Page 1181 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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Climate change
Discussion of matter of public importance
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Orr): Madam Speaker has received letters from Miss C Burch, Ms Cheyne, Ms Cody, Mr Coe, Ms Le Couteur, Ms Lee, Mr Milligan, Ms Orr, Mr Parton, Mr Pettersson and Mr Wall proposing that matters of public importance be submitted to the Assembly. In accordance with standing order 79, Madam Speaker has determined that the matter proposed by Ms Le Couteur be submitted to the Assembly, namely:
The importance of preparing the ACT for more extreme weather events because of climate change.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (3.21): My current podcast listening is to David Wallace-Wells, who is the author of the distressingly titled The Uninhabitable Earth. It is, he says, much worse, than you think. He covers a great deal of scary future expectations: drought, floods, wildfires, economic crises, political instability, the collapse of the myth of progress. It is a tour of the future’s emerging disaster. He talks about the six great extinctions, caused primarily by climate change. Some of those ended up with 96 per cent of all species becoming extinct. He also talks a lot about how even those of us who know about these predictions and believe them just do not live as if they are true. I am one of them. Basically it is because they are just too scary. I am not alone.
This is why we are having this MPI today. Climate change is real. It is going to get worse and we need to prepare for it. In the ACT we are already seeing more severe, more frequent and longer heatwaves, less rainfall but more frequent and severe storms, more extreme fire risk days and the likelihood of more dangerous bushfires. We have just had our hottest January on record. Canberra airport’s mean temperature was 34.5 degrees Celsius, the warmest January mean since records started. It was 6.3 degrees above average. The temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius on 19 days at the airport, just over six times the January average. January set a new record for the number of consecutive days above 40 degrees: four days.
These kinds of records are being broken all over the world, year on year. The summer which just passed was the hottest summer on record for Australia as a whole. In just 90 days, more than 206 heat records were broken around Australia. Port Augusta in South Australia reached a record-breaking temperature of 49.5 degrees. It is expected that many Australian towns will have maximum temperatures of 50 or above by 2030.
Every state in Australia experienced serious bushfires, with properties lost in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Pristine rainforests in Queensland and Tasmania which previously have not burnt suffered devastating damage. The pictures from Tassie were literally on an unbelievable level. New South Wales also experienced serious fires throughout autumn and winter. The Queensland fire season was much longer than normal. The Tasmanian fire season started early, as did ours, on 1 September, and is finishing late. In fact in the ACT we just experienced the hottest March on record as well.
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