Mr FITZGIBBON (Hunter) (18:28): I begin my contribution by associating myself with the remarks of all earlier speakers, who have expressed their sympathy and condolences to the families of those who lost their lives as a result of the terrible bushfires. There were far too many. Thirty-three valuable lives were lost, including nine firefighters and, of course, three American veterans, who were here helping us fight this very, very terrible challenge. For brevity, because I know many speakers want to make a contribution, I associate myself absolutely with everything the Prime Minister and everything the opposition leader said about our amazing first responders; firefighters, both paid and unpaid; volunteers more generally; emergency services; and the broader community. As so many have said, climatic challenges like this, natural disasters like this, bring out the best in all Australians. I'm not suggesting we are unique—I'm sure that's true of people in all countries—but there does appear to be a certain resilience and toughness about Australians, a certain commitment to our fellow man and woman, when we are in trouble like this. Some of these volunteers and service organisations—people who have given so much so unselfishly to others without any expectation of reward—have been just amazing. In 2009 I attended the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires as defence minister and I saw some terrible things there. I thought and hoped I would never see them again, but, over the course of this summer, I've seen a repeat. I do trust, in part off the back of the royal commission that the Prime Minister has established, that we will learn many lessons from this. I might return to that if I feel I've got time to do so. The fires have been impacting on communities since winter last year. When I first started to attend the fireground, in November last year, I could not have imagined what was to come next. I would suggest that, if the only fires over the summer had been in the Hunter Valley, we would have been hearing and reading about them for many, many weeks, if not months, to come. In the Cessnock LGA, for example, we lost 21 homes alone and many more other buildings. We had a huge firefront which stretched from the upper reaches of the Hunter Valley pretty much all the way to the Central Coast—much more than 100 kilometres in length—and it was very ferocious. My first visits occurred in North Rothbury and Greta in November. By December I was in the Laguna-Wollombi area, where there was a very real threat to human life. The work done by the Rural Fire Service and others there was amazing. The local community was amazing in its response. The thing that sticks in my mind most about that visit is the plea from so many for aerial assets; we didn't have any available then. It made me think of the poor person somewhere—in Sydney, I suspect—who had to make decisions about which fires to prioritise in those situations. There is no doubt that these areas in Wollombi and Laguna were worthy of aerial support, but it appeared that someone was having to decide that those assets needed to be somewhere else even more. I can't imagine being the person having to make that decision. We could not have ever imagined that the situation would get so bad so widely. We could not have imagined the ferocity, the scale or the geographical reach. I think we were all thinking of Dunkirk when we heard that the Navy and merchant seamen were being dispatched to rescue people off beaches on the South Coast. If you'd told me a year ago that that might happen here in Australia, I'd have shaken my head in disbelief. But it has happened here in Australia, and, again, there is a lot to learn. People have spoken generally about the national situation, so I won't take too much time doing so. I acknowledge the pain and suffering of people in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, in particular on Kangaroo Island. That has certainly been very widespread. I want to say something more about our Rural Fire Service volunteers. It is true that they do their task—their training and their work—very willingly and expect no reward, but many of us fear that the climate is going to remain challenging and, God forbid, we may have similar incidents like this in the future. No matter how well we plan, no matter how well we are resourced and no matter how well we respond, it is possible. It's unsustainable to expect volunteers to leave their families and their workplace and to be out there on the fire ground for weeks on end—with one uniform, I'm told, by the way. I've been meaning to fact check that one, but someone did complain to me that it's an amazing thing that firefighters, ones doing their training voluntarily and out there risking their lives, are issued with one uniform, yet they're out there for days on end and weeks at a time. It may be a relatively small issue, but it highlights the inadequate way we are resourcing them and the extent to which we are expecting things of people—well beyond what I believe we should be expecting. If you're threatened by fire in Sydney you get paid firefighters coming to your place. If you're threatened by fire in regional Australia you're likely to have volunteer firefighters coming to your aid. Something doesn't add up there. Like so many of our other voluntary emergency organisations we expect them not only to leave their workplaces or their small business to risk their lives but to run the raffles in the pub to raise money for the resources that they need to do their work. That just seems wrong to me. Yes, another system would be expensive, but what is the cost of not acting and how can we expect people in future years to volunteer for these organisations if we go on expecting people to do the sort of work, gratis, that we've expected of our volunteers this time around, risking their lives under such strange circumstances? It is hard to tell your crew that you've taken a decision to spend tomorrow with your family rather than come to the fight. It is very, very difficult. Once you're in you are in for the long haul. We can't expect people to be signing up to these tasks in the future if we don't better resource them, better reward them and give them more assistance in fulfilling their task. It makes no sense to me, and I don't believe it to be sustainable. These bushfires, coming on the back