other states and territories; fortunately, we have been in the position to support them as well. Both our Defence Force and the New Zealand Defence Force have come to our aid. I have just realised that we also had support from the UAE; thank you. I thank the other states and territories.
I would also particularly like to thank volunteers. Mrs Jones in particular talked about a lot of informal volunteer efforts, and these have been absolutely wonderful. There have also been more formal efforts, particularly from wildlife carers, the RFS, the SES, the Red Cross, and hundreds and hundreds of local groups.
The fires are unprecedented but not unexpected. We have known about climate change for over a century, and for at least the last 30 years it has been part of public discourse. I went to my first climate change conference in Canberra in 1988. I will not bore you all with my views on why the world, and Australia in particular, has failed to take effective action on climate change. For this motion, we need to be aware that, while this fearsome summer was unprecedented, it was predicted and it was not unexpected.
Some people are calling this summer the new normal. But whatever this is, it is not the new normal. The world has warmed by a little more than one degree Celsius since 1880. Two-thirds of that warming has been since 1975, at a rate of about 0.15 to 0.20 degrees Celsius per decade. The Paris agreement, which the world, unfortunately, is not even on track to meet, talked about 1.5 degrees of warming, or another 0.5 of a degree. More realistically, we are on track for another three to four degrees of warming, and possibly more.
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