Drought assistance

Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — The Greens are pleased to support this motion relating to drought conditions in regional Victoria, acknowledging the serious drought that is continuing to develop in Victoria and calling on the government to develop urgent assistance packages for farmers and country communities.

Leaving aside the issue of an ill-considered tweet by the Minister for Agriculture, on which Mr Drum spent some time, what we have in front of us is a very serious problem requiring some very serious consideration by the house. I think it is appropriate that the house spend some time laying out the sorts of measures and considerations that we think government should be taking, because it will certainly not be the last time we are called upon to address the consequences of drought and in particular drought that has been introduced and enhanced by global warming.

Some of us have been here a little longer and know the many issues and challenges that were brought before the Parliament as a result of that long dry spell. Like me, Mr Drum would remember many debates about the proposed north–south pipeline, such as how it was to be built and where the water was to come from. There was the response to the bushfires royal commission that has seen many pieces of legislation go through this Parliament and so on and so forth right throughout that time when climate-related issues seemed to occupy an extraordinary amount of Parliament's attention.

Here we are again, with looming El Niño conditions and their impact being felt on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Scientific and meteorological experts on both sides of the Pacific Ocean are watching for its next move very carefully. It would be a brave person who would predict that this will be a problem that will just disappear next year and that we will return to some sort of historical norm. The types of measures that therefore need to be put in place relate not just to an immediate crisis or to a drought of indeterminate length but to the highly predictable impacts of global warming as they bring these sorts of conditions upon us more and more frequently and with greater and greater severity.

It is true that the Andrews government has announced a number of measures in the intervening time since the last Parliament debated this motion. On 15 November it announced a whole package of measures more in the realm of social support, such as mental health, first aid training, the state school relief program for out-of-pocket costs associated with keeping kids at school, kindergarten participation funds and camp, sports and excursion funds to ensure that, along with all the stresses put upon families by these conditions, kids do not feel like they are missing out on the activities that their fellow students are getting to do.

Along with that there were a number of measures around financial counselling and farm planning. Both the drought extension program and the rural financial counsellors program should be very useful assets for those farmers who have to not only deal with what is happening right now in this season but also start to plan for the next and the next and the next. With that there are a whole series of questions around their financial reserves — how much to invest; what loans do they need to make — because as the climate becomes more variable, less predictable and less friendly than it has been since our various rural industries were established, there is no doubt that greater resilience and financial buffers are going to be required.

As the need for greater buffers and working capital grows, there is an associated financing cost. That eventually starts to impact on underlying asset prices, the biggest asset being the value of the land itself. When those land values start to change you can get caught in a cleft stick between falling asset prices and the rising costs of finance that is secured over those assets. If that goes on for a few years, you start to see some quite dramatic changes to patterns of land use.

The announcement of that package got us so far; it got us through the beginning of what will inevitably turn into a crisis. The Victorian Farmers Federation seems to have welcomed it; I have met with its staff and discussed these issues with them. As an initial response I think it is a good start by the Minister for Agriculture, the Minister for Water and the Premier.

There are also some funds to employ drought-affected farmers and farm workers on environment projects. There is always a great need for more funds for environmental projects, to protect the productive areas of our land and also to protect the biodiversity that is intermingled with all those farms and communities. In fact it has been a very successful exercise over the years to employ farmers in this way. It keeps them doing the thing they love doing, which is being outdoors and working to produce something that is quite tangible. Often it means they will be working with their friends in the community to do something for the community.

For that matter, Landcare groups, football clubs and other local groups that bring people together can be really valuable in these communities, so that people do not find themselves isolated, depressed or stuck at home with an uncertain future. I have seen for myself the way these social networks operate to keep people in good spirits and with a sense of connectedness to their friends, who may very well be going through the same things. They are an enormously valuable resource.

When it comes to what is traditionally thought of as drought assistance we are in a state of flux. The federal policies on drought assistance, which were reviewed by the Productivity Commission some years ago, have more or less been scrapped. There were arguments put forward that they did not operate ideally. Of course if someone is facing a future of long-term unviability, then drought assistance that keeps them in that unviable situation is not really a social good or necessarily good for those people. On that basis the old system of drought assistance was scrapped. Unfortunately it is not really clear what the new system consists of. There have been some ad hoc responses. The Victorian government has gone through the steps to get the necessary declarations in place. I think that was happening either side of the election last year, and certainly it has been happening this year. Whether that then leads to the sort of assistance communities believe is necessary is another matter.

We have to address the question of what measures are necessary when drought as traditionally thought of — natural variability but sometimes severe variability — starts to turn into something different, something more resembling the long-term trends we expect to see in Victoria associated with global warming and climate change. Then I think the flavour of Mr Drum's motion starts to change a little bit. We are talking not so much about drought assistance but about climate change adaptation, which can be a very different thing.

Members who want to contribute to this debate could draw on the resource of the previous government's Victorian Climate Change Adaptation Plan. It was a pretty good effort to get such a document out when the dominant ideology of that government seemed to be that global warming did not exist, but that if it did exist it was not going to do anything about it, and nor should the federal government. Various topics are covered in that document, which as far as I understand is still the working draft of the climate change adaptation plan required under Victorian law. A number of these issues go directly to some of the challenges Mr Drum has highlighted for us: managing risks to public assets and services, managing risks to natural assets and natural resource-based industries, building disaster resilience and integrated emergency management, improving access to research and information for decision-making, supporting private sector adaptation and strengthening partnerships with local government and communities.