of the still existing drought—of course, the bushfire season is not over yet—are going to have a huge economic cost. We've seen the human cost in loss of life and in injury, including the psychological effects; the cost of the loss of property, of course; and the cost to our natural environment with the loss of flora and fauna and the damage that's done to our ecology. All of these have economic cost attached to them. Then there is the cost to those who have left their small business to volunteer and the cost to employers who generously let their employees go to fight fires rather than be at work. And there is an enormous cost to the economy more generally. We'll be counting that cost for many years to come. It's certainly a very significant cost in my region. My fires stretch from places like Morisset and Cooranbong, on the western side of Lake Macquarie, right through the Wollombi-Laguna region to Greta and North Rothbury in what you might call central Hunter, then right up to Bulga and Milbrodale and those parts of the world in the upper Hunter. The fires were broad, geographically, but we are a region which relies in large part on the visitor economy, and on wine tourism in particular. The Hunter wine country association has estimated that $42 million has been lost in three months as a result of a fall off in visitation. Of course, our wine industry has been dramatically affected by smoke taint. For those who aren't familiar with that, the fact is that the smoke makes its way into the grapes, making them somewhat unattractive for the making of wine. Many vignerons have taken the difficult decision not to get the grapes off the vine this year. Bruce Tyrell, one of the larger, if not the largest, growers in that part of the world, has decided not to get any grapes off this year other than for a small amount of grapes further north on a different vineyard which is sufficiently distant from the source of the fires. I want to thank Minister Littleproud, who has been very cooperative whenever I had to make contact with him on issues in my electorate. One ongoing conversation I'm having with him is around the inability of vignerons to get assistance for smoke taint. The way the guidelines stand at the moment, if you lose your vineyards to the fire, you're capable of securing assistance or at least applying for assistance. But, if you lose your crop because of the smoke coming from the same flames, you're not eligible to make that application. He has lent a sympathetic ear to that, and I hope that at some point he might be able to change those guidelines so that those people can get the assistance. The assistance measures from governments generally have been welcome, but they're not enough. I don't say that to make a political point. They're just not enough, and there is no way in the world we can get through this recovery phase and beyond without significantly more money from the Commonwealth government. The Commonwealth government is the holder of the purse strings. It has the resources, and we have to be asking ourselves: what is the cost of not spending more? We need investment in the regions and we'll need a lot of it. We use the word 'recovery' as if recovery means getting us back to where we were before the bushfires broke out. But the fact is that we weren't in a very good place anyway because of the protracted and intense nature of the drought. I do believe that we'll need a lot more money for marketing, we'll need a lot more assistance for those directly affected and we'll need a lot more in terms of infrastructure. Regional Australia is under enormous pressure. The industries are struggling to maintain their social licence. We have drought, we have bushfires, we have floods, and we need to do a lot more work to further diversify our economies so that we're not so exposed to these natural disaster events. I don't say that to make a political point. We'll need to spend a lot more money, and sometime soon, affecting those who are directly affected by both drought and bushfire. I want to single out a friend of mine, Glenn Byrne. He is the commissioner of the Rural Fire Service in my region. I've known him for decades, going right back to the time when I was on Cessnock City Council. He and his people did an amazing job in my region over the course of the summer, and I want to thank them for their excellent work. It's appreciated in the community, and I add my thanks to all those other organisations, including the Red Cross, St Vincent de Paul and others who have made amazing contributions assisting those who need it. In closing, I want to say something about climate change. The Prime Minister, in his contribution today, talked about climate change. He acknowledged that it is real, that changes in our weather patterns are making the bushfire threat much worse. He fell short of extending that conversation to the extent to which the activities of humans are making a contribution; and while he touched on adaptation and mitigation, he chose not to further that conversation today. I have no problem with that because today wasn't the time and he had lots to get through. But we have to stop having this fight about climate change. Climate change is real. Human activity is making a substantial contribution. We need to do something about it. I think 195 countries in Paris agreed that is the case, so they have acknowledged it. They've acknowledged they need to do something, they have acknowledged the need to take collective action, yet we're still having a political argument about it. It's killing all of us; that's the truth of it. We don't necessarily have to dispense with or forgo Australian jobs or industry to do something. A Labor government did it the last time we were in office, and I would argue very strongly and confidently that if legislative architecture were still in place today no-one would even know it. The costs would be minimal—certainly carbon would be trading at substantially less than $23 a tonne—and we would have the credibility in global forums to argue that those who are not doing enough should be doing more. But we don't have that capacity now because we're not doing it ourselves. While the Prime Minister does his best to argue that we are, the fact is that his own departments tell us we are not. I don't say this to spark the political argument again—of course not. I say this for exactly