Page 218 - Week 01 - Thursday, 13 February 2020

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(2) acknowledges the work of the Chief Health Officer and the staff of Health Protection Services, including:

(a) issuing several public health alerts;

(b) establishing a “heavy smoke and hot conditions” website to provide a single source of truth for the community;

(d) facilitating the distribution of nearly 400 000 P2 masks to the most vulnerable in our community; and

(3) calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) create a whole-of-government strategy on smoke and air quality in the ACT, to be completed and released before the beginning of the 2020-21 fire season; and

(b) report to the Assembly on the progress of the strategy in August 2020.

For Canberrans, this summer has been completely dominated by the issues of fire, heat and smoke. These upsetting climatic conditions, symptoms of a world that is suffering the worsening effects of climate change, have had a dramatic and disruptive effect on our lives. I do not think there is a single person in Canberra who is not negatively affected in some fashion. Australia also suffered a record-breaking summer in 2018-19, and many people called it Australia’s angry summer. This year’s summer has been apocalyptic by comparison.

For months we have all watched the fires, willing them to go out, not knowing if they might reach our homes in Canberra, and hoping that people, properties, animals and the precious natural environment would be spared. We have sweltered and sheltered from record-breaking heat, enduring a new ACT maximum temperature of 44 degrees and a new high for the overnight minimum of almost 27 degrees. We have also suffered dust storms which carried the parched soil from drought ravaged areas of Australia into our city, and a severe hailstorm that caused extensive damage across Canberra.

There is a lot to say about all these issues, but in this motion I want to focus on a specific challenge that we faced here in Canberra, and that is the extended presence of bushfire smoke. Smoke from the terrible South Coast bushfires blew into Canberra and lingered in our air, seriously degrading our usually excellent air quality for months. This summer was not just an angry summer; it was fuming.

Smoke has dominated Canberrans’ thoughts for months. Smoke was the topic of everyone’s conversations. If you saw a stranger in the street you could immediately share a bond by talking about the smoke. Every day people were troubled by the smoke, checking air monitoring data, trying to acquire masks, changing their plans to avoid smoke and basically having smoke dictate their lives.

At its worst, going outside in Canberra was reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland seen in dystopian movies: a hazy orange sky, a red sun you could almost safely stare at and a few solitary people wearing breathing masks. Every day people

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