I have raised in this chamber on a number of occasions the fact that we are moving into a period of much less favourable climate conditions. It would have to be on top of the government's to-do list to develop comprehensive responses for this summer and all the seasons ahead. I do not intend to go through this document comprehensively, but in it we can see a number of the sorts of measures we are talking about. There is a case study about reaping the rewards of climate adaptation in relation to the Birchip Cropping Group, which some people seem to think is some sort of greenie plot. Actually it is just a group of farmers who are looking to the future and working with CSIRO on forecasting yields; managing climate, soil and water risk; making informed decisions about fertiliser and irrigation; and matching inputs with the yield potential of their crop. It is a software-based system using both historical climate data and also projections of the possible effects of climate change.

The first group of farmers to have been hit hard by this El Niño and global warming induced drought has been the cropping farmers, who have had to sow seeds and hope to get a healthy crop up, even producing grain, right when we have been hit hardest by the short, sharp, intense heatwave that I think initially led Mr Drum to frame and put forward his motion.

If we look at the isohyets — the rainfall bands — across a map of Victoria, what is interesting is how close together those lines are. It means that when there is a shift in rainfall averages, the area in which a certain crop or cropping system might be viable moves south very quickly. Once upon a time the Wimmera and the Mallee were seen as the home of cropping, but now you can drive down the Princes Highway and see them growing canola on the back of the Otways. There are great fields of yellow up there. The first time I saw it I thought, 'Gee, they've got a bit of a capeweed problem', because this was traditionally a dairy farming area where capeweed was a pasture weed. But in fact it has now turned into a viable area for grain growing, and that is due to the changing seasons and the movement of cropping systems all the way from the north of the state down to the very south. Of course it was spud country as well. To see crops growing there is really quite a sight.

Further on in this document we can look at some of the things the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority has brought in. The entire catchment strategy for the 2012–18 period takes an approach that identifies the risk that climate change poses to various social and ecological systems and then sets out the actions and priorities it has identified. Let us hope that the funding has been made available to deliver on those priorities for Goulburn Broken and all the other catchment management authorities.

Of course this is not simply about drought and dryness. For these communities, and even our urban communities, heatwave is going to be a major issue to deal with. I shuddered last week when I saw the weather conditions in Adelaide. There were three stinking hot days interspersed with two warm nights. Based on past experience here in Australia, we know those are the conditions when a large number of vulnerable people will start to die because of the inability to get relief from the heat when there are hot days followed by hot nights. We know from the experience of the heatwave that preceded the Black Saturday tragedy here in Victoria that those exact conditions caused more premature deaths than the Black Saturday fires themselves. In fact we have had a parliamentary inquiry into that very issue.

Let us hope that the necessary measures are in place to protect vulnerable people, who are often old or isolated or have low incomes and live in poor quality housing stock. There are people whose finances are so tight that they cannot even afford to run air conditioners. We know of examples of people going around to each other's houses and sitting in the one house with an air conditioner going because they could not afford to run them individually, or even examples of people going to libraries or sitting around in shopping malls to get some relief from the heat. There should be proper systems in place in Victoria to organise all of that, as there now are in European countries, which also experience some severe global warming driven heatwaves.

In the section of the report that talks about supporting private sector adaptation it discusses building standards, design and so forth in relation to surviving bushfires and even the question of how we facilitate insurance markets. Here in Victoria we still put a tax on insurance, which leads to underinsurance, particularly of small businesses. Then at the end of every one of these natural disasters, be they fire, flood, heat or anything else, we find that people are underinsured and funds have to be made available to get them back on their feet. Tax reform to actually get taxes off insurance would be one of the things that could meet the aims of this report. There is a whole section in the report on heatwaves, as I mentioned, and also on water allocations.

Moving on to the issue of irrigation farming, at the moment, at least in the Goulburn area, the water allocations have been, I think, somewhere around 75 to 80 per cent. We know from past droughts that even when allocations fell dramatically, production did not fall in the same way, which is to say farmers found more ways to be efficient with their water. But are any of those further efficiencies still to be had, or have we got most of those? Make no mistake: the scenario if we keep on heating the earth past 1 degree, 2 degrees or 3 degrees is the eventual destruction of the Murray-Darling Basin, which will experience in turn a higher rate of warming than those global averages.

Global averages is exactly what we are discussing in Paris right now. The science is very clear; in fact it is almost chilling that we are able to predict with such certainty the likely impacts of various concentrations of CO2 and that world leaders can sit around and say, 'What do you reckon, guys? Do we want to heat the earth 1.5 degrees, 2.5 degrees? Take your pick, because whichever number you choose we'll dial back and get you the amount of polluting you can do'. The answer in all cases is not much. There is not much more polluting that we can afford to do if we are to stabilise the earth's temperature, let alone try to mitigate some of these impacts. It may be reasonably easy to model the impact of CO2 concentrations on average global warming, but to then know the effects that that will have on each and every country, on each ecosystem, on each industry and on each community is much more difficult and much more uncertain. It really makes the price of taking action to reduce emissions quite small compared to some of the costs that we are facing associated with those risks.

There are questions of the infrastructure itself, be it in the area of transport, energy, water or the built environment. It will not be long before Mr Drum comes in here talking about the poor quality of the V/Line services, because with the heat we can expect there will be cancellations, delays and new, slow timetables brought in. All of that infrastructure needs to be made much more resilient to the new and much less friendly climate that we can expect in coming years.

This is a very timely motion by Mr Drum. It is important that members of the house turn their minds to all these issues. We have an important role to play here in terms of representing the people and their interests in this, holding the government to account and of course understanding, when legislation to respond to the many issues that I have outlined comes before the house, that that is adequate legislation and that it is an adequate response.

While this motion simply calls on the government to take action, it is actually a very good use of the house's time to debate these matters, and I have been glad to take a small amount of time in contributing to the debate.

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