the opposite reason: we have to get a political settlement on this issue. We shouldn't be spending so much time and energy arguing about causes and links and responses. People don't want us arguing about those things. People know the weather is changing. The overwhelming majority of people accept that it makes sense that greenhouse gas emissions are making a contribution. That's what all the scientists tell us. So let's just get on with it. Let's find some common ground. Let's strike some common sense. There's a thing called the precautionary principle. I say to members opposite: even if you don't believe there's a link, why take the risk? I'm hoping my house doesn't burn down, but I still take out an insurance policy. I do that because the consequences of being wrong about the chances of my house burning down are very, very substantial. So I take out the policy. Ask yourselves the question: if there's any chance that our activities are making climate change worse, shouldn't we take out that insurance policy? We should do something about it because it might be too late to do something about it in 10 years time. We should be doing it now. We shouldn't be arguing about it. We should be focusing absolutely on our capacity to respond to the here and now and how people are affected by our changing climate, whether it be drought, bushfires or, indeed, floods and cyclones—whatever it might be—because we all know that the economic cost to industry of being hit by those natural events is very substantial. It is not that hard to put in place the policies required to meet the commitments we made in Paris. There will be debate about what that commitment is, because the science behind getting warming below two degrees is not an exact one. Does it mean reducing carbon emissions by 30 per cent or 40 per cent or 50 per cent? The truth is that no-one can put an exact figure on it. But the overwhelming balance of scientific evidence is that we need to do more than we're doing now. We cannot expect to preach to others on the international stage who might not be doing enough when we're not doing enough ourselves. I'm certainly up for it. I hope others sitting opposite are up for it too. This debate has been going on for all the time I've been here. That will be 24 years, Mr Deputy Speaker, in March this year. It's gone on far, far too long. It's not doing any of us any good politically and it's certainly not doing our standing in the community any good. They are sick of it too. We've got to get the red herrings and mythologies out of the debate. We're all saying the same thing; we're all saying we believe in it and we have to act. The only thing missing is the 'act' bit. It's time to act. It's a great tragedy that Tony Abbott, when he was elected in 2013, chose to repeal the architecture we had in place. If he hadn't, those laws would still be in place and we'd have enormous credibility in international forums. We'd be doing more than our bit, and I think we'd all be benefiting as a result. So this is a plea from me to all members of this place and, indeed, in the other place to find a settlement on this issue. Like most people, I found the events of summer pretty scary. I've watched the New South Wales minister Andrew Constance with great interest. He's obviously been dramatically psychologically affected by what he saw over the course of the summer and what he experienced—not only himself but his community. I'm not suggesting that if we did something different on climate change tomorrow it's going to stop a bushfire next year. I accept that, but we have to start somewhere and we should have started a long, long time ago and now we have to make up for that time. In closing, I want to quickly say something about hazard reduction and associated issues. There is something wrong there and that's why I hope the royal commission does look at these aspects as well as the climatic and other issues. My own view is that we've had a risk averseness creep into the equation. Decision-makers are obviously less inclined to approve a burnoff, whether that be the state authority with respect to national parks or whether that be local Rural Fire Service authorities with respect to private land. I too would be reluctant. The opportunities for the cool days you need to burn are shrinking and declining. There's more fuel out there. When a fire starts it's likely to be more intense than we've ever seen before because of the hot temperatures and the amount of fuel available. I can absolutely understand why someone doesn't want to be the person that approved a burnoff that went wrong. As we know, there was one burnoff in this summer which led to the loss of four homes—thankfully no lives. I thought that day about the person who approved that burn. It's a great leap of faith to provide that approval and maybe that's one thing we need to address—whether it's a group of people I don't know. I don't have the expertise about issues that are largely the domain of state governments. I think there are a whole range of issues there. There's no doubt that if there's a greater capacity to do more in prevention in that sense then we should look at it. I hope the royal commission looks at it very, very closely and finds the answers. Let's hope that we do learn these lessons and we collectively come up with the responses required to ensure that—I am not saying we didn't respond to this fire well—we can respond to another fire, God forbid, if it comes along much better than we were able to this time around. It's probably the third time I've said it, but in closing I want to say one other thing. People keep telling me they've seen these bushfires before. It's part of the denial. 'This is nothing new. This happened 100 years ago somewhere.' Well, in those days we were putting them out with garden hoses and wheat bags. We didn't have aerial assets. We had none of the technology we have now and we were struggling this time around. I think that's the difference that people have to factor in when they're trying to compare the fires we saw this summer with fires of the past. This one was different and I heard so many experts say that. So many experts said they have never seen fire behave like this before. We have a lot of work to do. I thank, again, all those who in any way have given their time and their energy in the assistance of others over the summer break.