Page 3377 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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We have seen other great progress. We have seven-star buildings coming through, so we know that our buildings, our homes into the future, will be climate resilient. It is really, really good—and it is quick—to have change when you are motivated to make that change. I am finally feeling like we might see that federally. There is quite a lot of work to be done there. But we recently had an election and we had two old parties who did not talk about climate. It worried a lot of us that there was no mention of climate. The media pretty much did not cover climate. But Australia picked climate people. Australia picked people who were talking about climate, and that is really, really good.
We have had a lot of change happening really fast. We need that change. We need it to happen quickly, and we need tangible action. I am really pleased to see this motion. It is extremely tangible—tangible solutions to real problems. It is so simple and so obvious that we need good data, we need to prepare our health services to deal with the things that we know are going to happen and we need to bring forward a national strategy. It is fantastic to see this, and I am really pleased to support this motion.
MS DAVIDSON (Murrumbidgee—Assistant Minister for Families and Community Services, Minister for Disability, Minister for Justice Health, Minister for Mental Health, Minister for Veterans and Seniors) (6.09): I speak in support of this motion. Climate change is not coming; it is here. I am done with trying to explain the blindingly obvious to people who wish it was not true and who think that they do not have to change the way we all live in order to reduce the impact on those least able to live with it.
When we talk about the future impacts of climate change, the conversation, quite understandably, often focuses on bushfires and floods. But today I want to talk about the health impacts of heatwaves. The ACT Climate Change Strategy 2019-2025 tells us that more people die in Australia from heatwaves than from all other natural disasters combined.
As documented in the Victorian Legislative Council’s Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration report on the Department of Health’s response to the January 2009 heatwave in Victoria, in the week before the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria a heatwave resulted in a 62 per cent increase in deaths—around 230 people—while another 180 people died as a direct result of the bushfires. We also know that pre-term births are almost twice as likely in a heatwave. This is from the 2015 CSIRO publication Climate Change Adaptation for Health and Social Services.
The 2008 Garnaut climate change review projected an increase in days over 35 degrees in Canberra, from an average of five days per year in 2008 to eight days in 2030, 21 days in 2070 and 32 days in 2100. The 2014 report of the NSW and ACT Regional Climate Model project, titled Australian Capital Territory: Climate change snapshot, projected that Canberra will experience up to five additional days per year above 35 degrees by 2030 and up to an additional 20 days per year by 2070. So that is what is ahead of us.
But let me be very clear: climate change is here, and it is now. Between 1 November 2019 and 16 January 2020 Canberra had already experienced 15 days with a maximum temperature higher than 35 degrees. Between 1 October 2018 and
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