Page 1323 - Week 04 - Thursday, 5 May 2022
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We all lived through the black summer. We all choked through smokepocalypse. We have just seen Australian towns go underwater. We are seeing countries literally begging people to help them because the sea is rising to swallow them up. We understand that this is happening, but it does not seem to affect the decisions of some people in here. We have an extinction crisis, and we have a lot of really precious habitat in our region. We have grasslands that you cannot find anywhere else in the world. We have already lost 99 per cent of those grasslands. They have gone forever, and they are not coming back. There is a cumulative impact of each little carve-up for development. We have to look at that so carefully before we do it.
We also have a homelessness crisis. This is a Greens story. The Greens are always talking about people and the planet. And the reason we talk about both of those things is that we know we have to look after both of them. There can be tensions between the two, but we can actually look after people and the planet if we take the whole together. We put that at the heart of our election campaign in 2020. We said that climate and homelessness are the two biggest things that matter and that we are going to make sure we do something about it. We put those at the heart of our parliamentary and governing agreement.
We have two Greens ministers working in these fields. We have Minister Shane Rattenbury, who is our Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, and we have Minister Vassarotti, who is our Minister for the Environment and Minister for Homelessness and Housing Services. These things matter, and we cannot be dismissive. We know that people need a home, and people also need a planet that they can live on. We need both. We will have both, but we need to make smart, careful, balanced decisions if we are going to have that.
Ms Lee’s motion calls for a feasibility study to develop west Murrumbidgee for housing. Mr Gentleman’s amendments and his statement explain that this area has already been looked at and it has been ruled out. He said that studies show that the area is too environmentally precious and that it means we would sprawl too far out beyond our urban footprint.
I want to talk about urban sprawl just for a little while. Urban sprawl is something we often discuss and dismiss, but actually it is not a simple concept. Urban sprawl is really expensive. We have to build roads and schools. We have to find transport. We have to connect up all our municipal services. Fortunately, we do not have to connect up gas anymore, but we still need water and electricity. Cheap housing is not cheap at all for the taxpayer. We have to pay for all of that. It is not cheap for the resident, who will often find that they are stuck in a car in a long commute to get wherever they need to go. Rising fuel prices are really showing that a lot of people who have bought into these homes cannot afford to leave them anymore. That is a problem. We cannot afford to set that up.
Urban sprawl also costs the planet. I am just going to pause here and talk about the latest IPCC report for a little bit. The IPCC tells a lot of stories—it has been telling them for a long time—and the stories have shifted in recent years. The IPCC is speaking with more urgency and with much greater clarity and certainty. It is also
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